Jamsetji Tata apparently made purchases himself on his trips abroad, buying, among other things, a soda and ice-making plant, washing machines, a laundry, lifts and an electric generator. Visiting Paris, possibly at the time of the inauguration of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, and seeing pillars of spun iron for the first time, he ordered ten to be shipped home to hold up the vast ballroom, the proposed piece de resistance of the new hotel.

The interior was a work of fantasy. The building was set back to give guests the sensory experience of being at sea. Rooms were connected by marble corridors and here and there were vaulted alabaster ceilings, onyx columns, graceful archways, and a dramatic cantilever staircase. In later years, a rumour would grow and pass into city folklore, about the placement of the entrance. According to the story, the Italian architect who had designed the Taj realised that it was mistakenly built back to front and committed suicide. R.M. Lala, chronicler of the House of Tatas, however, discounts the rumour, clarifying that the entrance at the back was meant to face the Wellington Mews from where the horse carriages would arrive.

In 1903, the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel opened and was the first building in Bombay to be lit by electricity. It opened with 17 guests and soon attracted the international elite.

W. Somerset Maugham was a celebrated guest, actor Gregory Peck called it a ‘jewelled crown’. But as Tata had perhaps hoped, the hotel also became an integral part of the city, setting the trends for the fashionable elite in dancing, dining and music. Naresh Fernandes, an authority on Mumbai’s jazz musicians, for instance, maintains that the jazz scene only took off in the mid-30s when the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay hired its first resident jazz outfit, a nine-piece band led by a violinist from Minnesota named Leon Abbey.

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