The Sundarbans of West Bengal features prominently in public memory as it makes headlines through images and reports of man-eating tiger, crocodile, alligator, honey collector, pilfering gangster, catastrophic cyclone like Aila and of late eco-tourism. The region also shares an incongruous colonial vestige of human settlement in the islands. This was made possible with British land reclamation policy that were mandated by mercenary revenue demands of the Bengal Presidency during the late 18th and early 19th century. Among these developments one fascinating story surrounds a charismatic Scotsman who is a luminary yet to be discovered in India’s Imperial history.
Public records shed some light on his early life. Sir Daniel Mackinnon Hamilton (1859-1939) became a patron after suffering from trauma and shock at the death of his child. In his philosophical and political writings, he discusses the economic uplifment of the peasantry indebted to moneylenders through co-operative societies. His utopian ideas of rural development for Gosaba was inspired by the Scottish co-operative movement in the late 18th century Britain. Daniel Hamilton was born in Glasgow, as a young man he went to Calcutta in 1880 to join the firm of Mackinnon and Mackenzie. This was a shipping line based in Glasgow. As Amitabh Ghosh writes in his novel The Hungry Tide, “young Daniel worked hard and sold many tickets; first class, second class, third class, steerage. For every ship that sailed from Calcutta there were hundreds of tickets to be sold and only one ticket agent. Soon Sir Daniel was head of the company and master of an immense fortune, one of the richest men in India… ”. Other men might have taken the money and spent it on palaces and luxury.
In 1903 Daniel Hamilton, a wealthy, influential member of Lord Curzon’s council bought 10,000 acres of land from the government which in subsequent years went up to 150,000 acres. These acres were a group of islands at the mouth of the Ganges, part of the Sundarban delta. Gosaba is one of the main deltaic islands in the region. He chose Gosaba as the platform to experiment his ideas of rural reconstruction by establishing school, co-operative bank, desalinization plant, rice mill, religious council where peasants would co-operate and work together without exploiting one anther and live freely. In his estate there were no untouchables, moneylenders, middleman who would manipulate the peasants. In 1918 he started a Consumers’ Cooperative Society. In 1919 he set up a central model farm to experiment with paddy, vegetables and fruits. A Cooperative Paddy Sales Society was established in 1923. In 1924 he established the Gosaba Central Cooperative Bank, and in 1927 the Jamini Rice Mill. In 1934 he started the Rural Reconstruction Institute. He even issued his own currency signed by him and with a promise to pay a dividend of 100% in land reclaimed, tanks excavated, housing built and so on. The economy was run as a small co-operative society in which work and reward were linked. Celebrities of Indian freedom struggle Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore admired his co-operative model. Tagore visited Gosaba in 1932 while Gandhi sent his personal secretary Madhav Desai to see the progress made by the co-operative movement in the coastal realm. In Gosaba Hamilton named a tank after Madhav Desai soon after his visit. Hamilton and Tagore exchanged letters at length on ideas of rural improvement. In a 1930 letter to Sir Daniel, Tagore wrote: ‘I have not much faith in politicians when the problem is vast needing a complete vision of the future of a country like India entangled in difficulties that are enormous. These specialists have the habit of isolating politics from the large context of national life and the psychology of the people and of the period. They put all their emphasis upon law and order, something which is external and superficial and ignore the vital needs of the spirit of the nation…’ (From Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. Krishna Dutta & Andrew Robinson: Cambridge University Press, p. 382).
During Hamilton’s lifetime the dream of rural reconstruction was fissured by the malpractices carried out by estate bhadrolok babus (Bengali gentleman). After the death of Hamilton in 1939, Sudanshu Bushan Majundar became the de-facto zamindar of the estate, and reintroduced the practices of money lending and land grabbing through benami transactions from tenants who were cultivating estate land as sharecroppers (bhag chasi). Resentment brewed and it gave opportunity to local peasant revolutionaries like Gojen Maitey and Sevak Das to spearhead the agitation through direct confrontation and petitions. The Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and father Mazerik’s disciples directed people’s anger towards the Hamilton estate officials. In retaliation to non-payment of taxes that were disproportionately imposed on farmers cultivating the state khas land. There was a number of litigation cases filed during the 1940’s by the estate manager against the tenants. The police on false charges jailed the aggrieved peasant cultivators and their ringleaders. These actions prompted more protest and resistance against the state Nayabs and the manager. After independence these litigations became persistent and the peasants started articulating their demand with the support of their local leaders who were also active members of the RSP.
Few estate officials did try to promote ideas of welfare through education and good medical health care facilities in Gosaba. None the less the estate bhadrolok officials had degraded their moral position in the lure for windfall gains from grabbing peasant land through benami transection. In the public litigation between father Mezrik and the Hamilton estate, the Baptist church sided with the manager of the estate. Mr Sudanshu Bushan Mazundar branded the peasant protest against the estate as a conspiracy of the Communist.
The degeneration developed from within as the people Hamilton entrusted to protect the poor sharecroppers from moneylenders and middlemen themselves indulged in activities that endangered the co-operative movement of Gosaba. The tenants were the lower caste rustics who had migrated to Sundarban from central India, Khulna, and Medenipur from the clutches of middleman (sahukars) and from the bane of flood. They were poor peasant, refugees and run away agricultural labourers. There were eight nayabs (village officials) who were responsible for revenue collection, protection of embankment and administration of villages under their control. Each held Kachari Bari or tax collection houses. These men were recruited from Uttar Pradesh and they tortured cultivators to extract rent at exorbitant rate. Soon after Hamiltons death in the 1940s, these local authorities became despotic rent seekers and appropriated the land of tenants and adivasis who failed to pay their rent to the estate.
The Gosaba subjects admired the principle’s set by Daniel Hamilton but were disillusioned by the misuse of power by the estate officials’. After the zamindari system was abolished in West Bengal in 1956, the ruling Congress party along with the RSP became active in inspiring villagers to file litigation against the Hamilton Charitable Trust. In Dayapur village, the Indian National Congress MLA, Renuka Choudhury, the then Relief and Rehabilitation minister, played an important role with village leaders Murari Gayen to establish Congress patronage. She was successful in forming the Renuka colony where many of the East Bengal refugees were resettled along with the grieving peasants who were suffering from the atrocities of the state de- facto henchman. When the Left led CPI (M) party came to power in mid 1970, they filed cases against the Trust in Calcutta High Court terming it as illegal body and against the law of the land.
The Kacharai Bari (zamindari house) presents a strong reminder of the colonial past and zamindari authority. Hamilton’s co-operative mission and his dream to protect peasants from money-lenders and blood seeking landlords through co-operative stake holder ship was slowly co-opted by the manager and his establishment who blamed the peasant struggle as militancy, one inspired by the Communist party. In Scotland Daniel Hamilton and his wife Annie Hamilton, then later his brother in law James Hamilton were unaware of the manipulation carried out by the Mazundar’s. When father Mazric case proceedings went on in Vashirhat Magistrate court he was recalled by the Archbishop of Calcutta from his service stating that politics is not for missionaries to profess in their spiritual life. The Baptist church colluded with the manager to protect the estate from the revolutionaries who were spreading communism among helpless peasant cultivators. The Mazundar’s in their bid to defeat the case filed by father Mazrik attached published articles on Gosaba by well wishers to prove the sanguine state of affairs in the Zamindari, free of middle man and money landers. But in practice the manager and his kin members became the de-facto exploiters of the peasantry.
There is no doubt that Sir Daniel loved his land and cared passionately for Gosaba. He had a vision that by pouring money into well thought out schemes he could create a kind of ideal for rural development that would set the benchmark for India. Nonetheless his vision was squired and finally shattered by the estates self interested Bhadrolok gentry. They hardly bothered to live in Gosaba post 1960, and controlled the estate as zamindars settled in Kolkata leading to the dissolution of Hamilton’s dream. A selfless doctor Gopinath Barman who became its trustee later tried his best to revived Hamilton’s legacy in 1970s. He died with an unhappy heart few years ago. The Hamilton Charitable Trust became a public trust after a long litigation with the West Bengal government in the late 1990’s. A board of trustees headed by the Deputy Commissioner of South 24 Parganas today manages the Hamilton Public Trust. The condition of the medical dispensary, Hamilton and Bacon Bungalow where Rabindranath Tagore once resided as a state guest and Daniel Hamilton himself spent considerable time looking after his estate people is today left in a pitiable condition. His legacy and contribution to Gosaba is now gathering dust in the damp and leaky chambers of the Hamilton Bungalow in Gosaba. The legend of this great man shall not be left untold. Every year on 25th December people of Gosaba recall him by celebrating his birth and death anniversary.
One-rupee note introduced by Sir Daniel Mackinnon Hamilton in his zamindari, Gosaba, South 24 Pargana, Sundarban, 1936