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 Inter-racial relationships pique my curiosity, as I navigate my own thriving marriage with a Westerner. Reacting to Eliade’s book as though it were about a woman like myself, I felt flabbergasted and horrified at first, and then felt contemptuous and indignant that this book could be considered “literature.” It appeared to be blatant colonial-era prejudice and appropriation veiled as romance, and seemed to have been published in North America to capitalize on the fame of “the world-renowned scholar.” Eliade had perhaps come to India to transcend the Judeo-Christian sexual repression in himself, which experience he could only attempt to describe in fiction, rendering his object Maitreyi into a caricature of a tantric goddess, transforming her inexplicably from virgin to sex queen in his own unrealistic, self-indulgent fantasy. It took me weeks to finish reading the book; I would have abandoned it were it not for Maitreyi Devi’s “response”, which I was bent on reading.

I read through Devi’s It Does Not Die in one sitting. It overwhelmed me. An Indian woman had written a book with a very sure voice — a book filled with accounts of her life, her desires, her interests, her biases — without embarrassment, without regrets, and without any harm having befallen her. I was riveted by the boundary-less form of her narrative, dipping in and out of poetic prose and historical reminiscence. I was amazed by the frankness with which she described her passionate feelings, her critique of her father and family, and her strong sense of self. I was exhilarated by her single-minded goal of going halfway across the world to confront a European man she hadn’t seen or heard from in forty two years, then just as passionately putting pen to paper and thoroughly discrediting his version of their relationship, without fearing the disparity in their “status.” I was struck by her honesty in maintaining that she still loved the young Eliade whom she had once known, and whom she would love always. Na Hanyate, the original title of the Bengali version of Devi’s book, is a spiritual reference, alluding to the immortality of the soul, which does not die even when the body dies. I have never read such a book written by an Indian woman from India, and especially by one of her generation. I was deeply moved and troubled. More than a “counter to Eliade’s fantasies,” It Does Not Die delineates a complex character who embraced a complex experience without posturing, without apologies or excuses, and who, unlike Eliade, had the courage to contact an old friend after scores of years.

Eliade’s novel was first published in Romanian in Bucharest in 1933 under the title Maitreyi. It was written specifically for a literary prize, following the years 1929-1931 which he spent in India as a student of philosophy under Maitreyi’s father. Maitreyi was taken to be an autobiographical novel of Eliade’s passionate, but failed, romance with a young Bengali girl. The book sold very well in Romania, garnering Eliade both fame and money. Eliade had published two novels before Maitreyi, both written while in India, but it was Maitreyi that propelled him into a literary career which ran parallel to his scholastic career for the rest of his life. As Eliade relocated himself first in Western Europe and then in the United States, interest in his novels grew alongside his scholastic reputation. Maitreyi was translated into Italian in 1945, German in 1948, French in 1950, and Spanish in 1952. An English version, however, was not commissioned until 1993, when Carcanet Press in England assigned a translation from the French.

Maitreyi Devi was sixteen in 1930 when Eliade was invited to live in her father’s house. Her “romance” with Eliade lasted a few months. When her parents realized that the two were tangling amorously, Eliade was asked to leave the DasGupta residence and ordered by Professor DasGupta never to contact Maitreyi again. At the age of twenty she was married to a Bengali man. She had two children, published volumes of poetry and prose, wrote many books on her mentor Tagore, and later in life set up orphanages for needy children.

The first that Devi heard of Eliade’s Maitreyi was from her father, who visited Europe in 1938 or 1939, informing her on his return that Eliade had dedicated a book to her. Beginning with travels in Europe in 1953, Devi ran into Romanians who, upon hearing her name, claimed to know who she was. But it was not until 1972, when a close Romanian friend of Eliade’s, Sergui al-Georghe, came to Calcutta, that Devi finally understood that Eliade had described a sexual relationship between them in his book. She subsequently had a friend translate the novel for her from the French and was shaken by his depictions.

Devi’s first written response was a series of poems in the final months of 1972, published in a slim volume titled Aditya Marichi (Calcutta: Nabajatak Printers, 1972). From a personal letter she wrote to Eliade’s translator Mac Linscott Ricketts, it becomes clear that the title, which means “Sun Rays” in Bengali, was an affectionate nick name given to Eliade by Devi’s father. “Marichi” is a play on “Mircea.” The poems reflect the turbulence she felt at dealing, at the age of fifty eight, forty-two years after the fact of their involvement, with the old passions of her youth. The titles in this book include: “Many Times Have I Thought,” “So Many Ages Have Passed,” “Let Me See You Once,” “Do Not Pull Me So,” “If We See Each Other Again, Suddenly,” “I Read Love Poems, Alone.”

In 1973, Devi arranged to be invited by the University of Chicago to give lectures on Tagore and showed up at Eliade’s office unannounced. She had several meetings with him over the two months that she was there, condensing them into the one meeting described at the end of her book.

In 1974, Na Hanyate was published in Bengali, the “response” to Eliade’s book that became It Does Not Die.

Confrontations directed by women at their male lovers interest me, as do interpersonal confrontations of most kinds. From my experience of being in a culturally mixed marriage, I know that cultural differences can have tremendous impact on behavior. My background is replete with strong taboos against confrontation — my upbringing in India contained the tacit understanding that women didn’t challenge or contradict those who held power over them.

Two of the most bitter women in my life were my grandmothers. I didn’t understand either of them as a child. I understand now that they had plenty to be angry about, plenty that made them hard-hearted and unpredictable in their affections. I fantasize about what might have been different in their lives if they had had the permission, or the option, to confront those responsible for the harsh constraints of their lives.

Maitreyi Devi was a contemporary of my grandmothers. Born in 1914, she was seventy-six when she died in 1990. For her time, she was remarkably well-educated, and she was encouraged to express herself artistically. She was already attending university and was an accomplished poet at sixteen, and a favorite of Rabindranath Tagore, whom she referred to as Gurudev (sacred teacher), following the custom of other Indians.

That she had a romance at the age of sixteen with a foreign man is remarkable enough for that era. That she may have had sexual intercourse with him or anyone else before marriage is a sign of the permission that she felt she had, to take such a risk in the face of the kinds of horrors family and society routinely had in store for women who crossed that line. The early permission to explore must have been rooted in the same conviction that directed her, forty years later, to confront the man who claimed to have ruptured her virginity.

Eliade strikes me as a solid colonial-era Indologist, in spite of the disagreements he had with other Indologists of the time. India and Indian philosophy became his personal mission, and he was rewarded throughout his lifetime for elucidating this culture to the West. He writes effusively in his autobiography (Autobiography Volume 1: Journey East, Journey West 1907-1937. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990) on the meaning of India for him: “India fascinated me, it drew me like a mystery through which I seemed to foresee my destiny…to encounter the mystery that was waiting for me somewhere in India, that mystery of which I knew nothing except that it was there for me to decipher and that in deciphering it I would at the same time reveal to myself the mystery of my own existence; I would discover at last who I was and why I wanted to be what I wanted to be, why all the things that had happened to me had happened to me…” (p.153)

A different perspective on the Eliade of those early years reveals a man obsessed with upstaging his male mentors “It was a tragic paradox that, although I had barely entered the university, I had criticized violently and alienated permanently the professor I most admired, the man I had chosen as my model and whose life and work had played an almost “magical” role in my life… it was this giant, the man in whose shadow I had yearned to grow, whom I had deeply offended. ” (p.115) “I told myself that there was something in my destiny driving me against my will to offend the very people I most admired and loved. I asked myself if it could be some strange demonic force, if I was cursed to repay with misfortune those I loved and who loved me.” (p.126)

Eliade set up the eminent scholar Professor DasGupta as his mentor in India, and then went on to offend him thoroughly by blatantly violating the guest-host and teacher-student relationship by first imagining, then acting on, the fantasy that DasGupta wanted Eliade to marry his daughter. Perhaps Maitreyi was only an incidental player caught in Eliade’s pattern of seduction, betrayal and usurpation.

When it was all over and Eliade was taking stock of his Indian encounter, this is how he rationalized it: “…I was beginning to understand the reason for the events that had provoked my breakup with Dasgupta. If ‘historical’ India were forbidden to me, the road now was opened to ‘eternal’ India. I realized also that I had to know passion, drama, and suffering before renouncing the ‘historical’ dimension of my existence and making my way toward a trans-historical, atemporal, paradigmatic dimension in which tensions and conflicts would disappear of themselves…” (p.189)

Devi writes in a letter what I too might have felt if an old boyfriend showed up as an Indologist: “Though he seems to be a great Indologist to you he has not understood Indian society at all. I do not know how he has become such a legend in Europe, his base is very weak. His outlook is as mundane as a common Westerner.” “He has a wonderful capacity to misunderstand and has always been shy to face the truth with the equanimity expected from a learned and wise man.”

Just out of curiosity, I decided to look through the reviews of the two books, to see if anyone else besides myself had been struck by the unusual nature of Devi’s book. What I found in the reviews, instead, was a kind of “contest” made out between the two books to determine which of them was better written, more truthful, more virtuous, more worldly, and so on. Many of the reviewers champion one book over the other, saying of Devi’s book, for example: “one-sided,” “self-absorbed,” “anti-intellectual arrogance,” (Carmel Berkson, “Lost Love in India”, iCunt Meetingstrippeddevi En Dating Dating Advice 400 446 Win Her Over More Meeting Stripped Devi Pinakadakila's Weblogm Meeting Stripped Devi Videos Meeting gCunt Meetingstrippeddevi En Dating Dating Advice 400 446 Win Her Over More Meeting Stripped Devi Pinakadakila's Weblogr o %E7%92%B0%E4%BF%9D%E6%84%8F%E8%AD%98%E5%AE%9A%E7%BE%A9 Photo Meeting Stripped Devi