Spectacles, shawl and a tie belonging to Rathindranath Tagore (right) and four pieces of wooden handicraft designed by him at Visva-Bharati. Picture by Snehamoy Chakraborty

Santiniketan, March 31: Visva-Bharati has decided to set up a museum housing articles that belonged to Tagore’s son Rathindranath, the “unsung hero” who was the driving force behind the poet’s archives.

The university, which received a pair of spectacles, a shawl and a tie used by Rathindranath during his eight-year stay in Dehradun, today organised a seminar titled Rathindranath — The Unsung Hero.

The announcement to set up the museum at Guha Ghar, where Rathindranath stayed in Santiniketan, was made at the event today by vice-chancellor Sushanta Duttagupta.

Rathindranath’s memorabilia were today handed over by Jayita Chakraborty, a retired schoolteacher in Calcutta in her 70s with whose parents he stayed in Dehradun from 1953 to 1961. Rathindranath died in Dehradun in 1961.

The seven items given to the university today were a pair of reading glasses, a shawl, a tie and four pieces of wooden handicraft that Rathindranath had made himself.

According to officials, Rathindranath made two wooden boxes, which he gifted to Jayita on her wedding, a pen stand and a showpiece during his last years in Dehradun.

“The gifts from Jayita are quite valuable for us. Rathindranath Tagore loved Jayita like his daughter. We already have some memorabilia of him. These gifts will add to the collection. We will set up a museum on Rathindranath Tagore soon at Guha Ghar in the Uttarayan complex,” said Tapati Mukherjee, director of Rabindra Bhavana, the Tagore archives and museum on the Visva-Bharati campus.

Asked what prompted the decision, Mukherjee said: “Rathindranath did not get the recognition he deserved as an architect and an agronomist. He had enormous talent in varied fields. This is our way of paying tribute to the unsung hero.”

The youngest son of Tagore, Rathindranath was born in 1888 and was the first vice-chancellor of Visva-Bharati. He studied agriculture science in Illinois. At Visva-Bharati, he taught plant genetics and earned praise for making a technical subject interesting to the students, officials said. “He took the initiative to build his father’s archives,” an official said.

Rathindranath spent his last eight years in Dehradun from 1953 with friends Nirmal Chandra Chattopadhyay and Mira Chattopadhyay, Jayita’s parents. His house in Dehradun’s Rajpur was named Mitali.

“I spent a few years with jethu (Rathindranath). He treated me like his own daughter. As a Visva-Bharati student in the 1950s, I often wrote to him. He had given me the two wooden boxes on my wedding. I am happy to give them to Visva-Bharati,” Jayita said.

Official said Rathindranath built Guha Ghar in the 1930s in the core area of Visva-Bharati. The house was named “guha (cave)” because an artificial lake in front the house had a cave-like structure from which water flowed.

Rathindranath left for Dehradun two years after he was made Visva-Bharati vice-chancellor in 1951.