What are national treasures, after all? And it takes little to reduce greatness to perishable tokens. Rabindranath Tagore got the Nobel in 1913, he died in 1941, the Nobel got stolen in 2004, the Central Bureau of Investigation was put on the trail three days after the theft, and a few days ago — three and a half years after it started looking for the medal — the CBI officially gave up on the investigation. There is a naturalness about this chronology, a sense of the inevitable, that makes it difficult to focus on the larger implications of what it actually means for Bengal, and for India. These implications are all bleak and quite irreversibly shameful. Yet, after the voices of passive despair that have been heard since the CBI’s withdrawal, one is left only with a feeling of ineffectuality and hopelessness. An absurd, mock-heroic bustle immediately after the burglary— involving the Tagorean establishment in Santiniketan, the police, the chief minister and some Opposition politicians — had ended up with the CBI taking over. So the reaching of a dead end not only signals the CBI’s failure, but also symbolizes a deeper, grimmer defeat that implicates every public institution ostensibly dedicated to maintaining Tagore’s ‘heritage’ in Bengal and elsewhere.

This heritage is not simply about the achievements of an individual, but about an entire set of attitudes and practices that makes up what the civilized world calls ‘education’ and ‘culture’. Universities, libraries, museums and archives are not the only institutions that preserve books, pictures and papers as objects of inestimable value. The infrastructure, tangible and intangible, that supports them has become, particularly in Bengal, inseparable from the institutions of State — ministries, committees, the police and so on. And these public bodies are ultimately accountable to ordinary people in whose professional and personal lives the many meanings of what Tagore stands for are kept alive through a range of intellectual and creative practices. The corruption and disorder that prevail in the institutions of higher education associated with Tagore, the neglect and inaccessibility surrounding the invaluable family documents in archives and strongrooms — all gather around the lost Nobel, which becomes the symbol of an unspeakable crisis.