Rare Tagore letter rakes in Rs 21 lakh in auction

A rare letter written by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore in 1930 fetched a whopping Rs 21 lakh at an auction in an online art auction on June 21-22.

According to a report in the Times of India the amount exceeded all expectations as it was seven times the base price for the letter in which Tagore expresses reservations over the English translation of his short stories.   The letter was initially expected to fetch up to Rs 3 lakh but fierce competition among several bidders drove up the price.

In the letter written to Satyabhushan Sen, Tagore states that English readers would not like his stories as the style of writing was vastly different from the English writers of the time, the ToI report added.

Poet Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his collection Gitanjali published in London in 1912.