Dwarkanath Tagore - Business Life and Other Trivia

Business Life and Other Trivia

Tagore was a western-educated Bengali Brahmin and an acknowledged civic leader of Kolkata who played a pioneering role in setting up a string of commercial ventures—banking, insurance and shipping companies—in partnership with British traders. In 1828, he became the first Indian bank director. In 1829, he founded Union Bank in Calcutta. He helped found the first Anglo-Indian Managing Agency (industrial organizations that ran jute mills, coal mines, tea plantations, etc.) Carr, Tagore and Company (even earlier, Rustomjee Cowasjee, a Parsi in Calcutta, had formed an inter-racial firm but in the early 19th century, Parsis were classified as a Near Eastern community as opposed to South Asian). Tagore's company managed huge zamindari estates spread across today's West Bengal and Orissa states in India, and in Bangladesh, besides holding large stakes in new enterprises that were tapping the rich coal seams of Bengal, running tug services between Calcutta and the mouth of the river Hooghly and transplanting Chinese tea crop to the plains of Upper Assam. This company was one of those Indian private companies engaged in the opium trade with China. Production of opium was in India and it was sold in China. When the Chinese protested, the East India company shifted the business to the proxy of certain selected Indian companies of which this was one. Tagore founded the first Indian coal mine in Runigunj. Very large schooners were engaged in shipments. This made Dwarkanath extremely rich. And there are legends about the extent of it.

A restless soul, with a firm conviction that his racial identity was not a barrier between him and other Britons as long as he remained loyal to the British Sovereign, Tagore was well received by Queen Victoria and many other British and European notables during his two trips to the West in the 1840s; he died in London after a brief illness. Historiographers have often been flummoxed by his inability, despite a great desire, to be honoured by the Queen with a baronetcy (his grandson, Rabindranath Tagore, received the honour but returned it following British atrocities at the Jallianwala Bagh in the Punjab, 1919).

Some scholars have been puzzled by the paucity of documents concerning Dwarkanath in the Tagore family collections spread over many generations. There are scanty references to him in the records of Debendranath Tagore, his eldest son who founded the Brahmo religion. There is absolutely no mention of Dwarkanath (except in a personal letter) in the monumental body of writings by his grandson Rabindranath. The established academic view is that Dwarkanath's concept of equating the coloniser with the colonised was found galling by his countrymen in the context of the nationalist awakening in Bengal and India, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, of which the Brahmo movement initiated was an integral part. The first Indian entrepreneur who thought globally thus remains a memory of glory and pride at deepest core of our heart of honour.