Bengal Nights: A Novel

Bengal Nights: A Novel

Mircea Eliade

Language: English

Pages: 184

ISBN: 0226204197

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Set in 1930s Calcutta, this is a roman á clef of remarkable intimacy. 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.

Offered the hospitality of a senior Indian colleague, Alain grasps at the chance to discover the authentic India firsthand. He soon finds himself enchanted by his host's daughter, the lovely and inscrutable Maitreyi, a precocious young poet and former student of Tagore. 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. This erotic passion plays itself out in Alain's thoughts long after its bitter conclusion. In hindsight he sets down the story, quoting from the diaries of his disordered days, and trying to make sense of the sad affair.

A 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. At once horrifying and deeply moving, Eliade's story repeats the patterns of European engagement with India even as it exposes and condemns them. Invaluable for the insight it offers into Eliade's life and thought, it is a work of great intellectual and emotional power.

"Bengal Nights is forceful and harshly poignant, written with a great love of India informed by clear-eyed understanding. But do not open it if you prefer to remain unmoved by your reading matter. It is enough to make stones weep.

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about to arrive in my room. I could not believe I would never again see her here, at my side, ready to undress as soon as I had closed the shutters, ready to kiss me and to cry with joy. lt was impossible that after just two or three weeks of love, Maitreyi was to be taken from me. Alone in the darkness, I visualized every detail ofher naked body, saw her in each one ofher lover's postures. I forgot the torments I had endured because ofher, the agonising doubts, and I felt growing inside me a

against the safety barrier, watching the yellowish, muddy water as it flowed past - a little dizziness and then I would be ready . . . The film over, I played it again, and again, until I dozed off at dawn. Harold woke me: someone was on the telephone for me. I tore down the hall like a lunatic, in my pyjamas. I recognized Maitreyi's voice at once. Like a man dying of thirst who is given fresh water, I drank in her every word. I was afraid of replying, of being overheard by Harold or another

wretched thousands who love and who forget and who die without ever having considered anything as definitive, eternal. A few weeks earlier I had felt so enslaved by my passion, so certain of its omnipotence! But perhaps life itself, like the story of my passion, is nothing but an enormous joke? I interrogated myself in this way because I was frightened to acknowledge the immensity, the power, of my love for M I R CEA ELIADE Maitreyi. Without doubt, Jenny's kisses had profoundly dis­ gusted me.

I asked the poor girl. "I wanted you to love me also, as you loved Maitreyi," she replied, looking at me with her blue, expressionless eyes. I said nothing. Was such a thirst for illusion possible? Such a desire for love? Yet I think she knew that I could never love her, not even with a carnal love. "You told me how much you loved her and I thought of myself, alone and unhappy. I wanted to cry." I left her room at dawn, atrociously rational. She lay sleeping on the bed ; its indescribable

moments, torn between admiration and sadness, a mild sadness that was per­ haps regret that I could not see .Maitreyi in reality and also fear M I R CEA E L IADE 21 that I would indeed have to see - and speak - to her again soon. Harold's presence suddenly seemed to me as displeasing and scandalous as a blasphemy. I did not understand this bizarre impression. It was certainly not a question of any love or respect that I had for Maitreyi - I took her for a vain Bengali, odd, contemptuous of

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