Partner in Empire- Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India

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Blair B. Kling, Professor of History at the University of Illinois received his Ph. D. from the University of Pannsylvania and served as Coordinator of the Indian Steel Training and Educational Program, Carnegie Institute of Technology. He first visited India on a Fulbright grant in 1957-58 and returned in 1964-65 as a Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Dr. Kling has not written too many books. But he is one of those rare Americans who went deep into Bengal's history and culture and tried sincerely to analyse the decline. He has succeeded in arguing a strong case in his study of Prince Dwarkanath. As a modern historian of high calibre, he certainly could not do more!

Dr. Kling is married & has two children.

The story of Dwarkanath Tagore first came to my attention in a seminar conducted by Richard Park at Berkeley twenty years ago. I was intrigued by the discovery that the grandfather of the poet Rabindranath and the father of the saintly Debendranath was an astute business tycoon who owned fleets of ships, coal mines, insurance companies, banks, and indigo plantations. At once I sensed the likelihood of a dramatic conflict between the worldly father and his other-worldly son and imagined Dwarkanath's profound disappointment when Debendranath refused to carry on the hard-won business empire. In this case research confirmed my guess. On another point, however, I was proven wrong. I had anticipated that the adulatory historians of the Tagore family had exaggerated Dwarkanath's achievements, and I was surprised to discover that he was all they had said and more. In a British-dominated business world, a Bengali Brahmin indeed stood at the pinnacle of power.

My research was supported by generous grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the American Philosophical Society, and, at the University of Illinois, by the Center for International Comparative Studies, the Graduate College Research Board. the Department of History, and the Center for Asian Studies.

In India, I could not have proceeded without the help of my cherished friend, Professor Gautam Chattopadhyay. Other friends and colleagues who were generous in their aid were Samaren Roy, Professor Panchanan Saha, M.K. Chaudhuri, Tarun Mittra, K.L. Mukhopadhyay, Amritamaya Mookerji, Tridib Ghose, and Professor N. Majumdar. Those who helped me in an official capacity included Hiranmay Banerjee, Vice Chancellor of Rabindra Bharati University, S.N. Bhomik, Rabindra Bharati Museum; J.C. Goswami, Keeper of the Records, and T.K. Mukherjee, Assistant Director of Archives, West Bengal State Archives; Y.M. Mulay, Librarian, and Chittaranjan Banerji, Deputy Librarian, National Library of India; S.R. Das, Vice Chancellor, and H.C. Bhattacharyya, Registrar, Visva-Bharati University; Sovan Lal Ganguly, Curator, Rabindra Sadhana; S.V. Desika Char and Sourin Roy of the National Archives of India; A.D. Ogilvie, B. Mitter and W.J. Jameson of Andrew Yule and Company; S.K. Banerjee, Registrar, Calcutta High Court, and the staff of the High Court Archives; W.D. Bryden, Secretary of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce; and G.B. Ghosh, Geological Survey of India.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the armies of the East India Company extended British rule into every corner of the Indian subcontinent. Confronted with the totally unfamiliar task of administering a vast oriental empire, the British responded by converting India into a giant social laboratory. They experimented with transplanting their institutions onto Indian soil and applying current western economic and social philosophies to Indian conditions. Through trial and error they tested schemes for the administration of local government and land-revenue systems, fashioned codes of law and grappled with the question of interfering with religious customs they considered unacceptable. In contrast to the later nineteenth century with its bureaucratized, imperial leviathan, the first half of the century was a period of flexibility when alternative systems of relationships between ruler and ruled seemed possible. One of these alternatives was presented by a prominent Bengali merchant, Dwarkanath Tagore.

Dwarkanath Tagore (1794-1846), a western-educated Bengali Brahmin, was the acknowledged civic leader of Calcutta during the 1830s and 1840s. Though a brilliant entrepreneur, he subordinated his business activities to political and social ends. Tagore envisioned a future India that was westernized and industrialized and whose inhabitants enjoyed without discrimination the rights and liberties of Englishmen. He would lay the foundations for this new India in his own day by promoting an all-encompassing interracial partnership of Britishers and Indians. One component would be the community of British settlers who, like the colonists in America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, would strike roots in the country and develop local allegiances. The other component would be progressive-minded Indians who would associate with the British as equals in business, social, cultural, and political activities. Together they would form a single community with local loyalties.