When Dwarakanath Tagore, the entrepreneur hailed as India's first 'bourgeois', died on 1 August 1846, Jorasanko found itself rattled by a series of upheavals. In each of these episodes, the chief player was his son-and Rabindranath Tagore's father-Debendranath Tagore. He was a social reformer who founded the Brahmo Dharma. Yet, despite his deeply spiritual nature, he dabbled in crass materialistic matters. Drawing upon Debendranath's opposing sentiments, Tagores Before Tagore narrates a historical period crucial to the making of indigenous modernity.
Scripted at the insistence of the famed filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh, this screenplay, based on true events, chronicles the tumultuous happenings that shook Jorasanko between September 1846 and June 1860, following Dwarakanath's sudden death. Tales of bankruptcy, litigations, deceit, and domestic squabbles abound, and through these tales emerges a rich cultural history of nineteenth-century Bengal.
Sibaji Bandyopadhyay was professor of cultural studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, and professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He writes poetry, plays, stories, novels, and film scripts in Bengali, and essays in Bengali and "English. He has been awarded the Buddhadeva Bose Memorial Award (2016), the Vidyasagar Memorial Award (2010), and the Sisir Kumar Das Memorial Award (2010).
Maharghya Chakraborty is pursuing his doctoral degree at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, India. He is an avid cinephile, aspiring to be a writer. He has translated Taslima Nasreen's Nirbasan into English (Exile, 2016)..
We lived in the same city; we studied in the same university; we shared the same social milieu; we were shaped by the same cultural habitus. Yet, Rituparno Ghosh and I met for the first time just ten months before his sudden demise. Not surprisingly, it did not take us long to realize that although we had not known each other personally, deep down, the ground conducive to our intellectual rapport and emotional bonding had always been there.
I shall never forget the day we first met. That happened at my residence on Monday, 6 August 2012. Frankly, while waiting for him, I was getting increasingly frantic. For, what can be more harrowing than entertaining an iconic figure-and Rituparno Ghosh was certainly an icon in the sphere of Bengali cinema. There was another reason for my escalating unease. On Saturday, 4 August 2012, I had received a phone call. Possibly owing to a network problem the words that reached my ears were pretty indistinct. Despite the disturbances I was able to gather that the speaker was seeking an audience with me and he was Rituparno Ghosh. Puzzled by the courteous request purportedly made by the prominent actor-director, a gnawing suspicion had started to eat me up: was it a crank call, a prank perhaps, pulled on me by some disgruntled student?
But, to my amazement, Rituparno appeared in flesh and blood at the threshold of my flat exactly at the appointed hour on 6 August 2012.
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