ABSTRACT
A European living in India in the 1930s, Mircea Eliade, the author of Bengal Nights, was a student of Maitreyi ’s father, and later became a reputed Professor of Religion at the University of Chicago. In representing Maitreyi through his Oriental fantasy, Eliade obscures the violence of colonialism as well as the violations entailed in the constructions of the native woman. Upon reading his narrative for the first time after more than forty years and feeling betrayed by its descriptions, Devi writes her own version, which does not deny her love for him but is attentive to the tensions and transgressions of a cross-racial romance. Because the romance between Maitreyi and Alaine enters the forbidden zone on racial, spatial, and political levels, it becomes transgressive on several fronts. The novel ends with Alaine’s inability to meet Maitreyi and is peppered with information about the regular beatings inflicted on Maitreyi by her father.
