A narrow lonely lane seemingly leading nowhere, just off the G.T. Road at Konnagar in Hooghly. The address would tell you that its 2, Mirpara Lane. Does it ring a bell? Well, just walk on…two ancient boundary walls on either side, and then a row of ramshackle dwellings, a tiny stall selling sundry articles…and then a closed gate from which peeps creepers with abundant blue flowers, the Aparajita. Once the gate opens, you’re in for a surprise. A winding cobbled way would take you through a huge garden of century-old trees, interspersed with newly planted seasonal flowers, till you reach a single-storied colonial structure freshly refurbished with white paint. A small flight of stairs would take you inside to a large hall and some adjoining smaller rooms. An impromptu exhibition in the hall would tell you that it is the house described by the Father of the Master Artist, Abanindranath Tagore, in his memoir ‘Jorasankor Dhare’, which he had come to visit with his family when he was seven or eight years old. It was their refuge from the heat of Calcutta during the sweltering summer months. A small adjoining room facing the ancient jackfruit tree, now being held up with iron props, happened to be his bedroom. Through the wooden blinded windows, in the darkness of the night, amidst the song of crickets and the sound of the wind gushing in from the Ganga, little Aban used to watch the dance of the fireflies and imagine them to be dancing in a wedding. He reminisced about his idyllic childhood in his memoir Jorasankor Dhare:
It was a full moon night, yet there was darkness beneath the shadow of the jackfruit tree. Chatujjye Moshai had said in the morning that tonight there would be a wedding party of the squirrels under the tree. I felt it was truly so-tiny flaming torches brought forth their bridal party, a lot of fanfare and merry making-everything in my imagination. I had forgotten that these were actually fireflies flying around the tree.
Little Aban had drawn his first picture, a hut, while sitting under the jackfruit tree. Thus started the journey of one of the most gifted artistes in the world. His most famous paintings-The Passing of Shah Jahan (1900), Buddha and Sujata (1901), Ritu Samhara of Kalidasa (1904), Bharat Mata (1905), Ganesh Janani (1908), the Arabian Nights Series (1930s), Omar Khaiyyam Series (1906-08) etc., certainly had their precursor in this small town by the Ganga. So was also his literary imagination fired by his quaint childhood surroundings when he later wrote Rajkahini, Khirer Putul, Buro Angla, Nalok, mainly for children. The house can lay claim to being the inspiration behind the foundation of the Bengal School Of Art and the development of modern Indian painting and Contextual Modernism through the hands of the principal artist and creator of the Indian School of Oriental Art.
Abanindranath was born on 7 August, 1871, at Jorasanko in Calcutta to Gunendranath Tagore and Saudamini. As a direct descendent of Prince Dwarkanath, he was a nephew of Rabindranath Tagore and a favourite one at that. He spent a considerable portion of his life in Santiniketan, and his famous student Nandalal Bose even served as the Principal of Kala Bhavana from its inception in 1919. Abanindranath himself, served as the Chancellor of Viswa Bharati, after Tagore’s death, from 1941 to 1945. Through Rabindranath, Abanindranath was acquainted with artistes of international repute like Okakura from Japan and William Rothenstein, Principal at the Royal College of Art in London from 1920 to 1935. He maintained a deep friendship with Rothenstein throughout his life, bonded by their common affection for Rabindranath Tagore.
Abanindranath’s childhood memories in the Bagan Bari at Konnagar never failed to evoke nostalgia in him, though he actually stayed there only for a summer’s lease. The property itself was leased to the extended Tagore family by the zamindar of nearby Uttarpara, Joykrishna Mukherjee, with the leaseholder being Joggesh Prakash Gangopadhyay, the husband of Abanindranath’s aunt, Kadambini. Other Tagore family members were visitors to this house sometimes. Just across the river was the Panihati Bagan Bari, which also the Tagores often visited. Crossing the river amounted to a ritual of sorts and it has been lovingly described by Abanindranath in his memoir:
The Konnagar house was on the western banks of the Ganga. On the opposite banks lay the garden-house of Panihati-Jyoti Kakamoshai (Jyotirindranath Tagore) was in residence then. He and my father used signals to communicate-each of them fired a shot, the sound of which reverberated across the river. In order to make me fearless, my father used to keep the gun on my little shoulders and fire. An answer soon came from the opposite banks. My father’s efforts to make me fearless never materialized…it was not to be.
Gunendranath passed away when Abanindranath was only ten years old, at the age of thirty-four at his Bagan Bari in Champdani near Serampore and neither Abanindranath nor his family ever went back again either to Champdani or Konnagar, because his mother developed a paranoia of anything related to a Bagan Bari. The last Tagore family member to have occasionally visited the house in the 1930s was Jamini Prakash Gangopadhyay, a nephew and disciple of Abanindranath and a prominent artist at the beginning of the twentieth century in his own right. Throughout the years the Konnagar house changed hands and finally landed up with a promoter for whom building apartments on twelve bighas of prime land was much more lucrative than maintaining a dilapidated ‘heritage’ building, overgrown with weeds. It was declared as a heritage site at the behest of the ex-Chairman of the West Bengal Heritage Commission, Dr. Pratap Chandra Chandra on 28 May, 2007. The house was identified quite accidentally by Dr. Chandra on a visit to Konnagar on 1 April, 2007, where he was accompanied by Professor Rathin Chakraborty and Mohammad Rafique. From 2010 onwards, the Konnagar Municipality, under the able Chairmanship of Sri Bappaditya Chatterjee, have left no stone unturned to save this precious slice of the cultural history of Bengal. They retrieved the property back finally on 5 March, 2019. Since then the house, the garden and the river-ghat have undergone a long and tedious restoration process and stands open today for visitors, for a peep into a bygone era. Only as recently as 2022, the house was the subject of the first Virtual Museum on a single building in India, in a project led by the University of Liverpool, partnered by ARCHIAM, the Victoria Memorial Hall (Kolkata), the Konnagar Municipality and INTACH Hooghly.
To the eternal sorrow of Abanindranath in his later years, his birthday happened to be on ‘Baishey Shravan’ (22 Shravan), the day his beloved ‘Robi Ka’ had passed away. He spent sleepless nights in an adjacent wing of the house at Jorasanko, as Rabindranath lay dying. The news finally reached him in the afternoon of 7 August, 1941. As the whole of Calcutta burst into a fit of frenzy, the large house trembled at the onslaught of marauders, Abanindranath took up his brush for his very last painting. He kept on painting through blinding tears, of his Robi Ka finally bidding adieu to the gates of Jorasanko on the shoulders of countless unknown men, through the streets of Calcutta, towards his eternal rest in the lap of immortality. He never painted again…he never felt the need to.