Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
continues two decades later. The following year, the magnificent
St. George Hotel collapsed into the same smouldering and burned-
out rubble that most people think of now when they hear the name
Beirut. No attempt has been made to rebuild it. You can't just recreate
a great hotel.
After a day at the Taj Mahal, I realised even then that I was staying
at another hotel of the same tradition. Little did its founder realise
that, within just under a century, his heirs - the Taj Group - would
own the St. James Court hotel in London, and even receive that
city's prestigious award for excellence in renovating a historical
building. Back in 1888, no Indian ever dreamed that the capital of
the British Empire would need the help and money of his fellow
countrymen to save it from crumbling into decay. It may be among
the first of such karmic debts India will be entitled to claim.
In 1888, two particular events occurred in the life of Jamsetji
Nuserwanji Tata, whose name should be as well-known as that of
William Randolph Hearst or Aristotle Onassis or Howard Hughes
or J. Paul Getty. Yet over a century ago Jamsetji Tata represented
something entirely different in the eyes of the British: an inferior
who was getting too big for his boots.
Far from London, the heirs to the East India Company traders,
the Raj imperialists, treated their Indian subjects with often brutal
ruthlessness. Queen Victoria, of course, never heard about the worst
of the British atrocities and outrages. Murders and rapes were not
uncommon. Much behaviour that was unacceptable back home
was simply brushed under the table on the Indian frontier, where
small-minded men often found themselves in charge of vast tracts
of territory and hundreds of thousands of people.
After Britain's loss of the American colonies, nineteenth-century
India took their place as the jewel in the imperial crown. It provided
both the resources and the market to supply and support Britain's
manufacturing boom and its burgeoning working-class labour force.
Jamsetji Tata was perfectly aware of his country's position in the
British Empire and in the Great Game, that sabre-rattling match
between Russia and Britain for control of the lands east of the Balkans.
Armed with this knowledge, he became the worst kind of nuisance to
that empire - a servant determined one day to become master.
