Mumbai's Taj hotel holds a trademark on its own silhouette
In 2017 the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai became the first building in India to win intellectual-property protection for its architecture, registering its look as an image trademark. The hotel beside the Gateway of India had welcomed its first guests more than a century earlier, on 16 December 1903.
Jamsetji Tata commissioned it, and a popular tale says he built it in revenge after Watson's Hotel, open only to Europeans, turned him away. The writer Charles Allen doubts that such a snub would have moved Tata to build a rival. In his account the editor of The Times of India pressed for a hotel worthy of Bombay, and Tata delivered it as a present to a city he loved. Guests once came in from the landward side, where the swimming pool is today.
Named after the monument in Agra, some 1,050 kilometres away, the Indo-Saracenic building was ranked among the grandest hotels in the East under the Raj. From 1936 to 1960 it was home base for jazz bandleader Micky Correa, billed as the Sultan of Swing. After independence the British clientele drifted away, and by 1966 the place had grown shabby. Pan Am's Inter-Continental division ran it under franchise from 1972 to 1995, the same year a modern tower wing opened on the site of Green's Hotel, a building Tata had operated since 1904.
On 26 November 2008 Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen attacked the hotel as one of several targets across the city, taking hostages and setting off a three-day siege that ended when Indian commandos killed the attackers on 29 November. At least 31 people died at the Taj. Its less damaged sections reopened on 21 December, while the heritage wing needed months of rebuilding; in March 2010 the name reverted to The Taj Mahal Palace.
Owned by the Tata Group's Indian Hotels Company, the flagship property employs 1,500 people. It features in Louis Bromfield's 1940 novel Night in Bombay, hosted Michael Palin on his round-the-world journey, and served as a location for Christopher Nolan's Tenet.
Source: Taj Mahal Palace Hotel
