Dwarkanath Tagore and Felix Sebastien Feuillet de Conches. Cartoon executed by the latter

With the shares of quite a few Indians now quoted on the global stock exchange, the concept of the ?Indian MNC? is surely not the stuff of dreams. But long before L.. Mittal, the Chitpore Road lad, spanned the globe with his steel mills ?171 years ago, to be precise ? yet another Chitpore man set up the first Indian MNC ? Carr, Tagore and Co.

Dwarkanath Tagore, the ?merchant prince? of Bengal, was the first Indian to be received by Queen Victoria. In his two visits to Europe, and till his death in London in 1846, he was feted by the British and French nobility and writers such as Charles Dickens.

?Dwarky?, as his innumerable British friends called him, dreamt big. He tapped the coal seams of the Damodar Valley to form Bengal Coal Company. He set up Assam Tea Company. He grew indigo and poppy in his estates , and owned a fleet of the now notorious opium clippers that sailed from Calcutta to Canton. And he was in the vortex of Britain?s colonial opium economy that led to the first Opium War in 1840.

After his death his successors effaced from family record every document pertaining to the architect of the Tagore fortunes. Grandson Rabindranath, born 17 years after his death, didn?t mention him once. It is now that Chidananda Dasgupta, octogenarian film critic and a Brahmo like the Tagores, has written a film script on Dwarky, and filmmaker Mrinal Sen is looking through it. An international publishing house may also commission a thriller based on the family secret of a bygone era.