When young Bengali start out in life, they are not taught to look up to Dwarkanath Tagore or Mutty Lal Seal or Ramdulal Sarkar as their heroes. This elimination of wealth creators from the pantheon of Bengali heroes is a tragedy
Dwarakanath Tagore. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
This essay was born of a short lecture I gave to the newly formed Bengal Development Collective, made up mostly of students at my alma mater Oxford, and some also from Cambridge. In this, I argue that one of the primary elements that has gone missing from common Bengali consciousness is the urge towards wealth generation.
To observe a small but illustrative example, one only needs to check the number of startups that the state of West Bengal has compared to similar states like Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, or Karnataka. Karnataka has more than twice the number of startups compared to Bengal, Maharashtra, more than four-fold, and Gujarat, about two-thirds more. Tamil Nadu has around 40 per cent more registered startups than Bengal.
Now one could argue that perhaps many startups in Bengal are not registered but consider that per capita consumption of electricity in Bengal is lower than neighbouring states like Jharkhand and Odisha. This in a state which was once the industrial epicentre of India seems incongruous.
The economic worries of Bengal have many historic sources including a debt burden and it is also true that in the last couple of years the state has been showing swift growth in its GSDP (gross state domestic product). But there is a fundamental spirit of entrepreneurship — especially new or young entrepreneurship — which seems to need a rekindling in the state (as noticed in the number of startups).
Where is this spirit to be found? In fact, in Bengal’s own history. In this essay I wish to highlight three men from the late 18th to the early 20th century, from a period popularly known as the Bengal Renaissance.
These three are Dwarkanath Tagore, Mutty Lal Seal and Ramdulal Sarkar (also known as Ramdulal Dey).
The founder of the Jorashanko Tagores (or Thakurs in Bengali), and grandfather of the Nobel laureate poet and author Rabindranath, Dwarkanath was a pioneering entrepreneur.
He was one of the founders of the first Anglo-Indian mercantile company, Carr, Tagore, and Company, which had interests in jute, tea, and coal mines, and the first Indian to become a bank director in British-ruled India. Dwarkanath was a visionary in realizing that his inherited zamindari wealth was best deployed as investments in business and the real money was to be made in managing supply chains in commodities across the Empire including in trade with China. Dwarkanath was also the first Indian to buy a coal mine in Raniganj which eventually became the Bengal Coal Company.
Mutty Lal Seal was no less entrepreneurial as a trader, merchant, and owner of a major shipping fleet. Whether indigo or sugar, rice, silk, or salt petre, there is little that was traded from Calcutta’s ports that did not have some interest from Mutty Lal Seal. One of the founders of the Assam Company, Seal pushed the Oriental Life Insurance Company to start servicing Indian clients. He used his ships to send flour and other food items to the new immigrants in Australia, and was among the founders of the Bank of India.
For his efforts, Mutty Lal Seal was described as the ‘Rothschild of Calcutta’.
The third character in our story is a shipping magnate called Ramdulal Sarkar (sometimes referred to as Ramdulal Dey). If Tagore and Seal were making money trading with the British, Sarkar looked at the New World. His primary business partners were in America.
From New York, Philadelphia and Boston, traders dealt with Ramdulal Sarkar to deal with commodities of all kinds and get a share of the Calcutta port action. Such was his influence that his American partners named one of their ships ‘Ram Dolloll’, a mispronunciation of his name, in Sarkar’s honour.
As a tribute to getting them in on the Hooghly action, Ramdulal Sarkar’s American trading partners presented to him a life-size portrait of George Washington by the artist William Winstanley (it is said to be the first such painting made on Washington).
Ironically, even when I gave this lecture talking about these incredible men, there was little recognition of these names among my highly educated and talented student audience. These men and their daring, enterprising exploits have almost been wiped out of the history of Bengal. When young Bengali start out in life, they are not taught to look up to Dwarkanath Tagore or Mutty Lal Seal or Ramdulal Sarkar as their heroes, as people who they ought to follow.
This elimination of wealth creators from the pantheon of Bengali heroes is a tragedy and I would like to argue is part of the problem why wealth creation and enterprise is not seen as a natural and integral part of Bengali culture today (as for instance the arts is).
If the culture of enterprise is to be reignited in Bengal, it must begin with adding to the list of Bengali heroes the names of these incredible Bengal Renaissance wealth creators who — in fact — bankrolled all the culture and arts that that fertile period gave us.
The writer is a multiple award-winning historian and author. The views expressed are personal.
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