She came into close contact with Mircea, working with him on cataloguing her father's library, teaching him Bengali while learning French from him.Ĭharmed by his east-European manners and other qualities, she fell in love with him, and he with her. Maitreyi was 16 at the time, something of a brilliant jewel in her own right, being treated by her father, who had given her uniquely intense educational opportunities, as a literary and intellectual prodigy. At some point, he came to stay in Dasgupta's house. The core of the story is that in 1929, the 23-year-old Mircea Eliade came to Calcutta to study with Surendranath Dasgupta, a celebrated scholar of Indian philosophy. Eliade was an influential and popular scholar of religion, and his students at Chicago, including I believe Wendy Doniger (who told me that she learned Romanian just to read this book in the original), pushed for the companion volumes to be published, perhaps as argument and rebuttal, for certainly Maitreyi was in part inspired to write her book as a rebuttal to his, some 40 years later (See A Terrible Hurt). Somewhat ironically, Eliade and Maitreyi each became famous in their own circles, while remaining pretty much unknown in each other's. I should say that I have been interested in this story of Maitreyi and Mircea Eliade for a long time, from a distance, without really caring about it sufficiently to track down either her book, which is available in English translation as It Never Dies, or Eliade's personal account of the story, written in 1933, called Bengali Nights. The first thing that happened when I actually started reading the book was I felt a slight shock of discovery, as though an important historical document had been placed in my hand, discovered entirely by accident, for this is the very Maitreyi made famous in some Western circles on account of her brief relation with Mircea Eliade, and this is her account of that encounter and its lasting repercussions in her life.
This blog was started on the date given below, and it has taken my more than a month (July 27, 2008) to assemble my thoughts and finally post it in two parts. And, indeed, I have not been disappointed. It is interesting to get the insight that comes from modern novelists commenting in this way on such texts. The title caught my eye, since I also tend to like books that make some reference to Hindu shastras.
Seeing how many of her books were available in Hindi translation made me aware of her pan-Indian reputation and so I became interested. I had never read anything by Maitreyi before, even though she is a well-known writer in Bengal. I bought the book entirely without realizing what it was about. The other day I had to go to Dehra Doon on Foreign Registration Office matters, and in the course of the visit there, I happened to pick up a copy of the novel Na Hanyate by Maitreyi Devi.
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