The local story
Quinine, a chemist's house and Tagore's last summers
Mungpoo was shaped by a fever. Malaria killed and disabled huge numbers of people in British India, and the only effective remedy was quinine, extracted from the bark of the South American cinchona tree. In 1864 the government began planting cinchona on these warm, wet slopes above the Teesta valley, the first such plantation in India. A quinine factory followed, and Mungpoo grew into a company village of plantation workers, chemists and managers. The plantation still runs today under the West Bengal Directorate of Cinchona and Other Medicinal Plants.
In the late 1930s the chemist in charge at the factory was Dr Manmohan Sen, whose wife, Maitreyi Devi, was a writer who had known Rabindranath Tagore since childhood. At her invitation the ageing poet came to stay: from 21 May 1938 into June; again from 14 May to 17 June 1939; from 12 September to early November 1939; and from 21 April 1940, when his 79th birthday was celebrated in Mungpoo. He wrote, painted and talked late into the evenings in the bungalow.
Maitreyi Devi later wrote about those stays in Mongpute Rabindranath, published in English as Tagore by the Fireside. She is also remembered for Na Hanyate (1974), her answer to Mircea Eliade's novel Bengal Nights. The house where Tagore stayed is now Rabindra Bhavan, a small museum of his furniture, photographs, paintings and letters, and every year around 25 Baishakh, in early May, Mungpoo marks his birth anniversary. Few hill villages hold so much of one writer's life in so few rooms.
