Phoenix Rising

A year after 26/11, the Taj Mahal Hotel is not just reclaiming a past, but also creating a new identity — room by room
by Elizabeth Flock | Dec 11, 2009

Read it at Forbes

When terrorists entered the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower heritage wing and sprayed the grand staircase with gun fire, the Sea Lounge and Ballroom on either side were devastated. In the centre of the staircase, the iconic hotel’s founder Jamsetji Tata looked on stiffly. But throughout the entire ordeal, the marble bust of the man remained unscathed.

“If you had seen what the place looked like, you would not have believed it,” says Ajoy Misra, senior vice president, sales and marketing at Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL), Taj’s parent group. “There are many legends among the staff that Tata is the protector and preserves the Taj. The bust adds to that legend.”

While Tata’s bust was left untouched, most of the rest of the Palace heritage wing was decimated on 26/11 and the days after. The hotel that had withstood a great earthquake in the early 1900s, a fire and bomb in the port areas in the early 1940s, and acted as a hospital during the First World War could not withstand this sort of attack.

Historic Moorish and Florentine architecture, hundred-year-old and 1960s art deco design, as well as notable artworks were damaged beyond recognition. The country’s first licensed bar, first Sichuan restaurant, and most iconic sushi joint were badly hit. The art deco ballroom, elaborate suites given to top industrialists and heads of state, and the sixth floor that housed the general manager, too, were burned or otherwise destroyed.

The Taj senior management’s first reaction: