The European Fantasy That Betrayed Its Bengali Heroine
In the 1930s, a Romanian scholar turned one woman’s story into a salacious novel. She refused to let his version become history.
In 1972, a Bengali woman stormed into the Chicago office of her first love, 40 years after they last saw each other. Years after their romance, she discovered he had published devastating lies about her. A devotee of Durga and Kali, she refused to swallow the slander. She swung the door open and recited the final line of the novel he’d written about her: “I would like to be able to look Maitreyi in the eyes.” When Mircea Eliade finally looked up, he didn’t see the exotic muse of his bestselling Bengali Nights, but a grown-up Maitreyi Devi, the woman whose life he’d rewritten on paper.
In 1930, a young Romanian scholar arrived in Calcutta to study Hindu philosophy. He left with a forbidden love story. That story would become a reckoning between two people who never agreed on what had transpired between them. The story wouldn’t just inspire a novel, but at least two films — the French La Nuit Bengali (1988) and the Hindi Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999). Maitreyi Devi would also pen her own version of events in Na Hanyate (1974). So, when two people describe the same romance so differently, whose version becomes history?