Sania Mirza can now apply for Calcutta South Club membership. Had the tennis star from Hyderabad applied earlier, the Woodburn Park club could have thrown its 48-year-old rulebook at her, debarring women from membership.
At an extraordinary general meeting on Thursday evening, the club, once called the Wimbledon of the East, served an ace — unanimously voting to let in women members.
For this, Clause 4 of the Articles of Association, which states that “women shall not be eligible for membership of the club”, will be amended as soon as the resolution is cleared by the registrar of companies. “Over the past few years, the thinking inside the club has changed,” says club honorary secretary I.N. Chaturvedi.
The likes of Yagnaseni Das Biswas, who plays tennis regularly with her physician husband at South Club, are all for change in the “chauvinistic attitude that discourages single and qualified women from approaching clubs for membership”.
Was this a knee-jerk reaction to Calcutta Club’s decision to allow women members in its centenary year? No way, protests South Club. “Talks have been on since September. While Calcutta Club was only following a tradition, we had a disabling clause for women in the Articles of Association that took time to amend,” explained club president Rajat Majumdar.
Veterans like Akhtar Ali have termed the move “a historic one” for the club. “This has basically been a men’s club because, even till about five years ago, women’s tennis was not big in India,” said the director of the club’s junior coaching programme.
That, of course, has been changed by the forehand and the fame of a girl called Sania Mirza, who had last stepped on to the South Club greens four years ago as a ‘junior’.
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