La Nuit Bengali/Bengali Nights was made into an English movie of the same name, which was promptly banned in India. Subsequent analysis of the book has been largely of the he said/she said, East/West sort but I won’t go into it here, though I might point you to this review. Both books did not appear in English translation until 1994. In 1974, Maitreyi Devi wrote her account of his time in her father’s house in Na Hanyate, also a roman á clef. Subsequently he wrote the thinly disguised roman á clef, Maitreyi/La Nuit Bengali. In 1930, while living in Surendranath Dasgupta’s house in Calcutta, Mircea Eliade fell in love with his daughter, Maitreyi Devi.

But both of us are a bit too serious for our age. The film, Les Nuits Bengali, appeared in 1987.She is without doubt the most gifted and enigmatic of all the girls I have known.

Translated into French in 1950, Bengal Nights was an immediate critical success. Invaluable for the insight it offers into Eliade's life and thought, it is a work of great intellectual and emotional power. At once horrifying and deeply moving, Eliade's story repeats the patterns of European engagement with India even as it exposes and condemns them. In hindsight he sets down the story, quoting from the diaries of his disordered days, and trying to make sense of the sad affair.Ī vibrantly poetic love story, Bengal Nights is also a cruel account of the wreckage left in the wake of a young man's self discovery. This erotic passion plays itself out in Alain's thoughts long after its bitter conclusion. What follows is a charming, tentative flirtation that soon, against all the proprieties and precepts of Indian society, blossoms into a love affair both impossible and ultimately tragic. He soon finds himself enchanted by his host's daughter, the lovely and inscrutable Maitreyi, a precocious young poet and former student of Tagore. Offered the hospitality of a senior Indian colleague, Alain grasps at the chance to discover the authentic India firsthand.

Originally published in Romanian in 1933, this semiautobiographical novel by the world renowned scholar Mircea Eliade details the passionate awakenings of Alain, an ambitious young French engineer flush with colonial pride and prejudice and full of a European fascination with the mysterious subcontinent. Set in 1930s Calcutta, this is a roman à clef of remarkable intimacy.

Maitreyi roman