A Terrible Hurt, and a fascinating legacy

I came across this 1996 article by Ginu Kamani comparing the books written by Mircea Eliade and Maitreyi Devi about the two sides of their "love affair". Fascinating article, and I recommend everyone to read it.

For the uninitiated, Mircea Eliade is a Romanian scholar and former professor of history of religion at the University of Chicago who, in 1930, had a 3 month love affair in Calcutta with a then 16-year old Bengali girl, Maitreyi Devi. He went back and wrote about his "passionate" affair in this famous book called La Nuit Bengali, or Bengal Nights.

Maitreyi Devi, who grew up to become a literature scholar in her own right, did not find out about the book until several decades later, and becomes outraged by the erotic claim of the book written about her. She decides to tell her own story, and confront Eliade. As a Tagore scholar, she accepts an invitation to a lecture at University of Chicago in 1972, and shows up at the office of Mircea Eliade unannounced, and confronts him, 42 years after their supposed affair.

The recounting of the affair and the confrontation becomes her 1974 best-selling book, Na Hanyate, or It does not Die (literal meaning, It can not be killed, referring to the soul). She successfully blocks English translation of both books until 1993, after her death.

I've read La Nuit Bengali when I was a teenager, and loved the book. Despite attempts by my good friend, Shatil, I never read her side of the story, which denies the physical nature of the affair, but acknowledges how she felt as a Bengali girl in the 1930s embarking on a love affair in their own home, and how she carried a torch for him for so many years.

I'll have to look for this book now next time I'm in Dhaka.