‘Saw monsters... blinded by flashes of beauty’: Mexican poet Octavio Paz’s first impression of India

The ship approached the Bombay harbour early one morning in December 1951. As it moved forward sluggishly across “an enormous mass of liquid mercury, barely undulating”, Paz’s excitement grew. The morning fog gradually revealed the first vision of India to him in obscure outline. He saw the Gateway of India, an archway that was built in 1911 to welcome King George V and Queen Mary. In the years that followed, it welcomed overseas travellers, emphatically reinforcing their sense of arrival in India. It was also through this archway that the last British troops departed India in 1947. It was made in a revivalist architectural style that combines Mughal, Hindu and Gothic architectural elements, which is referred to as Indo-Saracenic. Paz’s first vision of India was made with an Orientalist disposition:

Behind the monument, floating in the warm air, was the silhouette of the Taj Mahal Hotel, an enormous cake, a delirium of the fin-de-siècle Orient fallen like a gigantic bubble, not of soap but of stone, on Bombay’s lap. I rubbed my eyes: was the hotel getting closer or farther away?

The Taj Mahal Hotel at Apollo Bunder, the one in which Paz stayed, is near the Gateway of India. Most heads of states...

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