Local administration removed the ink smeared by miscreants on the face of Rabindranath Tagore on the Gitanjali memorial plaque in Kushtia’s Kumarkhali. So far, no one involved in the incident has been identified.
Officer-in-Charge (OC) of Kumarkhali Police Station, Solaiman Sheikh said that the ink has been cleaned off the plaque and it has been restored to its original condition.
He added that police are investigating the incident and have already deployed intelligence to identify the miscreants.
Describing the incident as ‘embarrassing and undesirable,’ Kumarkhali Upazila Nirbahi Officer (UNO) S.M. Mikail Islam said that efforts are ongoing to bring the perpetrators to book. He mentioned that the ink was removed by the upazila administration on Friday afternoon.
According to administration sources, the mural was installed in at Hijolakor area of Sadaki Union, at the entrance to Kumarkhali upazila along the Kushtia-Rajbari regional highway in 2025, to mark the centenary of Gitanjali.
The renowned Kuthibari, where Tagore wrote a significant portion of Gitanjali, is located in Kumarkhali upazila.
Police suspect that the spot where memorial is located, is a relatively isolated.
Moreover, public movement on the highway is decreased due to the Eid holidays.
“The miscreants may have taken advantage of the situation occurred within the past two to three days,” OC observed.
The matter came to public attention on Thursday afternoon and quickly spread across social media, sparking widespread outrage. The backlash extended to neighbouring West Bengal, where poets, writers, and admirers of Tagore also condemned the act.
Aslam Hossain, Chief Executive of the cultural organisation Jibok in Kushtia said that such incidents tarnish the country’s image internationally.
“It’s increasingly feeling like we are losing the capacity to preserve a memorial bearing the image of Rabindranath Tagore,” he added.