The Taittiriya Upanishad, around the fifth century BC, instructs: mother is god, father is god, guest is god. Athithi Devo Bhava is the oldest written statement of a hospitality principle anywhere in this register — older than the Rule of St Benedict, older than the caravanserai, older than every building on every other page. India did not acquire a hospitality culture. It wrote one down and then built for two and a half thousand years inside it.
What follows from a doctrine rather than a market is a page with five parallel systems that never merged: the sarai of the trade road, the dharamshala of the pilgrim, the dak bungalow of the empire, the palace of the prince, and the langar, which gives everything away. No other country here runs five at once, and India still runs all five today.
The road, and the largest builder of lodging in this register
The Grand Trunk Road is older than its English name. Ashoka set rest houses every eight kos in the third century BC. Then, in five years between 1540 and 1545, Sher Shah Suri built up to 1,700 sarais from Bengal to the Punjab, planting trees and digging wells between them. ⚑ No individual in this register built more places to sleep, and Akbar added the rule that mattered: a sarai must feed a traveller who cannot pay.
A sarai was a walled yard with a well, a mosque, a bath and cells built into the wall, often with a nanbai to cook. A merchant paid a toll to sleep inside because sleeping outside was dangerous. That is the first paid safe lodging on the subcontinent, and Niccolao Manucci in the seventeenth century described it as a melting pot of merchants, craftsmen, adventurers and the occasional thief.
Two of them deserve their own lines. Arab Sarai in Delhi was built in 1560 by Haji Begum, widow of Humayun, to house the three hundred Arab clerics who had gone with her on hajj. Nur Mahal Serai near Jalandhar was commissioned by the empress Nur Jahan. Two caravanserais ordered by Mughal women, for named guests.
The pilgrim road, and the kitchen that feeds a hundred thousand
The dharamshala gave free or near-free lodging at a shrine: Varanasi, Haridwar, the four dhams. The guest travels for a place rather than for a trade, which is the same institution as the Japanese shukubō and the Russian podvorye, arrived at independently.
⚑ And then there is the langar at the Golden Temple. Around a hundred thousand people are fed there every day, free, all year, cooked and washed up by volunteers, with everyone seated on the floor together under the principle of pangat — a rule designed so that a maharaja and a labourer eat in the same row. It has run since Guru Nanak in the late fifteenth century.
The Library holds it, and the reason is worth stating. This register exists to record houses that sell nights. The largest act of hospitality on earth sells nothing at all, and a catalogue of luxury that cannot see it is describing a market rather than a subject.
Muziris, and the first long-stay guests
Pliny called it the first emporium of India. Sangam poems describe the ships of the Yavanas — Greeks and Romans — arriving with gold and leaving with pepper, and Roman coins still come out of the Kerala soil. ⚑ The hospitality fact is the monsoon: a Roman trader had to wait half a year for the wind to turn, so Muziris housed foreign merchants for months at a time. The first long-stay guests of the Malabar coast, and the reason the Malabar has been receiving strangers longer than almost anywhere in this Library. The port was lost to a flood of the Periyar and rediscovered at Pattanam from 2007.
The empire builds a bungalow every fifteen miles
Auckland's order of 1836–42 put a dak bungalow every ten to fifteen miles on the main roads so an official need not carry a tent. It is the colonial yeok — the state feeding the movement of its own post and magistrates — and it is the direct ancestor of the hill station hotel, which is why the Cecil and Wildflower Hall stand where they do.
The European hotel arrived alongside it and arrived segregated. The Great Eastern in Calcutta opened on 19 November 1840 out of David Wilson's bakery and had the first electric light of any hotel in India, in 1883. Watson's in Bombay of 1869 is the oldest surviving cast-iron building in the country, and Indians were not admitted.
16 December 1903, and a story this register will not settle
The Taj Mahal Palace opened to seventeen guests. It cost around £500,000, was designed by two Indian architects and finished by a British engineer, and its 240-foot dome was the first clear landmark of Bombay harbour — twenty-one years before the Gateway of India. It was the first hotel in the country where an Indian could stay on the same terms as a European.
⚑ Why Jamsetji Tata built it is disputed and the Library prints both accounts. The famous version is that he was refused entry at Watson's because it was whites-only and built his own in reply. Charles Allen disputes it, and the documented alternative is a gift to the city after the plague, suggested by the editor of the Times of India — a place where a European and an Indian could sit at one table. Tata's own sister called the project a bhatiarkhana, a cookhouse.
The register's rule is two independent sources, and here that rule produces two stories rather than one. Printing the myth alone would be easier and would be wrong.
The palace learns to charge, and then gets built new
The Twenty-sixth Amendment of 1971 abolished the princes' titles and privy purses, and the palaces went to work. Mewar gave Jag Niwas to Taj; Jodhpur kept a wing of Umaid Bhawan and let the rest. ⚑ Umaid Bhawan itself was built between 1929 and 1943 as famine relief — two to three thousand workers paid for fifteen years — which makes it the only palace in this register that was a jobs programme first.
Then the reverse move, and it is India's own invention. The Oberoi Udaivilas opened in 2002 on the Maharana's old hunting grounds, and Biki Oberoi's instruction to his designers was: we are building a palace. Not restoring one. A palace built from nothing that reads as though it had always been there — Rajvilas in 1997, Amarvilas in 2001 six hundred metres from the Taj Mahal with a view of it from every room. The register keeps the distinction between the restored palace and the manufactured one, because the market deliberately blurs it.
And a third way: Neemrana. Aman Nath and Francis Wacziarg saw a ruined fort of 1464 at sunset in 1977 while looking for Shekhawati frescoes, bought it for ₹700,000 in 1986 and opened twelve rooms in 1991, calling it a non-hotel. The Indian heritage-hotel industry followed them.
Three houses and a doctrine
Tata built the first. M. S. Oberoi pawned his wife's jewellery in 1934 to buy Clarke's in Simla, having started as a front-desk clerk at the Cecil in 1922 on fifty rupees a month, and by 1943 held control of Associated Hotels of India — the first Indian at the head of the country's largest hotel chain. C. P. Krishnan Nair started The Leela in 1986 at the age of sixty-five. ITC made the third historic force, and its Bukhara has kept substantially the same menu since 1977.
Against the rest of the register: Oman chose restraint, the Emirates built an industry, Qatar incorporated, Saudi Arabia designed, Japan kept the inn open, Korea made hospitality an instrument of policy. India had the principle first and everything else is commentary on it — the sarai that must feed the man who cannot pay, the langar that feeds a hundred thousand for nothing, and a hotel built in 1903 so that the door would open regardless of who was standing at it.