Konnagar Baganbari
Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951)
About this Heritage Place:This place is located at 2, Mirapara Lane, PS – Konnagar, Dist. – Hooghly.
This place was declared as a Heritage Place on 28th May, 2007 by West Bengal Heritage Commission. This house is related with the history of Tagore Family.
This Garden House belongs to the Father of Master Artist “Sri Abanindranath Tagore”. In his childhood he used to live to his father’s garden house near Kolkata at Konnagar was known to him as Bagan Bari . Most of his good memories was related to this place near the river Ganga . The place was surrounded by animals: dogs, horses, deer, pet monkeys.73 The memory is of an upper-class idyll: servants are funny or frightening, rivers and ponds exist for swimming and boating, and days are interspersed with carriage rides. He remembers shooting with his father, who would rest the barrel of his gun on his son's shoulder as he fired "to make me brave." He also remembers more plebian rural pleasures: watching bahurupi performers, seeing the arati at the temple at dusk and hearing the conch-shells.
Mothers and aunts are present as amusing and anxious onlookers when the servants toss him into the pond to teach him to swim. The historical book “Jorashakor Dhare” published by Visva Bharati written by Abanindranath Tagore, where we found that he learned to draw the picture of hut very first time in his life.
So we think that the legend master artist was inspired about the painting in his childhood from this “Bagan Bari”.
The rural cocoon, however, is broken almost as soon as it is imagined. Into Abanindranath's childhood idyll comes "a terrible night which destroyed our lives in an instant" and permanently severed his connection to the garden-house: the death of his father. Displaced from one juvenile geography into another, Abanindranath moves to the city and urban schools. He has no idea what became of the animals at the garden house, and harbors a guilty sense of having abandoned them. He writes: "It is as if a curtain descended between that life and the life that came after, and remained in place for a long time." He notes, also, that his mother would become panic-stricken at any mention of that old life. He has deleted this last observation in his memoirs, but it is still legible in the manuscript. This intimate geography of the rural home, with its animals, intact family, utopic Bengaliness and financial security is in some ways like Kipling's boyhood, disrupted and compulsively recreated76 precisely because certain kinds imagination are possible in fiction that, articulated as memory, would rupture the fabric of a colonial reality
We found that the greatest poet Rabindranath Tagore had the connection with this Bagan Bari. He used to visit there with his family to spend some time to enjoy the scenic beauty of nature. He had taken the idea of some stories from this Bagan Bari , which was mentioned in his biography.