In 1901, a child was born in Bejgaon, a tiny village in Bangladesh. Despite his father having 45 bighas of land alongside the Padma river, he couldn’t take his privilege for granted. In 1914, Sachindranath Chattopadhyay (later Chatterjee) first arrived in Kolkata with his father, Harindranath, a paralegal, in search of a better future. Little did he know then, that he would go on to become one of the city’s biggest philanthropists.
An entrepreneur is born
The family moved to a small house in Dhakuria, and Sachindranath was admitted to Mitra Institution in Bhawanipur. From the start, he exhibited great academic strength, going on to complete his BA with distinction from Surendranath College, which was then known as Ripon College. Although he wanted to study more, his dreams were dashed when he contracted the deadly black fever in 1922.
“His survival was nothing short of a miracle, as Dr. Upendranath Brahmachari discovered the cure in the same year,” says his son, Tarun Chatterjee, speaking to My Kolkata. “Owing to the family’s financial condition, he couldn’t return to his studies. As the eldest son, he was compelled to shoulder the responsibility of running the house.”
With almost a dozen people to feed in the house, Sachindranath decided that no job was too small to put food on the table. Taking inspiration from his guru, Prafulla Chandra Ray, he decided to become an entrepreneur and create jobs. “My father started by selling tea in passenger trains. He named the tea bags, Arian, a name that would become the face of many of the companies he would go on to open,” remembers Tarun.
Bought in 1937, the ground floor of Sachindranath’s Lake Avenue home, where his son Tarun continues to reside, was used by Netaji Bose as an office for Forward Bloc
By the time he was 22, he had started working as an agent at Hindustan Insurance (the predecessor of LIC), which is where he accumulated a great deal of wealth. In less than a decade, he started a share dealing company, Bengal Share Dealers Syndicate, under the Calcutta Stock Exchange. “By the 1930s, he was operating on a different level with both his companies. Things came full circle, when the foundation stone for the office was laid by Prafulla Chandra Ray himself. The house on Lake Avenue that we live in today, was bought by my father with just a day’s earnings in 1937! Despite the share market being dominated by Gujaratis and Marwaris, he became its president too!” Tarun beams. This prosperity also led Sachindranath to start his bari’r Durga Puja in 1939, which celebrated its 85th year last month.
Thinking bigger
As the business expanded, so did his vision. In the 1940s Arian expanded to mica mines, sericulture and commercial bee cultivation. Not long after, he bought two tea gardens in Darjeeling and three in Agartala. He also held favour with several eminent personalities. “Uday Shankar not only stayed in his Ranchi house, but also named it Kalpana after his famous dance-drama,” says Tarun.
His vision always lay beyond money, as he kept trying to create change with his position. Around the same time, Sachindranath gave the ground floor of his Lake Avenue home to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, to use as the office for Forward Bloc. “It was a very volatile time, and I even remember this one instance of someone throwing a bomb into the building while we were sleeping.” The spot is now used as a studio by his great-grandson, musician Sambit Chatterjee.
‘Byabasayir Bilaat Bhraman’ was initially published in the Bengali magazine ‘Uttara’, and comprised Sachindranath’s journals from his life in England, where studied how the British built businesses
With World War II fast approaching, he also anticipated a shortage in the supply of Horlicks, which would have been detrimental to the nutrition of children. Bengal couldn’t have survived another famine. Tarun says, “Even before the war began, he bought four bighas of land in Dum Dum and set up a factory for a Horlicks substitute, naming it Sanavita. Not only did it ensure that children from Bengal weren’t deprived of nutrition, but also provided 500 people with a job during this global crisis.”
Not one to limit his perspectives, Sachindranath boarded a ship in 1946 and travelled to England, journaling his experiences for the Bengali magazine, Uttara. “He wanted to understand how the British manufactured goods and ran businesses,” Tarun smiles. His observations of Britain were collected and published in the book Byabasayir Bilaat Bhraman.
The spirit of giving back
In the 1940s, Sachindranath established several schools in South Kolkata including Binodini Girls’ High School
Another recurring passion was to give back to those from his motherland. “He had a definite fondness for people coming from Bangladesh. He bought 38 bighas of land in Sahapur, near New Alipore, where he sold a lot of land to people from East Bengal at extremely cheap rates, and sometimes even gave it away so that refugees could build their first homes. Many still know the area as Chatterjee Colony,” says Tarun.
Unlike most people who amassed great wealth, his focus wasn’t on hoarding it. “He started a school at our Dhakuria home, for the girls of the family. Soon, girls from the entire locality started joining in. The gathering became so large that he bought a large plot of land and set up a school there,” Tarun explains. That is how Binodini Girls’ High School started in 1938, named after Sachindranath’s mother who had died very young. To this day, it remains one of the most prominent girls’ schools in South Kolkata, producing stalwarts like musician Sandhya Mukherjee.
Dhakuria Ram Chandra High School (in picture), Rajendranath Vidyabhavan and Sahapur Harendranath Vidyapith are among the other schools established by Sachindranath
However, Sachindranath wasn’t done. Setting up one school drew his attention to a far larger problem. “He realised that there were barely any schools in the locality. As someone who had always been a bright student but couldn’t continue his own education, he decided to remedy this,” Tarun adds.
In the 1940s, he built four schools, Rajendranath Vidyabhavan, Sahapur Harendranath Vidyapith, Dhakuria Ram Chandra High School, and Sahapur Sabitri Balika Vidyalaya, named after his uncle, father, grandfather and wife respectively. All three continue to run today. “He was a huge champion of learning, especially women’s education. The objective behind these schools was to make learning accessible to common people. For this reason, he merely set up the institutes and handed them over to competent educators to run, without holding any stake in them,” explains Tarun. Education was an important motif in his businesses too, as he set up schools in all three of his Agartala tea gardens.
Pictures of Sachindranath and his wife, Sabitri, at the Chatterjee home
While Sachindranath’s businesses declined over time, his spirit never wavered, and he was known to frequent his factories well into his seventies. He passed away in 1990, months before his 90th birthday. His book lay in the library of his Lake Avenue house for years, with time fading both its pages and his story. Of the 45 bighas of land that he had inherited in Bangladesh, 30 were enveloped by the river Padma. A few years ago, Tarun chanced upon the book, and realised that his father’s legacy deserved to be eternalised. “We somehow managed to get a fresh edition printed, because people deserve to know the visionary that he was.”
