35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘EUROPEANS ARE COMING TO MY COUNTRY NOW’
working continuously for 18 hours daily in the Hotel and are
positively the hardest worked and most satisfactory running Lifts
in India.’
Then the age of the tourist began, bringing an entirely different
sort of guest to the Taj. The British were proud of the jewel in the
crown of their empire, and tales of its fabled wealth and exotica
lured people irresistibly. In its tone the Times reveals the attitude
that would typify the English response to their cousins across the
Atlantic:
WORLD TRAVELLERS:
The Americans in Bombay
The invasion of Bombay by the large party of Americans
travelling round the world in the SS Cleveland was completed
on Saturday evening, and for the next few days our visitors will
pervade the city . . . all the tourists who are left in Bombay, 450 in
number, are staying at the Taj Mahal Hotel, where special
arrangements of an elaborate kind have been made for them . . .
A small army of special waiters has been imported, a special
kitchen, special bars, reading rooms, and an ‘American Candy
Store’ have been fitted up. A band plays during tiffin and dinner
each day. By a sensible arrangement, the party is kept entirely
separate from the ordinary guests of the hotel, and their visit
fortunately fits in between the weekly rushes in connection with
the home-going mail steamers.
In spite of all these excellent arrangements, the casual observer
would find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Americans
are ‘terribly bored with the whole thing.’ A writer in a home
magazine who saw them in Japan speaks of them as ‘those
cheerless tourists at Yokohama, with their leaden eyes . . .’
In the early 1900s, fortune-tellers and mystics visited India – the
reverse of today’s migration of people going to India in search of
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