• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Tagore Nobel Prize Replicas Handed Over to Indian University

Posted on: Sunday, 8 May 2005, 09:00 CDT

Tagore Nobel Prize replicas handed over to Indian university

NEW DELHI, May 7 (Xinhua) -- The Swedish Academy on Saturday handed over two replicas of Rabindranath Tagore's Nobel Prize medallion to the Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal, nearly 14 months after it was burgled from the varsity's museum.

Sweden's Ambassador to India, Ingaerikson Fogh handed over the replicas (both in gold and silver) to Indian External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh on behalf of the Swedish Academy, two days ahead of the bard's 144th birth anniversary.

The ceremony was held in the backdrop of a protest by the Visva- Bharati employees who are angry over the transfer of the varsity's security arrangements to a private agency.

Visva-Bharati University, whose chancellor is the prime minister, hit the headlines for the wrong reasons in March 2004 after the Nobel Prize medallion and other memorabilia of its founder Rabindranath Tagore were burgled.

A Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe is still continuing with no significant breakthrough so far.

Tagore, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913 for his book of verses Gitanjali (1910), founded the Visva Bharati University, an idyllic educational and cultural center, with the prize money. That was in 1921 and at Santiniketan, some 200 km northwest of Kolkata in Birbhum district.

The Nobel Prize was awarded to Tagore "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West." `

Source: Xinhua News Agency - CEIS

More News in this Category