Abhijit Banerjee wore a dhoti and kurta to the Nobel awards ceremony.
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo opted for traditional Indian outfits while receiving the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences along with Michael Kremer in Sweden on Tuesday. Indian-American economist Dr Banerjee wore a gold-bordered white dhoti and kurta, teamed with a black bandhgala, to the awards ceremony at the Concert Hall in Stockholm. He is the first Bengali to opt for traditional attire at the prestigious awards ceremony.
French-American Dr Duflo, his wife, wore a blue-green saree, paired with a red blouse and a bindi. Their colleague, Dr Kremer, opted for a black suit.
Dr Banerjee's dhoti-kurta, a nod to his Bengali origins, did not go unnoticed on Twitter. The 58-year-old was born in Kolkata and completed his MA in Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He went on to do a PhD in Economics at Harvard University in 1988.
Dr Banerjee is the third Bengali to have won the prestigious Nobel Prize, and the first one to wear a traditional Bengali outfit to the awards ceremony. Rabindranath Tagore, known as 'the Bard of Bengal', was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. He couldn't attend the ceremony in Sweden. Amartya Sen, born in Santiniketan in West Bengal, also won the Nobel Prize in Economicsin 1998. Mr Sen wore a suit to the awards ceremony.
The Nobel Prize committee shared a video of Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer receiving the award "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."
"Their research is helping us fight poverty," the organisation said on its website. "The research conducted by this year's Laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research."