The last time I felt anything like this was when the first anti-aircraft gun was trained at a Bamiyan Buddha, followed by a diligent regime of destruction in March 2001. No human life was harmed in the process, and it was clear in the aftermaths of 9/11 that if a world republic of letters was shocked and outraged by the cultural catastrophe at Bamiyan earlier that year the world republic could repair to the library and classroom it came from and lick its psychic wound. The 6th-century Buddhas, besides being magnificent and irreplaceable specimens of art, had long been real and symbolic figures of survival and natural selection in a troubled geopolitical region. They were also towering embodiments of the busy cultural traffic - and friendship - between the subcontinent and Central Asia, between the ancient Indian, Hellenistic, Roman, and Sasanian empires. The Bamiyan valley, a historical repository and sacred destination for pilgrims over many centuries, by its continued existence till 2001, had testified to a utopian coexistence of world religions, or, in this case, the existence of a religious group with the hyperbolic past of another.

It is absurd to compare the siege of a luxury hotel to the destruction of a World Heritage site, also on the grounds that hotels, unlike relics, tend to heave with perishable life, but my point is that we ought to mourn places passionately, for places can and do outlive people, and the accretion of history and stories in time-honoured monuments often makes chronic human life seem innocent of meaning in comparison.

I have stopped at the Taj every year for the last five or six years, mostly through the good offices of my husband, who worked stints in Mumbai every summer and sometimes winter, and have long been a bemused observer of the softly-softly opulence of the place. The alabaster ceilings and onyx columns; the carefully careless placement of masses of art; the Taj purchase of seaview; the grand cantilever staircase. For me, child of parents of the first post-Independence generation who had little or nothing to do with 5-star frippery (whether or not they could afford it), the Taj was about arriving at an unafraid and unapologetic Indian modernity and prosperity. I say Indian because the contingent nature of this piece makes me value the hotel as heritage material, but the originary moment of the Taj itself confounded the limits of a nascent national imagination. Built as per the larger-than-life vision of Jamsetji Tata, himself the son of a Parsi arriviste to the colonial city, the Taj was a belated and knowing concretisation of an Orientalist fantasy. The architectural influences were rich and strange: Rajput, Mughal, Moorish, Florentine, Byzantine. It cost over four hundred thousand pounds to build it in 1903. The Ballroom, propped up by the first spun-steel pillars from the Paris Exhibition, was a modern reincarnation of the lost Durbar Halls of yore, while the electric laundry, the refrigeration plant, the in-house soda bottling facility and the imported fans (from the US) - the fully electrified hotel itself - was about a brighter future for an emergent metropolis that would usher a new era of global travel.

The wheels of the place were lubricated with overabundant money, of course, but not alienatingly so, as the mixed groups of revellers in the restaurants each weekend testified. If felt good instead to have access to the aspirational character of the Taj, which was also about the rise of the parvenu and the go-getter, the expense-account professional, and the promise of universal self-improvement and social climbing in a democracy, however troubled. As the wall of fame in one of the show windows of the colonnade once testified, this had been a transit lodge for princes and presidents as well as artists and poets, Lord Mountbatten as well as a dark interpreter of the empire, V. S. Naipaul. If you managed to scrape together enough for a meal at Wasabi by Morimoto you would eat with movie stars and Bret Lee. The Taj was a club and marriage market for the old rich, but also the playground of the new merchants and movers of Mumbai and beyond. One look around the poolside and you would come up with all the ambivalent catchphrases of cultural studies in the West: cosmopolitans and migrants, class mobility and race mobility, English as the global vernacular.

The lobby of the Taj (from the "new" main entrance) was lined with a Husain painting. The receptionists looked effortlessly at ease in such back-rubbing contact with priceless art. They were self-confident, smiling young men and women in smart suits or saree, trained in the unspoken norms of Taj hospitality, never too much or too little. If reports are to be believed, three such immaculately prepared guardians of this unique and changeable community of Prometheans were some of the first to be gunned down at the lobby. As the edifice faces physical ruination and an unhappy transformation after the barbarous attacks of last week, I lament the horrible waste of human life and fear the political fallout in Mumbai, India, and South Asia. I mark also the end of a rare and short-lived instance of (Indian) triumphalism and effrontery that was the old Taj.