Dwarkanath Tagore
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Dwarkanath Tagore (Bangla, Darokanath Ţhakur) (1794-1846), one of the earliest entrepreneurs from India, has been remembered for an altogether different reason: that of being the founder of the great Tagore family, and for making substantial contributions to the Bengal Renaissance.
Dwarkanath was a 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. He is the architect of the first bi-racial agency house from India, Carr, Tagore and Company. 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. 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 it 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. 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, 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.
Some scholars[1] 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 first Indian entrepreneur who thought globally thus remains an enigma in the country's socio-cultural history.
