The international press hounded him to the Taj hotel in Bombay, trying to fathom the tall, dusky, reclusive Sonali Dasgupta. Both books gracefully trace the authors' doomed love affair and its emotional aftermath.When the renowned Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini left the gorgeous Ingrid Bergman for an unknown Bengali woman he met on a sojourn in India in the late 1950s, the world was shocked. Together they detonate the classic bipolarities: East-West, life-art, woman-man."-Richard Eder, New York Newsday An impassioned plea for truth."-Anita Desai, New Republic Maitreyi is entirely, disarmingly open about her emotions. "Recreates, with extraordinary vividness, the 16-year-old in love that she had been. Taken together they provide an unusually touching story of young love unable to prevail against an opposition whose strength was tragically buttressed by the uncertainties of a cultural divide."-Isabel Colegate, New York Times Book Review
"In two novels written forty years apart, a man and a woman tell stories of their love.
Read together with Eliade's Bengal Nights, Devi's "romance" is a powerful study of what happens when the oppositions between innocence and experience, enchantment and disillusion, and cultural difference and colonial arrogance collide. On its own, It Does Not Die is a fascinating story of cultural conflict and thwarted love. Amid a tangle of misunderstandings, between a European man and an Indian girl, between student and teacher, husband and wife, father and daughter, she describes a romance unfolding in the face of cultural differences but finally succumbing to cultural constraints. When their secret romance was discovered, Devi's father banished the young Eliade from their home.Īgainst a rich backdrop of life in an upper-caste Hindu household, Devi powerfully recreates the confusion of an over-educated child simultaneously confronting sex and the differences, not only between European and Indian cultures, but also between her mother's and father's view of what was right. They were also, as it turned out, deeply taken with each other. "We were two good exhibits in his museum," Devi writes. Proud of her intelligence, Maitreyi Devi's father had provided her with a fine and, for that time, remarkably liberal education - and encouraged his brilliant foreign student, Eliade, to study with her. In part a counter to Eliade's fantasies, the book is also a moving account of a first love fraught with cultural tensions, of false starts and lasting regrets. More than forty years passed before Devi read Bengal Nights, the novel Eliade had fashioned out of their encounter, only to find small details and phrases, even her given name, bringing back episodes and feelings she had spent decades trying to forget. Precocious, a poet, a philosopher's daughter, Maitreyi Devi was sixteen years old in 1930 when Mircea Eliade came to Calcutta to study with her father.
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