Daniel Hamilton (businessman)

[1] His involvement with Gosaba was motivated by his desire to improve the living conditions of the poverty stricken people of British India.

He was a contemporary and close associate of the Nobel Laureate poet, Rabindranath Tagore, with whom he exchanged several letters on the need for village reconstruction and cooperative societies.

[3] As his Gosaba project neared completion in the 1930s, Hamilton invited both Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi to visit it.

[3] Gandhi never did visit, but in 1935, just as he was getting deeply involved in his own quite different experiment in village revitalization, he sent his secretary, Mahadev Desai, in his place.

Over the previous 30 years Gosaba had gone from easily flooded jungle to a prosperous estate of 10,000 people in twenty-five villages, linked by a network of cooperative societies, dispensaries and schools.

But Gosaba only pointed “toward” an ideal estate, and Desai ends his series with several suggested improvements including lower rates of rent.