Indeed, you hardly need a key to identify the characters: Eliade himself became a Frenchman called Alain, and Surendranath Dasgupta became an engineer, named Narendra Sen, but most of the other people, including Maitreyi, kept their own names.īengal Nights belongs to a popular subgenre of confessional literature. Eliade appears to have stuck closely to the facts, as he saw them. It was recently made into a film, which was less successful. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I knew that, along with the friendship of the Dasgupta family, I had lost India itself.” 4 His romance had come to an end, even if his cosmic feelings had not: he escaped to a Himalayan monastery to “find himself.”Įliade wrote up the affair as a roman à clef which had considerable success, especially in France. He had tried to live like an Indian, even to become one, and now he had been rejected, like a foreign body in a healthy organism. Eliade thought his teacher would be delighted.īut when Dasgupta found out about the affair, Eliade was told to leave the house immediately. He despised the Eurasians, or “Anglo-Indians,” whom he describes as “idiots” and “fanatics.” He did not feel he was a visitor in India: “I felt completely at home.” 3 And he fell in love with Professor Dasgupta’s teen-age daughter, Maitreyi, a talented poet already at sixteen, whose first volume was introduced by Rabindranath Tagore. As he wrote much later, after he had become a famous historian of comparative religion: “In India I discovered what I later came to refer to as cosmic religious feeling.” 1 He took to wearing a dhoti-“the apparel of the people with whom I wished to become one” 2-and eating with his hands. Dasgupta was so taken with his Romanian student that he invited him to live in his house.Įliade fell in love with India.
His purpose was to study in Calcutta under Surendranath Dasgupta, a famous historian of Indian philosophy. He was a twenty-one-year-old student of philosophy, and an aspiring novelist. In 1928 Mircea Eliade left Bucharest for India.
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