The broken grille in the Santiniketan house. Picture by Indrajit Roy

Santiniketan, April 9: Thieves broke into the Sangit Bhavan principal’s house in the heart of Visva-Bharati last night and took away paintings, artefacts, four silver coins and Rs 2,500.

Jiten Singha said the robbers must have left in a hurry as his pet pug started barking.

The two-storey house at Aban Palli is about 500 metres from Rabindra Bhavan in the Uttarayan complex from where Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel medal and other memorabilia were stolen in 2004.

Around 3.20am, Singha woke up and hurried to the ground floor hearing the barks and found the iron grille of his puja room window broken.

He switched on the lights and found four brass idols of Gopal, Mahakaal, Radhakrishna and Laxmi-Ganesh missing from a wooden throne.

Three paintings, one by Singha himself and two others by a Manipuri friend, were also gone.

“The money had been collected as dakshina (offerings to God) during a recent puja and was kept on the throne. The silver coins, too, were kept for puja,” Singha said.

Police have found footprints of the suspected thieves on the pedestal where the idols were placed.

“The paintings gifted by my friend were worth about Rs 20,000,” Singha said after lodging a police complaint.

Bolpur subdivisional police officer Debasish Dhar said: “We have started a probe. We can’t disclose anything.”

The year the medal was stolen, academic Bhabatosh Dutta’s Ratan Palli house was burgled. Several paintings and artefacts were stolen. Neither the medal case nor the other heist has been cracked.