Despite the injustice that had driven Neelmoni away from his ancestral home, his successors did not harbour any resentment or bitter feelings against their cousins from Pathuriaghata. Both families flourished, though not equally. The Jorasanko branch towered over the other and, during the lifetime of Neelmoni’s grandson Dwarkanath, rose to dizzying heights.
Dwarkanath’s mother Menaka and her sister Aloka were married to two sons of Neelmoni Thakur. It is said that on Dwarkanath’s birth, his mother Menaka, suffering from puerperal fever and knowing that death was imminent, placed the newborn in her sister’s arms with the words, ‘Take care of him, Didi.’ Aloka, cursed with the fate of stillbirths, brought the child up as her own and, after a few years, he was legally adopted by her husband, his uncle Ramlochan.
Dwarkanath’s drive and dynamism and his capacity for hard work were visible from childhood. At eighteen he took charge of the family estates in Kushthia, Birahimpur and Cuttack, but what he inherited failed to satisfy him. He wanted more. Much more. And he set out to get it with purpose and determination. Land brings respectability, he reasoned, but trade – the Goddess Lakshmi. And he set himself to wooing her. His business interests expanded, by degrees, spreading over a variety of fields – banking, insurance, silk, indigo, shipping and coal. Whatever he touched turned to gold. His ancestors had been stevedores. He became a shipping magnate and the first Indian to launch a company – the Carr, Tagore and Company – in equal partnership with an Englishman. Dwarkanath’s bank, the Union Bank, was also the first of its kind in India.
At the age of fifteen, Dwarkanath was married to Digambari, the five-year-old daughter of Ramtanu Chowdhuri of Narendrapur. Nurtured within the high walls of the mansion of Jorasanko, like a delicate hothouse flower, she grew in loveliness by the day till, at the age of thirteen, her beauty had attained legendary status. People spoke of her as an incarnation of Goddess Lakshmi and the family potters were instructed to use her face as a model for the Durga and Jagatdhatri idols they made each year. But her beauty went deeper than her face and form. Deeply religious, she threw herself wholeheartedly into the faith of her husband’s people and rigidly upheld their dharma. She rose at dawn and spent several hours of the day in jap and prayer despite being the mother of many children whose rearing and nurturing she took as an important duty.
The Tagores were Vaishnavs, disciples of the Goswamis of Khardaha, and followed numerous rules with respect to food and worship. Meat, alcoholic beverages, onion and garlic were strictly forbidden. Dwarkanath obeyed these regulations faithfully and spent a good part of the morning in the puja room in the service of Lakshmi and Narayan – the two idols his grandfather had brought with him from Pathuriaghata. But with increasing fame and wealth and under the influence of his friend, guide and mentor, Raja Rammohun Roy, he began ushering in certain changes in his lifestyle. But that was as far as he would go. Though he made lavish contributions to Rammohun’s Brahmo Sabha, which preached a doctrine of monotheism, he did not follow it. He was a Hindu and would not admit the concept of one omniscient presence pervading the Universe.
First published in India in 2013 by
HarperCollins Publishers India
Copyright © Aruna Chakravarti 2013
ISBN: 978-93-5029-087-3
Epub Edition © February 2013 ISBN: 9789350299838
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Aruna Chakravarti asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction and all characters and incidents described in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Cover design: Shuka Jain
Cover drawing: Head Study by Rabindranath Tagore, National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi
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