Tagore’s personal letters to Suniti Kumar Chatterji sell for Rs 42.35 lakh at auction

Kolkata: A set of Rabindranath Tagore’s personal correspondence, which offers insights into his emotional life, were sold for Rs 42.35 lakh in an online auction, 21% more than the opening bid, reflecting collectors’ enduring interest in any form of handwritten text from the bard.

Tagore wrote thousands of letters throughout his life and the contents are now subjects of intense research. Some studies pegged the number of published letters at 4098 written to 315 different recipients.

The letters sold in the auction organised by AstaGuru earlier this week were written to the legendary linguist and educationist Suniti Kumar Chatterji, with whom Tagore shared an intellectual bond. These -- a set of four -- were penned between 1928 and 1940, and offer a profoundly intimate window into the Nobel Laureate’s interior world during his mature years.


In one of those letters, Tagore reflected on the sustained criticism he was subjected to, especially from the magazine Shanibarer Chithi (The Saturday Letter), which under the aggressive editorial control of Sajanikanta Das along with fierce critics such as Mohitlal Majumder, served as a deeply conservative literary watchdog.

In the letter to Chatterji, Tagore wrote that he would not consider the critic simply as an adversary, instead he would recognise criticism as an integral part of artistic life.

“The letters thus capture a poet in dialogue with the public, rather than an artist insulated from it,” a person familiar with the letter said.

Another letter shows Tagore’s anxiety over the financial insecurity of Kala Bhavana’s artists, and concerns over the likely collapse of the institution ‘for want of food.’

The auction held on September 29 and 30, titled Manifest, also brought together celebrated modernists such as Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij -- both flourished at Santiniketan under the direct mentorship of Tagore -- among others like Sailoz Mookherjea, SH Raza and MF Husain.

An untitled painting of Bose was sold at Rs 26.6 lakh against an opening bid of Rs 15 lakh, according to AstaGuru’s website. Baij’s sketchbook of 22 drawings, a jotting and a terracotta sculpture of a dog were sold at Rs 1.21 crore against an opening bid of Rs 1 lakh. Baij, was a seminal Indian sculptor and painter who studied under Nandalal Bose at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan.