South Asian Outlook : An Independent e-Monthly | Glimpses: Mumbai's Pride

A Monument to Love: Taj Mahal Hotel
Jamsetji Tata’s gift to the city he loved - as the Taj Mahal of Agra was Shah Jahan’s memorial to the woman he loved.

Mumbai's Pride: Taj Mahal Hotel

The Taj is to Bombay what the Empire State Building is to New York: it is what you see on a postcard of the city, a building that does not need to be further identified. It is, simply, ‘Bombay’.

The 1880s and 1890s were a time of great construction in Bombay. The Grand Victoria Terminus was built, and after it the Municipal Corporation building, another beautiful structure, followed by the Churchgate headquarters of the B.B. & C.I. Railways (now Western Railways). But there was no hotel worthy of the growing city.

Sir Stanley Reed, Editor of The Times of India, said Jamsetji had an intense pride and affection for the city of his birth, and when a friend protested against the intense discomforts of hotel life in Bombay, he growled: “I will build one.”

As there was no Gateway of India for 20 years after the Taj came up, the hotel offered the first view of the city to ships sailing into the harbour until 1924. Even now, with many more tall buildings on the skyline, the hotel engages immediate attention. It is a symbol of Mumbai.

The Taj was born out of a slight: because a man was turned away from a fancy hotel. When the prominent Parsi industrialist Jamshetji Tata was refused entrance into Watson’s hotel in the 19th century because he was a native, he swore revenge, and built the Taj in 1903. It is less a hotel than a proving-ground for the ego.

It cost about Rs. 25 lakh. When the hotel opened, it had a large staff of waiters but only seven guests. It was Bombay’s first public building to be lit by electricity and when it happened, those present outside clapped as they saw it lit.

In years to come, world-renowned personalities have stayed there, from Somerset Maugham and Duke Ellington to Lord Mountbatten and Bill Clinton. The hotel was featured in a hundred books, including Louis Bromfield’s One Night in Bombay, which is centred on the Taj.

People who are seeking position or money in Bombay often use this one hotel, this one citadel of empire, as a mark or measure of their progress upward through the strata of Bombay.

http://www.hindu.com/2008/11/29/stories/2008112955770900.htm

(Russi M. Lala is the author of For the Love of India — The Life and Times of Jamsetji Tata. He lives near the Taj Mahal and even closer to Nariman House.)