As the silent funeral procession slowly wound its way through the streets of London on 5 August, 1846, a storm of great violence continued to rage and the men who followed the cortege did it only out of love or gratitude for the man who was about to be buried. A memoir recorded the event as follows:
The funeral was attended his son and nephew and the following gentlemen-Sir Edward Ryan, Major Henderson, General Ventura, Dr. H.H. Goodeve, Dr. Raleigh, Mr. William Prinsep, Mr. R. Roberts, Mr. Plowden, Mohun Lall, and the medical students who were being educated in England at his expense. The funeral was also attended by four Royal Carriages, and the equipages of many of the nobility.
[Kissory Chand Mittra]
The procession wound its way to an unconsecrated portion of the cemetery at Kensal Green. A brick mausoleum put forth hurriedly had been made ready to accept the corpse. The burial went forth with minimum fuss, as torrential rain and thunderstorm continued unabated. It was only a simple act of lowering down of the coffin amidst those present. The clergyman Reverend Mr. Twigger did not utter a prayer, for the deceased was not a Christian. For his relatives back home in Calcutta, his heart had been extracted, to be sent for the last rites according to his religious beliefs. The coffin was a prized one, covered with silk and velvet. On the lid of the coffin there were two silver plates, one bearing the style and title of the deceased in the vernacular language and on the other the translation of the same in English:
BABOO DWARKANATH TAGORE, ZEMINDAR, DIED, 1st AUGUST 1846, AGED 51 YEARS
Prince Dwarkanath Tagore had passed away at St. George’s Hotel in London on 1 August, 1846, at about 6.15 p.m. London at that moment seemed to be possessed by a mad demonic storm. It had started around 3.00 p.m. and stopped suddenly about fifteen minutes after he had been dead, only to be reinforced at his funeral. The funeral itself was a matter of considerable anxiety for his friends. Major Henderson, the executor of his Will, could not decide about the disposal of the remains of a ‘Hindoo gentleman whose ancestors had been burnt’. His friend Ram Mohan Roy had been buried at Bristol in 1833, but it was believed that the Raja had been more of a Unitarian than a Hindu. Dwarkanath’s youngest son Nagendranath and his nephew Nabin Chandra were both quite young and they had to agree to the exigencies of the situation. It was a far cry from the send-off that his grandson Rabindranath was to receive nearly a century later in 1941, with a large city and overpowering crowds in a frenzied state of lunacy.

Dwarkanath remains largely a forgotten legend. But to give the man his due, he was the first celebrity in the house of the Tagores of Jorasanko. He was an entrepreneur and reformist and a pioneer of the Bengal Renaissance. While the British were consolidating their colonial empire, Dwarkanath was dealing in salt, opium, coal, banking, shipping, insurance, in partnership with them. He founded the Union Bank in Calcutta in 1829. The Carr Tagore Company, founded in 1834 was the first company of equal partnership with the British and the first ever managing agency system in India. It managed huge estates spreading across modern Orissa and Bangladesh. In 1832, Dwarkanath purchased the first Indian coal mine at Raniganj, which later became the Bengal Coal Company. He enthusiastically supported the setting up of Calcutta Medical College in 1835 and even provided scholarships for students to pursue medicine in England. For all his prosperity though, Dwarkanath remained a desolate figure, despised at home by his wife Digambari for his dissolute lifestyle, his beef eating and alcohol parties at the ‘baar mahal’ for the English, where ‘khansamas’ cooked and served them. He supposedly continued to be in awe of his valiant wife who had banished him from the ‘andar mahal’ and even ordered the face of Goddess Durga to be modelled on her exquisite features, a practice which continued through the succeeding generations of the Hindu branch of the family.

Debendranath received the news of his father’s demise about one and a half months later, while on a house-boat on the Ganga with his wife Sarada and three sons Dwijendra, Satyendra and Hemendra. Whether he was truly sad or relieved at the prospect of having being spared the burden of sending a lakh of rupees every month to his father, is a matter of debate. However, he returned home and consigned his father’s effigy to flames. But as a Brahmo, he refused to partake in a Hindu sradh ceremony. It was performed by his younger brother Girindranath. Debendranath agreed to a huge ‘daan’ to Brahmins-gold and silver utensils, expensive Kashmiri shawls, a sum of rupees fifty to every Brahmin present, as reported by the newspaper Bengal Harkara on 17 0ct, 1846. After that, Debendranath took every possible measure to erase his father’s memory from the general psyche and certainly from within the family.

The mausoleum at Kensal Green remained shrouded in obscurity for well over a century. When Krishna Kripalani, the author and parliamentarian and also the husband of Nandita (grand-daughter of Rabindranath), went for a visit in 1976, he had to search high and low before he came across a cursory stone engraving on a mausoleum overgrown with weeds – D. TAGORE, CALCUTTA, 1846. As he placed flowers at the foot of the grave, he noticed a number. He copied the number and went to the Registry Office of the cemetery asking how much was to be paid to keep the grave clean. He was informed it was five pounds forty pence a year. Kripalani deposited it and subsequently produced the money receipt to the Indian High Commission, who took up the matter and future responsibility. So much for the man who regularly paid for the upkeep of the grave of his dearest friend Raja Ram Mohan, which people continue to visit in considerable numbers. The Prince meanwhile rests in relative obscurity, marginalized at the edge of a shifting public memory.