DHAKA: Recently found photographs of Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian to win the Nobel prize for literature, show the poet in a new, more intimate light in an exhibition marking the 150th anniversary of his birth.

The pictures offer a glimpse of Tagore — a poet, novelist, musician, painter and playwright who is revered in both Bangladesh and India — at the university he founded in Santiniketan, a small town in West Bengal, India.

“They are not formal or official pictures. This is why they are very rare.

They are a glimpse of life in the golden age of the university,” said Samuel

Berthet, director of the Alliance Francaise in Chittagong, Bangladesh.

Berthet discovered the trove of hundreds of photographs, taken by French historian Alain Danielou at Santiniketan between 1932 to 1940, while “digging through the late photographer's archives at his house in Italy”.

The Viswa Bharati university, founded with the prize money Tagore received from the Nobel Foundation, was “a gate to rural India, and it is still the case now — artists from across the globe are living there,” Berthet said.—AFP