Rare photographs and archival material from the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata, were on display for the first time commemorating the relationship between a world poet and a world-renowned statistician.

A young Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, then only 17, met Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan in 1910 and a relationship blossomed.

Over 30 photographs and handwritten letters, a manuscript formed part of an exhibition titled Verses and Variables that documents the relationship.

The four-day exhibition at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity ended on Saturday.

“We have digitised 5,000 photographs from the archives of ISI Kolkata. We loaned a few of them out for an exhibition,” said Kishore Chandra Satpathy, in charge of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis Memorial Museum and Archives (Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata).

From 1921, Tagore travelled to various countries in Europe in the company of Mahalanobis, his wife Nirmal Kumari and others.

A page from the manuscript- of Baishe Sravan by Nirmal Kumari Mahalanobis. It was on display at the exhibition.

An enlarged digital copy of a group photograph at the exhibition showed Tagore with Madam Andrea Butenschon, the Swedish translator of Gitanjali, along with Mahalanobis and Nirmal Kumari at the studio of sculptor Gustav Vigeland in Oslo in 1926.

The original manuscript of Baishe Sravan written by Nirmal Kumari was also on display.

Another item on display was a kind of tribute to the poet, Nirmal Kumari wrote how Tagore had named the house that the Mahalanobis couple bought in Baranagar Amrapali. Today, Amrapali is being renovated by ISI Kolkata.