Dwarkanath Tagore

Dwarkanath Tagore
'Prince' Dwarakanath Tagore (Dwarakanath Ţhakur; 1794–1846) was one of the first Indian industrialists to form an enterprise with British partners. He was the son of Rammoni Tagore, and was given in adoption to Rammoni’s elder brother Ramlochan Tagore. He was the scion of the Tagore Family of Calcutta, father of Debendranath Tagore and grandfather of Rabindranath Tagore.
Ancestry
Dwarakanath Tagore was a descendant of Rarhiya Brahmins of the Kushari (Sandilya gotra) division. Their ancestors were called Pirali Brahmin - the word "Pirali" comes from Pir Ali, one ancestor of the Tagores, who had supposedly converted to Islam. His descendants again became Hindus and got the name "Pirali Brahmin".
Dwarakanath's great grandfather Jairam Tagore made a large fortune as a merchant and as Dewan to the French government at Chandannagar. He shifted from Gobindapur to Pathuriaghata, when the British constructed the new Fort William in the mid-eighteenth century. His eldest son, Nilmoni Tagore (b.1721 - d.1791), with his wife Lalita Devi and sons, settled at Jorasanko after leaving the ancestral house at Pathuriaghata following a rift with his younger brother Darpanarayan Tagore. Nilmoni Tagore built the Jorasanko Thakur Bari where the Jorasanko branch of the family dwelled, while Darpanarayan Tagore's descendants belonged to the Pathuriaghata Tagore branch.
Childhood
Nilmoni's grandson, Dwarakanath Tagore, was born in 1794 to Rammoni Tagore and his wife Menaka Devi. Soon after birth, he was given in adoption to Rammoni's childless elder brother Ramlochan (b.1759 - d.1807), a rich man of his time and a patron of music. Menaka Devi was the younger sister of Dwarakanath's adoptive mother Aloka Sundari Devi.
On 12 December 1807, Ramlochan died leaving all his property to Dwarakanath, who was then a minor. This property consisted of zamindari estates in Birahimpur Pargana, Pandua, Balia Mahal, and some places near Calcutta, governed by the Regulations of Permanent Settlement introduced by Lord Cornwallis in 1792. The Zamindars were the ruling authority of a certain sub-division or region under the British ruling authority in India and had the authority to collect tax or to rule their fellow residents inside the territory on behalf of the British Government. Therefore, to participate in the Zamindari left by his adopted father Ramlochan Thakur as the forthcoming Zamindar, Dwarakanath left school in 1810 at the age of 16 and apprenticed himself under renowned barrister, Robert Cutlar Fergusson and traveled between Calcutta and his estates at Behrampore and Cuttack. Dwarakanath used to study at the English school of Sherbourne, in Chitpur, Calcutta.
Marriage
At the age of 17, Dwarakanath married the 9 years old Digambari Devi, daughter of a zamindar from near Jessore, in 1811. They had 4 sons and 1 daughter - among whom 3 survived - Debendranath Tagore (b.1817), Girindranath Tagore (b.1820 - d.1854) and Nagendranath Tagore (b.1829 - d.1858). As Dwarakanath started leading an extravagant lifestyle, his married life with his orthodox Hindu wife got strained. She consulted with Hindu Brahmins regarding his behaviour and finally decided to stop interaction with her husband. Whenever she had to speak to him regarding household matters, she used to take a bath in the holy Ganges water. It continued this way for some time. However, after taking such a bath in a cold winter night, Digambari caught fever, and died in 1839 at the age of 37.
Business life
Tagore was a western-educated Bengali Brahmin and a civic leader of Calcutta 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. (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 large zamindari estates spread across today's West Bengal and Odisha states in India, and in Bangladesh, and held 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.
Carr, Tagore and Company was one of the Indian private companies engaged in the opium trade with China. Production of opium was in India and then sold in China. When the Chinese protested, the East India Company transferred the opium trade to the proxy of certain selected Indian companies, of which this was one.
In 1832 Tagore purchased the first Indian coal mine in Raniganj, which eventually became the Bengal Coal Company.
Death
Dwarakanath Tagore died "at the peak of his fortune" on the evening of 1 August 1846 at the St. George's Hotel in London.
In his obituary, The London Mail newspaper of 7 August wrote:
"Descended from the highest Brahmin caste of India his family can prove a long and undoubted pedigree. But it is not on account of this nobility that we now review his life but on far better grounds. However gifted, his claims rest on a higher pedestal – he was the benefactor of his country... [T]hey testified to his merits in the encouragement of every public and private undertaking likely to benefit India."
References
Further reading
Blair B Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India, University of California Press, 1976; Calcutta, 1981.
NK Sinha, The Economic History of Bengal 1793–1848, III, Calcutta, 1984.
Sengupta, Subodh Chandra and Bose, Anjali (editors), 1976/1998, Sansad Bangali Charitabhidhan (Biographical dictionary) Vol I p223.
External links
1794 births
1846 deaths
Bengali zamindars
Businesspeople from Kolkata
Burials at Kensal Green Cemetery
Dwarkanath
Indian businesspeople in coal
Bengali Hindus
Indian businesspeople in mining
Indian businesspeople in textiles
Businesspeople in the sugar industry
Indian social workers
Social workers from West Bengal