Dwarkanath Tagore’s rise and ruin in colonial Bengal

Despite the end of his gilded -edged life in debt and exile, an Indian capitalist identity deserves to be remembered as a struggle to fit under colonial restrictions.

In 1794, in the land of Jorasanko, which expanded in Northern Calcutta, a Hamindar family was born in a lounge and courtyard labyrinth, which doubled as an influence theater, grew up in a world where Bengali merchants and reformers grew up in a world where the British grew up in a world where the British grew up in a world. The apprenticeship with a British lawyer taught him that the empire was not only a political or military force, but also a large, small economic opportunity.

The East Indian Company brought the tools of modern capitalism: joint stock companies, commercial banking, industrial initiatives, commodity trade. Most of the Indian traders were clearly guided; Dwarkanath entered directly.

In 1834, Carr established the Afyon trade, coal shipment and banking of the Tagore & Company-Europe partnership of the first India-Europe-Europe in interests. Two years ago, in 1832, Raniganganganj bought the coal mine and then united his rivals to Bengal Kömür, which gave him the monopoly power in the Eastern Generation. He also founded the western Western Western of the Bengal Railway Company to connect the mines to Calcutta by railway.

At a time when British banks dominated the financial system of India, Dwarkanath was founded in 1828 to serve Indian hikes, industrialists and traders excluded from official banking channels.

However, their reserves were fatally attached to the British markets, British loan and in favor of the British. It was the creation of empire patronage until personal intelligence, and it made it back there. The business style invited suspicion: over -lifting on a magnificent scale, speculative land agreements and farmers’ trap into the debt.

The Birlik Bank, which lacks official controls, has largely functioned as an in -house financier for many of them underground initiatives. In the 1840s, when the commodity prices fell and the loan was bored, the global economy slowed down. The exposure of the bank became deadly and lost with its collapse in 1848 La4.7 Lakh defaults and bad management.

But before autumn, a last Hurray came. During his visit to London in 1842, Dwarkanath was greeted by the Queen Victoria, who was painted by the press by community artists and greeted as “Prince Dwarkanath .. However, under the glow, it was over -expanded by disaster.

The debts were installed; Their assets were torn apart. He died alone in London in 1846, buried in the Kensal Green Cemetery, a painful irony for a man who stacked everything to be accepted as equal in the Empire Order.

Dwarkanath’s life envisaged an explosion and explosion that would define Indian capitalism at the end of the 19th century. Both the pioneer and the stimulus tale: only a visionary national icon was sacrificed to be rejected as a colonial cooperation.

His son Debendranath dismantled most of his father’s built and returned from trade to spirituality. Tens of years later, the name of Tagore would be resurrected by the type of global recognition that escaped from the family’s capitalist patriarch.

Dwarkanath believed that the British empire could be a equalizing force, overcome the color of the capital, and that a brown man in a vest could demand the place among the peers. It was a mistake that cost him with everything. The tragedy was in the vision that raised him and finally destroyed him. Nevertheless, he stands as the first modern capitalist of India: he was bright, flawed and back by the system he tried to master.