An iconic Indian hotel hosts an indispensable art collection
As you enter the lush lobby of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Colaba, Mumbai, turn left. Behind the long, gleaming reception desk there is an equally long, vivid-in-its-redness triptych. It’s a Husain. Stand a while; take it in.
Now stroll down the corridor to the left. Peep in at the Harbour Bar (incidentally, the oldest licensed bar in the city). Anchored there are a Ram Kumar, a Laxman Pai and a Rajesh Pullarwar.
Now, down the corridor. Take a left into the stairwell of the hotel’s heritage wing. Before you take the stairs, step into the Palace Lounge. Amid the hushed silence of its plush interiors, resting on its sombre wooden walls, are a couple of VS Gaitondes, a Ram Kumar, and a Jehangir Sabavala.
Tear yourself away; take the grand staircase. As you ascend, your feet sinking into the carpet, you come face to face with an SH Raza. On the first floor, step into the banquet hall. Take a slow, deep breath. Around you are works by KK Hebbar, Anjolie Ela Menon, Vivan Sundaram, Sabavala, GR Santosh, B Vithal and Laxman Shrestha.
And this is a mere sampling.
The Taj’s collection of paintings by modern Indian artists is one of the largest in the country—about 1,000 original paintings, including about 200 masterpieces, and another 3,000 prints—and rivals some of the best private treasure troves of the country’s most zealous collectors. And what sets it apart is the fact that instead of being guarded by jealous owners behind high levels of security or in secretive private galleries, it is out there for anyone who walks in to admire. Well, at least some of it.
The Taj, as we see it today, was not always so. Neither was the now-famed art collection.
From the time it opened to the public—on December 16, 1903—right up to the decade after India’s independence, the history of the Taj is generously populated with royal (and loyal) guests, grand parties, extravagant entertainment, and national luminaries. But once the Second World War was over and the country independent, the arduous task of nation-building lay ahead, and the going was not all that smooth.
“The Taj too, was having its post war problems, albeit of a different kind and on a different scale. The turnover during the last year of the War had been the highest ever, with bar receipts alone amounting to two million rupees. However, increasingly large sums of money were now having to be spent on keeping the Taj and Greens in running order,” write Charles Allen and Sharada Dwivedi in their book The Taj at Apollo Bunder.
JRD Tata, who had been overall chairman of the Tata organisation since 1938, would later admit that neither he nor his colleagues then gave much thought to the hotel, which represented such a tiny part of the Tata business. “The idea was that we had gone into the hotel business in a moment of mental aberration on the part of the old man, Jamshetji Tata, who had done it really because he was proud of Bombay. I took some interest in it, I appointed Faletti and people like that in order to get some professionals in, but otherwise it was almost comical the way the Taj was run in those days—and so long as it did not lose too much money, nobody bothered too much about it.”
Chuckling over her memories from the 1960s is Elizabeth Kerkar, as she sits behind her crowded desk at her interior design consultancy firm, Elizabeth Kerkar and Associates, in Colaba. “In 1963, when I first stepped into the hotel, I looked around and thought to myself, ‘Where have I landed?’ It looked quite ugly; and it was an old building. The flooring was ruined. The colour scheme of the [heritage] tower was dull and boring. Everything had to be changed.”
And change it she did, over the next 35 years, during which she was associated with the Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces (she retired as head of housekeeping in 1997). Along with Rodabeh Sawhny’s (JRD Tata’s sister), Kerkar’s efforts at the Taj Mahal Hotel included a severe overhaul of the hotel’s interiors, bringing in paintings, antique furniture for the lobby and the corridors, replacing old metal pillars, and changing existing colour schemes.
It was by the early 2000s that the hotel felt the need to focus on the conservation and preservation of its collection. “Till the early- to mid-’80s,” Chatterjee says, “there was a clear acquisitions mentality... But that’s not to say that the quality of the care of the works diminished during that period. It’s just that the focus moved from acquisition to preservation. The early 2000s was the period in which the Indian art market came to be what we understand it today: From a point where values were way below fair market value, to a point where they had some relationship with their international peers. Many collections, and not specifically the Taj’s, therefore needed to take more cognisance of the methodology of conservation and preservation as the values increased.”
Although the bulk of the hotel’s collection had been built by the 1980s, it still commissions works. The Husain triptych behind the reception—unveiled in December 2000 by Ratan Tata—was one. Rajesh Pullarwar’s depiction of Mumbai—spanning the entire width of the rearmost wall of the Harbour Bar—would be another.
PICKING UP THE PIECES
Image: Taj Hotels/Graham Crouch(This story appears in the 31 October, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)