Absentee Account Pattern

Description

The Wentworths are not the first. They are the fifth.

Laid side by side, the revenue records show four other private European accounts drawn into the godown syndicate over twenty-three years, and every one of them has the same shape:

1. An absentee family in England with an old Indian interest and a single unsupervised factor.
2. A failing original holding, honestly failing, and a warm invitation from a partner of the consortium.
3. The capital subscribed into the syndicate. Illiquid from the moment it enters.
4. Remittances thin over two or three years, then stop.
5. Five to seven years later the account is written off entirely, and the family in England is not heard from again.

The subscription list carries their names still. Fanshawe. Middlemass. Ord. Pettiward. Respectable English families paying an annual charitable subscription to a temple at Baranagar that not one of them has ever heard of.

What It Reveals

• The Wentworth situation was not misfortune and was not Pargeter’s mistake. It is a procedure, and it has been running since 1791.
• The European names are the point. A subscription list with baronets on it is a list no Company officer will ever audit. The temple’s funding is laundered through the respectability of the families it is consuming.
• Somebody selects the accounts. Each of the five was proposed to the partners by the syndicate’s registrar, Ramkanta Sett, in his own hand, in his own ledger.
• And three of those four families sent someone out to Calcutta to ask questions.