KOLKATA, May 7: A Nobel Prize medal belonging to India’s only award winner for literature was replaced on Saturday, more than a year after the original was stolen from a university in eastern India.
Thieves stole the Nobel, won in 1913 by the revered poet Rabindranath Tagore, from a museum in a university he founded in 1921 in Shantiniketan, some 150kms north of Kolkata.
Inga Eriksson Fogh, Sweden’s ambassador to India, handed over a set of gold and bronze medallions set in a box to the university authorities in the presence of India’s foreign and defence ministers.
Tagore, a cultural icon in the West Bengal state of over 80 million people, won the honour for Gitanjali, a collection of poems. He died in 1941 at the age of 80.
A federal investigation has been unsuccessful, even after a one million rupees ($23,000) reward was announced to retrieve the medal stolen in March last year.—Reuters
