Eliade (1907-1986), a major figure in the scholarly study of world
religions, tells his version of younger days and of what his
"research" in India was really all about. This is the roman a clef
about a torrid young love blown apart by cultural and colonial
chasms in response to which, years later, Maitreyi Devi wrote It
Does Not Die (see above). Alain, Eliade's persona in the story,
comes to take up residence with an Indian family who have a
sublime, mysteriously beautiful daughter, Maitreyi. Though the
blossoming young woman has read widely in English, American, and
Indian literature, Alain sees in her and her sister a certain
savage Otherness that intrigues him. As the young man and the
teenager spend more and more time together, they are drawn together
and end up, of course, spending passionate nights behind closed
doors. As Alain discovers that even the recently virginal Maitreyi
knows the sexual secrets of the East, the two are tortured by a
foreknowledge that their affair will be discovered by the teen's
modernizing, but still traditional, Hindu family. After the younger
sister blabs and the father sends Alain away, Maitreyi becomes a
victim of her father's physical wrath. Tormented and grandiose ("I
suffered ten times more than she at the idea of the punishments she
would suffer"), Alain retreats to the Himalayas to tell fellow
seekers of Indian truth that they are merely romantics who, unlike
him, don't know the real story behind the mysteries of the East. In
the end, Alain seems at most to have found that his fantasies don't
hold up to concrete experience rather than to have come to any
authentic understanding of India. A typical colonial tale of
adventure and conquest, with too many fantastic edges to come
across as being about actual human beings. (Kirkus Reviews)
Set in 1930s Calcutta, this is a "roman a clef" of remarkable
intimacy. 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.
Offered the hospitality of a senior Indian colleague, Alain grasps
at the chance to discover the authentic India firsthand. He soon
finds himself enchanted by his host's daughter, the lovely and
inscrutable Maitreyi, a precocious young poet and former student of
Tagore. 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.
This erotic passion plays itself out in Alain's thoughts long after
its bitter conclusion. In hindsight he sets down the story, quoting
from the diaries of his disordered days, and trying to make sense
of the sad affair.
A 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. At once horrifying and deeply moving, Eliade's story
repeats the patterns of European engagement with India even as it
exposes and condemns them. Invaluable for the insight it offers
into Eliade's life and thought, it is a work of great intellectual
and emotional power.
""Bengal Nights" is forceful and harshly poignant, written with a
great love of India informed by clear-eyed understanding. But do
not open it if you prefer to remain unmoved by your reading matter.
It is enough to make stones weep." -- "Literary Review"
Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was the Sewell L. Avery Distinguished
Service Professor in the Divinity School and the Committee on
Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Many of his scholarly
works, as well as his two-volume autobiography and four-volume
journal, are published by the University of Chicago Press.
Translated into French in 1950, "Bengal Nights" was an immediate
critical success. The film, "Les Nuits Bengali," appeared in 1987.
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