Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian ever to receive a Nobel Prize. Popularly known as Gurudev, India’s Poet Laureate Tagore was born on 7th May 1861, in Kolkata. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his work Geetanjali, a collection of poems, in 1913.
Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize “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.”
On March 25, 2004, Tagore’s Nobel medal and the Nobel citation were stolen from the safety vault of the museum of Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, along with several other personal belongings of the poet.
In December 2004, the Swedish government presented two replicas of Tagore’s Nobel Prize, one made of gold and the other made of bronze, to the Visva-Bharati University.
In November 2016, a baul singer named Pradip Bauri was arrested from Birbhum district in West Bengal for his alleged involvement in the theft. A Bangladeshi national, identified as Mohammed Hossain Shipul, was the mastermind of the plot and two Europeans were also involved in the theft.
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