The Tagore Family of Jorasanko (per. 1690–1951) traced their connection with the area now occupied by Calcutta, India, back to the end of the seventeenth century, when their ancestors migrated from the district of Jessore in eastern Bengal to the village of Gobindapore on the River Hooghly, where Fort William of Calcutta was later built. In the words of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the most remarkable member of a remarkable family dynasty, his ancestors came with the ‘earliest tide of the fluctuating fortune of the East India Company’ (Tagore, My Life, 9). They left their inherited priestly duties as high Brahmans to become banians or brokers to the Europeans. The villagers of Gobindapore addressed their Brahman guests as thakur or ‘holy sir’, which was anglicized into Tagore as the family’s padabi or title. In Bengali their title is still Thakur. According to Blair B. Kling, a historian of the ‘age of enterprise’ in eastern India, these ‘descendants’ of ‘humble priests’ became ‘aristocrats’ or ‘the “Medici” of Calcutta’ (Kling, 10). The Tagore family could boast of the first independent Indian merchant under East India Company rule, of several venturesome landholders and banians, of freethinking reformers, of Sanskrit scholars and polyglots, a senior Indian civil servant, and a world-famous poet.
Oral tradition takes the Tagore pedigree back to Bhattanarayan, who was chief of the five Brahmans of Kanauj in central India. In this semi-historical Tagore ancestry a key figure was Purushottam Vidyavagish, who was supposedly Bhattanarayan’s twenty-fifth descendant. (A sloka, or chant, sung at the obsequies for Rabindranath Tagore’s death listed a further ten ancestors from Purushottam to Dwarkanath Tagore.) In the family mythology Purushottam was responsible for lowering its high brahmanical status to pirali Brahmans, or Brahmans who were contaminated by contact with Muslims. Whatever may actually have happened the family was sidetracked in the Brahman hierarchy. Rabindranath Tagore referred to it as the ‘freedom of the outcaste’ (Tagore, My Life, 7).
The family records begin with Purushottam’s nephew, Panchanan. He and his uncle Sukhdev came to Gobindapore about 1690. Their income came from supplying provisions to the East India Company. Panchanan built a house and a temple to Siva at Gobindapore. His capable son Joyram Tagore (d. 1762) was appointed amin or revenue collector of the metropolitan district of Calcutta. Joyram built a second house for himself. But Panchanan and Joyram had to leave their properties at Gobindapore when the British decided to build Fort William at that site. Joyram was compensated with the contract for building the fort, and the family was given land in the part of Calcutta called Pathuriaghata, near the river. There they built a mansion still known as Tagore Castle and a family bathing ghat or pool.
Among Joyram’s sons Darpanarayan Tagore (1731–1791) was a banian of the French East India Company at Chandernagar, and Nilmoni Tagore (d. 1793) was sheristadar or civil judge of the district court. In 1765 the two brothers fell into a property dispute, as a result of which Nilmoni left home to find a niche elsewhere. He built a modest house in Mechhuabazar in north Calcutta and added to it after Darpanarayan gave him his legitimate dues from the family property. This became Jorasanko House. The Tagore family was thus bifurcated into the Pathuriaghata branch under Darpanarayan and the Jorasanko branch under Nilmani. A third branch was later established at Chor Bagan by Sukhdev Tagore’s son Krishnachandra Tagore.
Darpanarayan was succeeded by his son Gopimohan Tagore (1760–1818), who continued in the service of the French and expanded the family’s landholdings. As a dutiful Brahman he consecrated a temple to the goddess Kali along with a dozen temples to Siva, where the poor and helpless were daily fed, but he was a personal friend of several European merchants and was among the few Hindus who invited foreigners into their homes. He befriended and supported the reformer Rammohan Roy, who settled in Calcutta in 1815. Gopimohan Tagore was educated in several languages, had a passion for music (holding performances in his house), and was a patron of learning. He was a large donor to the foundation of the Hindu College in Calcutta in 1817. Gopimohan’s brother Harimohan Tagore (d. 1838) was a highly placed diwan or administrator of the export warehouse. Reginald Heber, bishop of Calcutta in 1823, knew him and wrote appreciatively of his ‘philosophical studies’, his ‘austere devotion’ of bathing in the Ganges three times a day, and his imitation of ‘many European habits’ (Furrell, 113).
Gopimohan’s son Prasannakumar Tagore (1801–1868) was an esteemed pleader and a member of the governor-general’s legislative council. He, Dwarkanath Tagore, and Rammohan Roy together sued the government for its resumption of lak-i-raj (rent-free tenures) throughout Bengal. He was a supporter of Rammohan’s theistic movement. Prasannakumar left seven lakhs of rupees for religious and educational purposes, including the endowment of a law professorship at Calcutta University. He was as famous for his library of law books at Pathuriaghata House as his brother Harakumar Tagore (d. 1858) was for his rare Sanskrit manuscripts. Harakumar’s two sons, Jotindramohan Tagore (1831–1908) and Sourindramohan Tagore (1840–1914), were leading men in the world of theatre and music besides remaining powerful landholders. Jotindramohan was given the titles of raja bahadur, maharaja, and maharaja bahadur. Sourindramohan earned a doctorate in music from the University of Pennsylvania in 1875 and was the author of An Universal History of Music (1896).
At Jorasanko House Nilmoni left three sons, Ramlochan Tagore (d. 1807), Rammani Tagore (1759–1833), and Ramballav Tagore. Rammani’s son Dwarkanath Tagore (1794–1846) was adopted by Ramlochan, who was childless. Dwarkanath’s meteoric career took him from Bengal to Europe. He turned himself into an independent merchant at a time when wealthy Indians in the mercantile professions worked only as banians to European firms. In 1834 Dwarkanath Tagore chose to retire from his high post as diwan of the board of customs, salt, and opium and launched the firm of Carr, Tagore & Co. He was congratulated by the governor-general, Lord William Bentinck, for being the first Indian to start an Indo-British commercial enterprise. The firm supplied indigo and silk, and did business in coalmining, shipping, insurance, and banking. Dwarkanath Tagore added spectacularly to the family estates and had many successes on his tour of Europe in 1842, when he dined with Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, and had audiences with the pope in Rome and with King Louis-Philippe in Paris. In his own country he was Rammohan Roy’s dedicated partner in founding the monotheistic Brahmo Samaj, in abolishing the rite of suttee or widow burning, in sponsoring the Landholders’ Society for monitoring the government’s land legislation, and in championing freedom of the press. After his death The Times of London asserted that ‘his name will be proudly associated with all the noble institutions flourishing in Calcutta’ (The Times, 3 August 1846). He was popularly known as ‘Prince Dwarkanath’, both for his great generosity and for his high style of living. He entertained his European guests lavishly, and acquired a suburban house called Belgachia Villa for the purpose, in deference to his wife, who was religiously and socially orthodox. He also had a baithak-khana, or living room, built for himself in the courtyard of Jorasanko House. He was sensitive towards his family’s way of life. In his own personal faith he remained a Vaishnava Hindu throughout, but his way of worship was his own. He was remarkable in combining his love of his country and heritage with his radical thinking. His younger brother Ramanath (1800–1877) was his close ally in business and in social reform.
Dwarkanath’s eldest son, Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905), was the first Tagore to become an initiated brahmo, and led the Brahmo Samaj movement. With his uncompromising austerity he paid off his father’s debtors instantly, thus effecting a reversal in the economic status of the Jorasanko branch of the family. He was popularly called Maharshi, or great sage. Like his father he did not interrupt the family’s religious rituals but he dissociated himself from them after he became a brahmo. He married Sarada Devi (1826?–1875). Among their progeny Dwijendranath Tagore (1840–1926) was a freethinking philosopher whom Mahatma Gandhi revered; Satyendranath Tagore (1842–1923) was the first Indian member of the Indian Civil Service, who emancipated the women of his family from the purdah or veil; Jyotirindranath Tagore (1849–1925) was a painter and patriot who courted bankruptcy for swadeshi (the promotion of Indian economic self-sufficiency); his daughter Swarnakumari Tagore (1856–1932) was a writer; and Rabindranath was a world-renowned poet and educationist. Debendranath’s nephew Gunendranath Tagore (1848–1881) was the father of two great painters, Gaganendranath Tagore (1867–1938) and Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951), who led the new Bengal school of art from Jorasanko.
Although from the 1760s the Tagore family was divided into two branches they acted as one paribar or joint family in matters of property, marriage, ritual, and social status. In business ventures too there was collaboration. Dwarkanath and his cousin Ladlimohan Tagore (d. 1833) of Pathuriaghata together entered joint ventures with European merchants. At any given time the family placed itself under a dalapati or leader of the Tagore dal, or party, who was the senior member of the two branches. When there was dissent, as there was over supporting Rammohan Roy’s reforms, the cousins Dwarkanath and Prasannakumar chose to follow their own convictions and became young dalapatis themselves. The orthodox and the liberals coexisted in both households. As middlemen in a trading world the family willingly allied themselves with European merchants in banking, insurance, and plantations, believing that was good for their country and its future. They established the material foundations of a society which was at ease with high British culture, held their own solidly in British-Indian commerce, and grew in their position as cultural nationalists. With them there was an advent of new ideals, which at the same time were old.
Sources
The Times (3 Aug 1846) · A brief account of the Tagore family (1868); repr. (2004) · K. C. Mittra, Memoir of Dwarkanath Tagore (1870) · Prasunno Coomar Tagore, C.S.I.: reprinted from the Oriental miscellany of September 1880 (1880) · J. W. Furrell, The Tagore family: a memoir (1882) · Sort notes on the Tagore family (1895) · List of titles, distinctions and works of Raja Sir Sourindro Mohun Tagore (1895) · The autobiography of Maharshi Devendranath Tagore, trans. S. Devi and I. Devi (1909) · H. Banerjee, The house of the Tagores (1968) · A. Chakravarty, Maharshi Devendranath Thakur (Calcutta, 1971) · B. B. Kling, Partner in empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the age of enterprise in eastern India (1976) · S. N. Mukherjee, Calcutta: myths and history (1977) · D. Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the shaping of the modern Indian mind (1979) · K. Kripalani, Dwarkanath Tagore (1981) · C. Deb, ‘Jorasanko and the Thakur family’, Calcutta: the living city, ed. S. Chaudhuri, 1: The past (1990), 64–7 · Rabindranath Tagore: my life in my times, ed. U. Das Gupta (New Delhi, 2006)
Archives
Rabindra Bharati Museum and Archives, 6 Dwarkanath Tagore Lane, Kolkata, India · Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, India, Rabindra Bhavan Library and Archives.
Historian and Tagore biographer Uma Das Gupta was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Oxford. Her post-doctoral research has been on Rabindranath Tagore and the history of the educational institutions he founded at Santiniketan and Sriniketan, 1901–1941. She retired as Professor, Social Sciences Division, Indian Statistical Institute. She was Head of the United States Educational Foundation in India for the Eastern Region. Recently, she has become a National Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IAAS), Shimla, and a Delegate of Oxford University Press, India. Her publications include Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography; The Oxford India Tagore: Selected Essays on Education and Nationalism; A Difficult Friendship: Letters of Rabindranath Tagore and Edward Thompson, 1913–1940; Friendships of ‘largeness and freedom’: Andrews, Tagore, and Gandhi, An Epistolary Account, 1912–1940.
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