The Taj — not a hotel but a symbol of Indian spirit
SHREEKANT CHATTERJEE
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The nationalist connections were visible in Jamsetji’s determination to establish a world-class hotel in Bombay
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The current terror attacks in Bombay (Mumbai, if you please) has come in many shades and one of them, in the form of attack on the majestic Taj-Mahal hotel. This Taj is not just a hotel. It is many things rolled into one. Sample just two ways of looking at it by two eminent persons, both Nobel laureates and iconic figures.
Amartya Sen is an argumentative and a proud Indian. Says this Nobel winning economist:
“The nationalist connections were present in different ways and to varying extents in the different economic decisions in which the early Tata enterprises were involved. They were perhaps most colourfully visible in an anecdotal form, in his [Jamsetji’s] determination to establish a top world-class hotel in Bombay.
Jamsetji’s dream
“There is, apparently, truth in the story that Jamsetji’s decision to establish, in 1903, the ambitiously planned Taj-Mahal hotel (the first building in Bombay to be lit by electricity and a place that would soon attract celebrities, from Somerset Maugham to Gregory Peck), followed his being told at Pyrke’s Apollo Hotel, to which he had taken a foreign friend for a meal that while the friend was welcome in that (‘for Europeans only’) hotel, he — Jamsetji — was not. The anecdote adds colour to our understanding of Jamsetji’s sense of identity and priorities…” (The Argumentative Indian, p. 337)
Let’s now see what Octavio Paz, the Mexican Nobel Prize winner for Literature and a one-time diplomat to India, has to say as he came to India:
“Behind the monument [The Gateway of India], floating in the warm air, was the silhouette of the Taj-Mahal Hotel, an enormous cake, a delirium of the fin-de-si`ecle Orient fallen like a gigantic bubble, not of soap but of stone, on Bombay’s lap. I rubbed my eyes: was the hotel getting closer or farther away?
“Seeing my surprise, Auden explained to me that the hotel’s strange appearance was due to a mistake: the builders could not read the plans that the architect had sent from Paris, and they built it backward, its front facing the city, its back turned to the sea.
A symbolic gesture
“The mistake seemed to me a deliberate one that revealed an unconscious negation of Europe and the desire to confine the building forever to India.
“If this book were a memoir and not an essay, I would devote pages to that hotel. It is real and chimerical, ostentatious and comfortable, vulgar and sublime.
“It is the English dream of India at the beginning of the century, an India populated by dark men with pointed moustaches and scimitars at their waists, by women with amber-colored skin, hair and eyebrows as black as crows’ wings, and the huge eyes of lionesses in heat.
“Its elaborately ornamented archways, its unexpected nooks, its patios, terraces, and gardens are both enchanting and dizzying. It is a literary architecture, a serialized novel. Its passageways are the corridors of a lavish, sinister, and endless dream…..” (In the Light of India, p. 8 & 9)
Did the terrorists know all these? Did they know that the Taj was not just a five-star hotel where the high and mighty loved to stay and dine?
That this was the preferred place of cricketers to stay whenever there was a match in Bombay? That the Taj symbolised in more ways than one, the Indian spirit of freedom and enterprise? Jamsetji must have shed a tear or two in his heavenly abode at the wanton, senseless attack. As did many Indians here on this earth. The terrorists came to kill and destroy.
The brave commandos fought them. It’s time to pause and reflect. It is time to forget the terrorists. And time to salute our proud soldiers and policemen.
Above all, it is time to remember Jamsetji — his spirit of adventure and dream to create centres of excellence.
It is time to rebuild. It is time to learn lessons and move ahead. The Taj has been ‘confined to India forever’. No terrorist can take that away.
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