Maitreyi. From Authenticity to Colonial Fantasy

Abstract

It was a pen name under which, in 1933, Mircea Eliade sent his novel titled Maitreyi2 (the real name of the girl he loved in India) as a manuscript to a competition for a Romanian literary prize. Although Eliade did not reveal himself as the author, he used his friend's name in the title of this book that he presented as an exercise in authenticity. The other people whom he portrayed in this novel were Maitreyi's family members who knew Eliade as a guest in their house, and also Rabindranath Tagore, an icon of Indian culture. Acquainted with Tagore, Maitreyi Devi was to become his biographer. Eliade was aware that Devi was an intellectual with the potential to become a prominent cultural personality in her country. He had come to study with her father, Surendranath Dasgupta, a famous scholar of yogic philosophy and Sanskrit. He wrote the novel two years after his encounter with Maitreyi, with a distance that allowed him to understand how he could have misconstrued their relationship. However, he depicted Maitreyi and her family in pathetic episodes and derided them in his book in which the protagonist, an engineer named Alain, was invited to live with them to leam about Indian culture. Devi was furious when she found out, in 1972, from Sergiu A1-George, a Romanian Sanskrit scholar, how she was depicted in the novel. George didn't understand Maitreyi Devi's anger. He had come to India to meet the muse of Maitreyi, thus fetishizing her once more, as the book had done with her image, and responded to Maitreyi's shock by saying that this book was just fantasy, and that this is what novels do, speaking as if Devi, a writer herself, had never grasped Western novels.Ginu Kamani3 reminds her readers about Maitreyi Devi's very accomplished life:Maitreyi Devi was sixteen in 1930 when Eliade was invited to live in her father's house. Her romance with Eliade lasted a few months. When her parents realized that the two were tangling amorously, Eliade was asked to leave the DasGupta residence and ordered by Professor DasGupta never to contact Maitreyi again. At the age of twenty she was married to a Bengali man. She had two children, published volumes of poetry and prose, wrote many books on her mentor Tagore, and later in life set up orphanages for needy children.Maitreyi is one of the most beautiful and celebrated characters in Romanian literature. Just like George, other Romanian scholars tried to know Eliade's muse better and interviewed her and her family about her life and career. Her books of poetry appeared in Romania and her correspondence with Eliade's student and exegete, Mac Linscott Ricketts, was recently published.4 Her son, Priyadarshi Sen, remembers his mother, Maitraye (with 'e' in a different spelling), and mentions the importance of Rabindranath Tagore in her life. In 1972, inspired by Tagore's philosophy and ideals, she founded, in the suburbs of Calcutta, a Home for Children in need and distress. She worked for this home until her death, (pp. 94)Kamani notices the fetishization employed by Eliade in constructing Maitreyi's character in the eponymous Romanian novel (1933), translated as Bengal Nights (1994) into English:Eliade had perhaps come to India to transcend the Judeo-Christian sexual repression in himself, which experience he could only attempt to describe in fiction, rendering his object Maitreyi into a caricature of a tantric goddess, transforming her inexplicably from virgin to sex queen in his own unrealistic, self-indulgent fantasy.Eliade was observing women with an anthropologic look. If India was hard enough for him to grasp, women were even more complicated and what he had to say about his protagonist's friend Lucien in the novel Bengal Nights was true of him. Lucien is writing a book on India and what troubles him is that he does not comprehend Indian women enough to complete his monograph. Lucien had previously made an impression on Alain for his triviality:I had liked the uncultured, arrogant journalist, with his talent and his perspicacity, from the very first. …