Image of Pauling’s Nobel medal displayed as Rabindranath Tagore’s

AHMEDABAD: At the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Memorial in Moti Shahi palace, Shahibaug a special exhibition is dedicated to Rabindranath Tagore, for he had stayed here, when 17 years, for a brief time with his brother Satyendranath Tagore in 1878. Satyendranath was then posted here as district judge. It was here that Tagore wrote the short story ‘Kshudhita Pashan’.

While mentioning his life’s works and achievements, a pictorial exhibition also mentions Tagore’s Nobel prize, which he received in 1913 for ‘Gitanjali’, but displays chemist Linus Pauling’s Nobel Prize of 1954 instead. For any visitor who scans through Tagore’s pictorial exhibition, the name, Linus Pauling on the Nobel medal sticks out. Pauling had received the medal for “his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances.”

The fact is that on March 25, 2004, Tagore's Nobel Prize was stolen from Viswa-Bharati University’s safety vault, along with several other important Tagore belongings. In December that year, the Swedish Academy decided to present two replicas of Tagore's Nobel Prize, one made of gold and the other made of bronze to the University.

“I will get the pictorial exhibition examined by the secretary of the museum. We had a special Tagore exhibition in the Sardar Patel memorial since he stayed at the Moti Shahi palace,” says Dinsha Patel of the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Memorial Society, that maintains the exhibition.

It was at the palace that Rabindranath Tagore wrote his first poems and short stories of his life. Tagore composed his first poem 'Boli O Amar Golap Bala (I say, O my girl of roses)'.

In his book 'My Reminiscences' Tagore wrote of how he came up with the idea of the poem, “On moonlit nights pacing round and round the extensive terrace overlooking the river was one of my caprices. It was while so doing that I first composed my own tunes for my songs. The song addressed to the Rosemaiden was one of these, and it still finds a place in my published works,” he wrote.