As he wrote much later, after he had become a famous historian of comparative religion: “In India I discovered what I later came to refer to as cosmic religious feeling.” 1 He took to wearing a dhoti-“the apparel of the people with whom I wished to become one” 2-and eating with his hands. Dasgupta was so taken with his Romanian student that he invited him to live in his house.Įliade fell in love with India. His purpose was to study in Calcutta under Surendranath Dasgupta, a famous historian of Indian philosophy. He was a twenty-one-year-old student of philosophy, and an aspiring novelist.

The film, Les Nuits Bengali, appeared in 1987.In 1928 Mircea Eliade left Bucharest for India. Translated into French in 1950, Bengal Nights was an immediate critical success. Invaluable for the insight it offers into Eliade's life and thought, it is a work of great intellectual and emotional power. At once horrifying and deeply moving, Eliade's story repeats the patterns of European engagement with India even as it exposes and condemns them. In hindsight he sets down the story, quoting from the diaries of his disordered days, and trying to make sense of the sad affair.Ī 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. This erotic passion plays itself out in Alain's thoughts long after its bitter conclusion. 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.

He soon finds himself enchanted by his host's daughter, the lovely and inscrutable Maitreyi, a precocious young poet and former student of Tagore. Offered the hospitality of a senior Indian colleague, Alain grasps at the chance to discover the authentic India firsthand. 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. Set in 1930s Calcutta, this is a roman à clef of remarkable intimacy.

Maitreyi roman