For the past nine winters that I have been with this paper, Reshmi Dasgupta has been inviting the office over for a lavish Bengali spread cooked to perfection by a family chef from Kolkata. Last Friday she served us delicacies made of mutton, rohu, aubergine and cauliflowers, before signing off with mishti doi and sandesh.
I’d die for the hilsa she served last winter. Given Reshmi’s penchant for the fine things of life, it’s time she opened a Bangla fine-dining restaurant in Delhi. If idli-dosa and tangri kebabs can make it to the top of the charts, there’s no reason why the best of bhadralok kitchen can’t be chartbusters either. Instead, Reshmi, a self-styled epicure, sniffs around other people's pots and pans, cooking complex recipes, week after week, on, among other things, Romanian offal. In the process, she triggers the digestive disorder syndrome in me.
But then, with Reshmi, as with most other Bongs, you can hardly talk business. She’s been married into a Kolkata family that tried to make private capital out of a public tragedy that came with Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal exactly a hundred years ago, and rode the swadeshi bandwagon to set up Calcutta Chemicals. CC, for the uninitiated, was among the country’s first toiletries manufacturers that once made Margo soap and Lavender Dew. Today, Reshmi shies away from telling us what happened to that family business. Actually, if you dig into history, the Bongs, at various points in time, have tried their hands at business, only to get mud on their face. The 1905 partition of Bengal itself triggered a huge enthusiasm among the bhadraloks to set up indigenous factories that took on the might of the mercantile raj. Dwijendra Tripathi’s recently published Oxford History of Indian Business captures the spirit of Bengali enterprise in some measure, though exhaustive research on bhadralok business is yet to be undertaken. The call of swadeshi saw the emergence of a number of Bengali enterprises, among them, the Banga Luxmi Cotton Mills and the Mohini Mills. Both took on the monopoly of British agency house Kettlewell Buller & Co in cotton manufacturing in Bengal pointing to the revival of sorts of the entrepreneurial spirit among Bengalis. But the more adventurous among the Bengali entrepreneurs were not attracted by traditional industries like cotton. So their entrepreneurial zeal took them to frontier technologies of the time involving advanced scientific knowledge and sophisticated manufacturing processes. Among the “new age” companies that came up around Kolkata were Bengal Chemicals and Pharmaceutical Co, Calcutta Chemicals, Bengal Lamps and Calcutta Pottery Works.
What happened to them? Nobody quite knows. But I’ll attempt to answer that later. Back to the history of Bengali entrepreneurship goes back to the days of Company Raj. In the 1820s Dwarkanath Tagore emerged as the most solvent and credible Indian in Kolkata’s business fraternity. In 1834, he set up Carr, Tagore & Co, as senior partner. The company went on to become one of the most powerful agency houses of the time and was, in fact, the first biracial enterprise in India. Tagore was also one of the promoters of the Commercial Bank promoted by Mackintosh & Co. When in 1829, Commercial Bank was wound up and the Union Bank set up, he held substantial shares in the new bank and got his younger brother Ramanath elected as its treasurer.
Over the next decade, Tagore acquired substantial stakes in coal mining, steamship navigation, a floating bridge company, insurance, warehousing, railways and tea. For Carr, Tagore & Co, export trade was the mainstay of the business. They exported indigo, sugar, silk, silk piece goods, saltpetre, hides, rice, timber and rum to Europe. Tagore even posted his correspondent in London to sell his merchandise. This was emulated by G D Birla almost 100 years later when he took to exporting jute to England. Tagore’s partnership firm operated on the principle of backward integration, a concept successfully emulated by Dhirubhai Ambani almost 150 years later. It helped to control the production and processing of commodities. But then, two years after Tagore’s death in 1845, his business went bust. What went wrong? That’s the subject of research. For Tagore, like most later Bengali entrepreneurs, and unlike their later-day Marwari counterparts, both capital and raw material for their businesses flowed out of the land. They were big zamindars who used their land to produce raw materials and generate investible surpluses out of rental incomes. Now if you read the history of the Bengal zamindars, there’s enough evidence to suggest that the landlords went bust throwing lavish lunches and dinners. At the turn of the 20th century, some of Kolkata’s bhadraloks even hosted mega dinners at mock weddings of their cats and dogs. Reshmi Dasgupta had better watch out. Better still, it’s time she started a restaurant.
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