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BOOK REVIEW Love, Bengal-Style Bengal Nights It Does Not Die Mircea Eliade Maitreyi Devi The University of Chicago Press The University of Chicago Press 1994; $ 22.50 1994; $ 22.50 Review: Sarbani Sarkar philosophy with her father, with the sisters became a discovery .S. BYATT, in Possession, has Surendranath Dasgupta, an erudite which Mircea could not lose. written that we live in a time Sanskrit scholar and historian of reli- A “But the tree,” interrupted Chabu, which is theoretically knowing; we gion. And so began his long journey “What did the tree say?” know about linguistic sexuality: in religious anthropology which I was at a loss to answer and said analysis, dissection, deconstruction, would culminate decades later into to myself: pantheism! exposure, phallocracy, clitoral tumes- several learned volumes on images, cence, polymorphous and polysemous symbols, myths, and the history of “She asks if her tree has a soul. I perversity, the fluids, the solids, the religion. What followed was une told her all trees have souls.” systems of desire and damage, the ico- affaire de passion, but Dasgupta’s “She has a tree?” nography of the cervix, and the im- patriarchal blood erupted upon dis- “It’s not a tree exactly. It’s a shrub agery of the contracting and expand- covering the amorous liaison between in the courtyard......” ing body. And we mistrust love. Ro- his shishya and his beloved daughter, I repeated happily to myself: pan- mantic love can be viewed as “a sus- and the romance ended abruptly and theism, pantheism! What rare pect ideological construct” which tragically. What remains of this cel- documents I had before me! controls us, so when we have to try ebrated affair are two testimonials of Bengal Nights and understand lovers who occupied love - one an impassioned confession, a time and space different from ours, the other a melancholic protestation, Mircea immediately departed to “we have to make a real effort of a righteous corrective; a remarkable his room to scribble excitedly in his imagination to know what it felt like bracing of books, one incomplete journal: “First discussion with to be them.” Though we know we without the other. Maitreyi. The primitive nature of her are driven by desire we cannot quite thinking to be noted. A child who has The young Mircea who arrived at bring ourselves to see it as they did; read too much........... A revelation : the Bhowanipur house was twenty and when “they” happen to be a Ru- Chabu is a pantheistic soul. She makes three years old, patronizing, a trifle manian anthropologist and a Bengali no distinction between her own feel- arrogant, racist, and filled with a pre- litterateur whose lives intertwine sumptuous sense of having awed and ings and those of inanimate objects hopelessly in a colonial, very snob- gratified the Dasgupta household with ........ Very interesting.” Maitreyi her- bish and very Victorian Calcutta, his superior civilized presence and his self writes that Mircea was “always one’s task becomes that much more divinely given “whiteness.” At first searching for inner meanings”, grop- difficult. Maitreyi was distanced as an object, ing for symbolic significance behind Mircea Eliade and Maitreyi studied with an almost Cartesian gaze. every word and action which were of Dasgupta met and fell in love quite Moments spent with Maitreyi and course documented faithfully in his disastrously in the summer of 1930. Chabu (her younger sister) appear to daily journal. She told him, “At first I Mircea came to reside in Maitreyi’s be deliberate ethnographic encoun- loved a tree ..... will not the ground home to study the scriptures and ters. An evening of storytelling spent below you, write down the story of No. 86 37 love between a girl and a tree?” Upon to change the name of his heroine such a declaration the young student from Maitreyi to Gayatri and erase the from Bucharest was disturbed and sexually explicit scenes from the film. taken aback and quickly resolved his Being a Hindu, Maitreyi obviously did discomfort by treating it as yet another not share Mircea’s Christian compul- example of pantheism, but Maitreyi sion to confess, to admit, to make was saddened. “He could not believe known, to come to terms with one’s that this was no ‘ism’ but just soaring self by salving the conscience. poetic fancy.” Hepworth and Turner, quoting An- thony Trollope, have said that men At sixteen, Maitreyi was a budding and women who desist from confess- poet, her first book already published ing are viewed with “a disagreeable with an introduction by Rabindranath suspicion.” Hepworth and Turner have Tagore. To Mircea she was a coquette; further said, that in romantic confes- vain, precocious, pampered, and sional literature, platonic affection clearly did not merit the intellectual indicates “respect for the person rather admiration she commanded from her than mere sexual attraction to the father and the lettered of Calcutta. In body as a sexual object.” But perhaps fact Bengal Nights exhibits a veiled, Maitreyi was merely trying to protect implicit intellectual disrespect not her right to privacy, zealously guard- only towards Surendranath Dasgupta ing her most sacred, most intimate but towards the Bengali literati in gen- domain, the innermost realm of her eral that he encountered during his seductress, a sensuous siren, being which no man could violate. stay in the Dasgupta household - a provocating and inviting him to ex- disrespect more glaring and eloquent plore the promising delights of her Maitreyi had also objected to the in the silences, in the gaps between nubile body, which he did apparently, open association of her name with that the syntagmas. “For a long time, I night after night in the dark precincts of the Tagores, although readers of It of the Bhowanipur house. flattered myself by thinking of our re- Does Not Die would be only too fa- lationship as that of civilized man and Maitreyi has objected loudly, de- miliar with her unabashed expressions barbarian,” an unfathomable, elusive nying vehemently, those nights of of affection for the poet. “Do not leave barbarian. This was compounded by passion, first in Na Hanyate (the origi- me, master, come back to my heart. I the fact that despite herself, Maitreyi nal Bengali of It Does Not Die, pub- have nothing else in my life - I never was drawn irresistibly towards his lished in 1972, 20 years after the had. Covering my past, present and fairness. With “envy and melancholy” French translation of Maitreyi) and future, your presence is a constant her gaze would wander and rest for a then again, in 1987, when she filed a festival.” As she told Mircea many few moments on his partly uncovered stay order against producer Phillippe arm, on his feet “white as alabaster”, times, despite his outraged jealousy, Diaz and director Nicholas Klotz to “my sky blooms stars at night, and amusing and enchanting Mircea with stop the production of the French film, forests blossom flowers in the morn- her jealousy. More than once, she has Les Nuits Bengali, which she claimed ing, because he is there”. Through- sat by him and reflected, “I also would sullied her name and made her life out her conversations with Mircea, she like to be white. Is it possible, do you profane. Facticity seemed to bother seems to have allowed herself a rare think?” her less at old age. She wrote in an candour in It Does Not Die about her Yet he was intrigued and smitten. article in 1988: “Books that achieve not so conventional emotions towards For him, Maitreyi was an enigma, literary success cannot only be a bare the greatest icon of Bengal. This non- beautiful, like a startled bird, a “crea- account of facts, they are mostly a ture of movements as supple as silk mixture of facts and imagination...” conformism which is bounded and re- ........ whose musical voice continu- and she firmly held all books were not strained in Maungpute Rabindranath, ally invented new harmonies, new meant for filming. For “any literature a book crisp and tight unlike the sen- pitches.” As he fell in love with her, impregnated with some deep idea will sual languor and repetitiveness of a the primitive child in the eyes of the not bear an audiovisual expression.” more sentimental, Rabindrik, Na Orientalist metamorphosed into the Director Nicholas Klotz was forced Hanyate. 38 MANUSHI It Does Not Die is Maitreyi’s soul wanted to embrace Hinduism. “Is it has written, even if it were so, he on wings, her liberated self, rippling possible that he thinks father will eas- would not be eligible - he would have with poetry and laughter, revealing a ily agree if he becomes a Hindu?” to be of the same caste but of a differ- world mosaiced with literature, where Mircea apparently had no doubts in ent clan, for if the clan was the same Mircea and Maitreyi find love and his mind. In the beginning he thought “it would mean that probably many romance between the pages of Hearne his hosts were conspiring to marry thousands of years ago they were of and Hamsun, Goethe and Conrad, him off to Maitreyi with obvious at- the same parents so it would be in- Swinburne and Whitman, Kalidasa tempts to bind them in friendship. “It cest if they married lawfully. He can- and Tagore. It gives glimpses of a was as though a plot was being not get into the heart of all this com- changing world, a patriarchal, tradi- hatched against me: I was meant to plexity, though he constantly enquires tional, yet educated Anglophile, fall in love with Maitreyi ...........

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