Dwarkanath Tagore
Dwarkanath Tagore,(1794-1846), one of the earliest entrepreneurs from India, has been remembered by the posterity for an altogether different reason: that of being the grandfather of Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941).
Dwarkanath was a western-educated Bengali brahmin and an acknowledged civic leader of Calcutta (now Kolkata) who played a pioneering role in setting up a string of commercial ventures -- bank, insurance and shipping companies -- in partnership with British traders. He is the architect of the first bi-racial agency house from India, Carr, Tagore and Company (even earlier, Rustomjee Cowasjee, a Parsi in Calcutta, had formed an inter-racial firm but Parsis were classified as a Near Eastern community). Tagore's company managed huge zamindary 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.
A restless soul, with a firm conviction that his racial identity was not a barrier between him and other Britishers 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 1840's; he died in London after a brief illness. Historiographers have often been flummoxed by his inability, depite a great desire, to be honoured by the Queen with a baronetcy (his grandson, Rabindranath, received the honour but returned it following British excesses at Jallianwalabagh in the Punjab, 1919). A theory often propounded is that Dwarkanath Tagore, as an acknowledged opium grower, and shipper of the product to China till the outbreak of the first Opium War in 1840, was an outspoken critic of mercantilism which, in the context of the times, stood for continuing British government control on colonial trade, including trade with China. British merchants refused to forgo quantitative restrictions on export of opium to China, a policy that ensured profit often as high as 2000%. They reportedly enjoyed powerful support of the Tories, who were then in power, inluding the Prime Minister, Robert Peel. It is this conflict of interest between Tagore and the mercantilists that could possibly have destroyed his chances of becoming the first Indian to be decorated by the British queen.
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 led his branch of the family tree to opt for the anti-idolatrous Brahmo sect, founded by his mentor, Raja Ram Mohun Roy, as opposed to idol-worshipping Hindus. 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 by his progeny was an integral part. The first Indian entrepreneur who thought globally thus remains an oddity in the country's socio-cultural history.