Santiniketan, April 4: A year before Rabindranath Tagore got the Nobel in 1913, he had lost the manuscript of Gitanjali — the collection of poems that won him the honour — on a trip to England.

In May 1912, the poet decided to travel to London to show the English manuscript to artist William Rothenstein so that he could ask Irish poet W.B. Yeats to write an introduction.

On June 15, Tagore, with son Rathindranath and daughter-in-law Pratima Devi, took a train from Dover to London to meet Rothenstein. The poet had the manuscript in an attaché case. A friend of the Tagores, Soumendra Deb Burman of the Tripura royal family, was with them.

On arrival in London, they took the underground railway. Awe-struck at the “sight of the modern marvels of the tube”, they forgot the attaché case at a station and proceeded to the hotel Rothenstein had booked for them, said Amitrasudhan Bhattacharya, dean of Visva-Bharati’s art faculty and an expert on Tagore’s travels, who has documented this incident in Rail Bhromone Rabindranath.

Rathindranath was on his first visit abroad with his wife. He had been trying to coax his father to go on a holiday since 1902, when Tagore had taken ill after wife Mrinalini Devi’s death and would spend most of his time in Santiniketan.

On June 16, 1912, just before the scheduled meeting with Rothenstein, Tagore realised that his attaché case was missing. A frantic search failed to yield results and Rathindranath was contemplating calling police when Tagore pacified him. “Amar obostha onumeyo (You can understand my condition),” Bhattacharya quotes Rathindranath as saying. This incident has also been mentioned in Rathindranath’s Pitri Smriti, written in memory of his father.

Tagore asked his son to go to the London tube railway’s “lost property” office and try his luck. “True to his father’s hunch, the attaché case was found there and the manuscript was inside intact,” recalled Gautam Bhattacharya, another expert on Tagore and a teacher at Patha Bhavan in Santiniketan.

The visit to Rothenstein’s went ahead as scheduled and Yeats did write the introduction. On his return, Rathindranath was quoted as having said: “Majhe majhe ekta dushswopner moto bhabi, jodi engreji Gitanjali amar omonojog--gafilotiir dorun hariye jeto, tahole.... (I keep having nightmares that had the English version of Gitanjali been lost due to my negligence, then…).

More than 90 years later, Visva-Bharati authorities are hoping history will repeat itself and Tagore’s Nobel medal and other pieces of memorabilia, stolen from the museum here, will be found. “Who knows,” said Gautam Bhattacharya.