Re-writing the Colonial Story in Mircea Eliade’s Maitreyi and Maitreyi Devi’s Na Hanyate

Abstract

PRELIMINARIES20th century researchers from various humanistic fields agree that, in the modem world, the encounter between two cultures can no longer take place on innocent or neutral ground; virtually in all cases, ideology shapes human experience into stereotypical discursive patterns. While otherwise leading to remarkable hermeneutical insights, when taken to the extreme, this position leaves very little room for individual agency. By and large, such rigid determinism implicitly undermines its own empirical consequences, and runs the risk of ending up as a sterile theoretical exercise.In this article I attempt to examine various forms of cultural clash as problematized in Mircea Eliade's novel Maitreyi (1933) - translated into English as Bengal Nights (1993) - and the extent to which the traumatic encounter between two subaltern cultures was mediated (and possibly undermined) by patterns of colonialist discourse. The novel stands out as an example of hybridisation, as its roots can be located in a mixed experience of Romanian inter-war culture, Indian colonial society and Western colonial and postcolonial discursive formations.If the Romanian dimension is ostensibly absent from the story itself, it is the genealogy of the novel which calls attention to its importance - Maitreyi was written in Romanian and expressly, if not exclusively, for a Romanian audience. According to Eliade's Memorii (in the English version Autobiography), it was put together for the purpose of entering a literary competition judged by prestigious Romanian scholars.1 Eliade's text met the criteria of an innovatory novel as advertised by the awarding committee both due to the exoticism of its subject and its experimental narrative technique.On the other hand, the novel's specificity is also given by the peculiarities of its reception. Translated in 1950 as La nuit bengali^the book gradually gained an international audience, and, improbable as this might have seemed to any young Romanian author at the beginning of the century, its echoes finally reached India. As the love story was based on Eliade's own experience in Calcutta, his barely disguised confessions were regarded as mischievous, and at best scandalous. In an attempt to re-establish the truth, Maitreyi Devi, the poet who had inspired Eliade, wrote her own version of the events, published in Bengali under the title Na Hanyate (1971). To the same end, she closely monitored the shooting of the film Les nuits bengali, which appeared in 1987 (one year after Eliade's death).Interestingly enough, Devi's book in its turn addressed a national audience, and dwelt profusely on the Indian narrative tradition. These peculiarities, as well as the nature of political conditions, would keep this novel away from Romanian readers for almost three decades. Eventually, the two stories met on the common, if not neutral territory of the same language - English. In 1976, Na Hanyate was translated from the Bengali as It Does Not Die, whereas Eliade's Bengal Nights, translated from French, appeared as late as 1993 (significantly, after the death of both writers). Subsequently published by the University of Chicago in a common edition (1994), the novels have been projected in a spatialtemporal context that inevitably obscures the specificity of their different cultural matrices - which is precisely the focus of my analysis in this article.To this end, I will examine critically two conflicting tendencies in the reception of these texts. On the one hand, I will discuss the blind spots of the traditional narratological approach (as practised mostly by early Romanian as well as Western critics), which insisted on formal analysis and overlooked the cultural situatedness of the characters. On the other, I will focus on the problems of postcolonial readings, which insightfully bring to light covert patterns of Orientalist discourse in Eliade's novel, yet over-hastily erase its Romanian context, and do not address the specific conditions in which a subaltern culture can be made to represent the West in its relationship with the other. …