The New Taj Mahals

Luxury has a long and storied lineage in India. It was in 1903 that Jamsetji Tata built India’s first luxury hotel, the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai—a property that, even at the time, offered electricity, air-conditioning, elevators, and telephones in every room. While palaces and residences of the Indian royalty that were later converted into luxury hotels dominate today’s rankings (Rajasthan is India’s luxury hotel capital), the Taj set the tone for what luxury would come to mean in modern India.

- Siddharth [e-mail] @szarabi

India’s market for luxury goods and services has expanded on the back of rising wealth. In 2014, the country had just over 192,000 individuals with a taxable income of over ₹50 lakh a year. By 2024, this number had risen nearly five-fold. The number of taxpayers with incomes between ₹1 crore and ₹10 crore a year has risen 320% in the past decade, as Prince Tyagi captures in the data spread of this special edition on the luxury boom in India. Various research estimates suggest that the luxury market in India is around $30 billion today and expected to triple by 2030.