Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
advantages of modern technology. The building flows effortlessly
across the lobby's Moghul inlaid white marble fountains from the
old to the new, still offering a sense of how things were when the
Chamber of Indian Princes used to hold their annual conference at
the hotel.
Rolls-Royce Phantoms would cruise up to the entrance in an
endless curving metal caravan, many of them customised with
gleaming, unpainted aluminium bodies, fitted with vast spotlights
and removable roofs for night
shikar
, hunting for wild game.
Disembarking at the Taj's doors, the maharajahs and rajahs and
nawabs, each with a huge entourage of servants, bodyguards, political
agents, advisers, spies, and even assassins, vied with each other in
splendour, every exuberantly bearded man shimmering in cloth of
gold, gem-studded brocades, hand-embroidered cloaks, tunics, and
shoes, and vast turbans shining like solid gold and set with gems
the size of hen's eggs. Today, sadly, such outfits gather dust and
holes in palace museums, or in the underfinanced state warehouses.
Such days will never return, which may be just as well.
Yet, in places like the Tanjore restaurant, the Taj still manages
brilliantly to recreate the feeling of that vanished age, with antiques,
and an elegance extending from the service to what is served. Even
the classical Indian dance and music performed upon the
colonnaded central stage are reminiscent of those with which the
Chamber of Princes would have been entertained while consuming
a leisurely twenty-course meal - sampled by personal tasters for
possible poison first, naturally.
In 1974, the rooms at the old Taj still looked much as they had
back in the thirties: spacious, with ceiling fans, mosquito nets, and
broad balconies overlooking the lugubrious Arabian Sea. They have
been modernised now, to satisfy those tourists who cannot cope
without the familiar environment of the five-star world. The old
building itself, with its cavernous ten-storey space, off which
corridors stretch, leading to the rooms, differs little from the way it
looked at its opening in 1904.
Almost everyone I've ever
heard of
has stayed at the Taj: the Shah
of Iran, Twiggy, Sean Connery, Norman Mailer, Farrah Fawcett,
