Bengal Nights by Mircea Eliade (Carcanet Press,
Manchester: 1993)
English Translation (1993) by Catherine Spencer from the 1950 French translation. Originally published in Rumanian (1933).
Film version, La Nuit Bengali, directed by Nicolas Klotz (1988) - see synopsis of storyline at end of this review.
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et in Calcutta in the 1930’s, this autobiographical novel by one of the 20th century's foremost scholars of religion, is a poignant, penetrating and powerful exploration of cross-cultural encounter. Considered quite apart from any value this novel may or may not have as a text for the academic study of religions, its romantic, sometimes almost erotic, narrative makes compelling reading. Had Eliade never again written a single word, this book would still represent an enduring and valuable contribution to the field he dominated for three decades or so.
[Her] nakedness seemed to surpass all human beauty, to partake in the divine … Stretched out on my white sheet, she resembled a bronze statue. (p 111).
Eliade went on to write such religious studies’ classics as Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958), The Sacred and the Profane (1959) and to edit the multi-volumed Encyclopaedia of Religion (1987). He spent about four years in India studying at Calcutta University. While in India, he began to formulate some of the concepts that feature in his later academic work, such as ‘sacred place’, ‘cosmic religion’, ‘homo religiosus’. Eliade believed that homo sapiens are inherently ‘religious’ and that similar symbols and patterns repeat themselves across the religious landscape, within different cultures and religious systems. Peasant societies especially presented rich fields for research into religious symbolism, practice and beliefs. That which is sacred is sacred because it ‘manifests itself’ (1959: 11).
Eliade also believed that, while the ‘Indian experience alone could not reveal the universal man’ (Kitagawa, in Eliade, 1987 5: 87), Indian religions could help the West regain its own lost sense of the spiritual. This notion, shared by such Westerners as Carl Jung, the Theosophists and the Boston Transcendentalists also informed much of what is often called ‘neo-Hinduism’ – that is, the Hinduism of Swami Vivekananda, among others. When Alain speaks of the ‘death of the white world’ (p 103), he is probably voicing the view that the East is spiritually more alive than the West, even if the West is technologically the more advanced. In the novel, Alain, a young Frenchman, reflects on his own love affair with Maitreyi, the beautiful daughter of his Indian superior, Mr Sen, ‘the first Bengali engineer to have won an award from Edinburgh University’ (3). Although not a member of the ruling British elite, Alain shares many of their colonial assumptions. For example, he is convinced of his own intellectual superiority as a rational man, especially as he ventures further into the Assamese jungle where Sen puts him in charge of a railway construction team.
The deeper I ventured into this wild domain, the more consuming became a hitherto unconscious notion of my superiority (15).
Anglo-Indians, who could only travel third class, were of a lower status because ‘their mastery of the language [Hindustan] actually ‘lowered them in the eyes of their subordinates’ (4). Since Alain ‘spoke badly, with a deplorable accent’ his ‘superiority’ was indisputable! Alain hoped to be of ‘use’ in India (5); as a young man ‘dedicated to science’ he was ‘bringing civilization’ with him (158). As a child, he had thought of becoming a missionary (2). In several passages, Alain contrasts his own rational, civilized mind with Indians’ and India’s irrationality and primitiveness:
Civilized people …. were simple, innocent and clear ….[Indians] all nurtured in the recesses of their beings a whole impenetrable history and mythology. How deep, complex and unintelligible they seemed (93).
Alain describes Maitreya’s thinking as ‘primitive’ and ‘irrational’ (35, 120). This was a common colonial assumption – India was a complex, complicated, colourful and immensely interesting place that could be enjoyed by the Westerner, whose help in imposing order and discipline was all that prevented total chaos (see my notes on Kipling’s Kim). Like many colonial officials, Alain also had some scholarly or literary aspirations:
I wanted to unearth the aesthetic and ethical life of these people and each day I collected anecdotes, took photographs, drew up genealogies (15).
This might reflect Eliade’s own interest in peasant societies. Alain thought that he might perhaps write a novel based on his experiences in Assam, recounting the ‘encounter of this ancient world with our modern world’ into which previously only ethnologists had ventured (15). Falling ill with malaria, Alain finds himself back in Calcutta, convalescing in hospital where he is visited not only his manager, Mr Sen but also by Maitreya. Sen invites him to leave his lodgings and live with his family:
It was my wife’s idea … you are so weak from your illness. And you will save a great deal of money … (p 23).
Alain had visited Sen’s house on one previous occasion, when he had helped a friend, Lucien Metz, research for a book. He reflects that never before, in two years in India, had he been curious enough ‘to enter the house of a Bengali family, to penetrate their private lives, to admire their works of art, if not their souls’ (6). He had been pleasantly surprised:
Rooted to the spot, I stood gazing at the living-room as though I had at that very moment disembarked in India (6).
He had seen Maitreya twice before and recalls having though her rather ugly (1). Yet already he felt that she was ‘connected in some way’ to his ‘most fugitive thoughts and desires’ (2).
Realizing that the life he was living in India (partying with his mainly Anglo-Indian friends) could be lived just as easily anywhere else in the world, this unexpected invitation represented an interesting opportunity to explore a ‘magical’, ‘fascinating’ and ‘mysterious’ world, which, to his knowledge, ‘no white man … had ever experienced at source’ (23). Already alarmed at the possibility of some sort of relationship between their friend and an Indian girl, Alain’s Anglo-Indian companions start to express their disapproval:
‘So, Alain! That’s you lost, my boy, said Gertie. ‘But she isn’t ugly at all’, said Clara. ‘Only, she seems dirty, like all these Negroes. What on earth does she put in her hair? (26)
This is one of several references in the text to Indians as ‘negroes’ or as ‘blacks’. Harold (himself born in India) calls Bengali women ‘dirty’ and ‘disgusting’ (2).
Life in Sen’s house fulfils its promise. Alain finds it immensely interesting and keeps notes of each new experience in his diary, as if he were an anthropologist or a social scientist practicing participant observation. Learning that Chabu, the Sen’s younger daughter, offers biscuits to a tree, he writes, ‘A revelation: Chabu, a pantheistic soul. She makes no distinction between her own feelings and those of inanimate objects’ ( 35). Mrs Sen especially goes out of her way to make him comfortable. However, he is shy and cautious towards Maitreya, ‘frightened of violating some part of the obscure ceremonial that governs the behaviour of an Indian’ (29). Maitreya writes poetry (her volume, Uddhita,is critically acclaimed) and is a disciple of Rabindranath Tagore. She had spent ‘every summer except the last at Shantiniketan, staying with the poet’s family, in his own house’ (86). The ‘veneration and filial devotion’ she felt for her guru, who would ‘stroke her hair’ while they sat alone on the terrace at night, appears to have developed into what might perhaps be described as a ‘esoteric’ relationship with the famous poet, who ‘told her that it was in fact a manifestation of Love’ (80).
He had asked her to stay pure for the rest of her life, to write poetry, to love, to be faithful to him and never to forget him (81).
Alain feels that Maitreya’s devotion to Tagore was less than innocent and stood in the way of his own desire for her. He calls Tagore that ‘disgusting, old charlatan … with his libidinous mysticism’ (p 81) Despite his own sense of foreboding, Alain is increasingly attracted to Maitreya. Events conspire to allow their spending more and more time in each other’s company, so much so that Alain thought the Sen’s were encouraging their friendship with a view to marriage.
These obvious attempts to bind us in friendship … began to disconcert me more and more and then to make me suspicious. At times, I wondered if my hosts were not happy to marry me to Maitreya. Yet such a project was surely impossible: they would have lost everything – their caste, their reputation (41).
Preparations are being made for our marriage – I am certain of it. New proof appears every day. Mrs Sen … cocoons me in maternal warmth … Mantu wants me to call him ‘Uncle’ and Lilu ‘Aunt’, even though she is only 17 years old. It is all very amusing.
On one occasion, when the Sen’s think that Alain had ridiculed the institution of marriage, they treat him so coldly that he felt he had become a ‘stranger in [the] house where [he] had known the most sincere affection, the most authentic Indian hospitality’ (57).
In fact, Alain was misreading the Sen’s intentions. They wanted him to be Maitreya’s brother, not her lover:
You must love him as a brother. Father wants to adopt him. When father retires, we will all go back to Alain’s country with him. With our money, we will be able to live like rajahs. In his country, there are no revolutions, and the whites are not evil like the English here [Mrs Sen to Maitreya] (90).
Despite the inherent difficulty of the situation (several members of the household appear to be spying on them) Alain and Maitreya become lovers. After their secret engagement (pp 108 –9) they spend night after night in sexual passion, which more than proves for Alain the truth of what one of his Bengali friends had told him, that ‘a young virgin becomes on her wedding night a skilful and perfect lover’ (60). Alain writes:
This young girl, who knows nothing of love, had no fear of it … she had almost nothing of prudery, finding a total sensuality in each posture (113).
Indeed, there seemed to be something ‘divine’ about their love-making, ‘while I retained my lucidity, handling my experience of love with rationality, she gave herself up to it as though it had a divine origin, as though the first contact of her virginal body with that of a man were some supernatural event’ (96).
Aware now that Sen would never agree to their marriage, the couple plot various scenarios that might nonetheless allow this, including eloping, Maitreya’s rape and Alain’s conversion to Hinduism. ‘They would never accept you as my husband. They expect something else from you’, says Maitreya. When, to test her reaction, Maitreya tells Mrs Sen that Alain had formed an attachment to one of her friends but did not know how to go about asking for her hand in marriage, her mother replies: ‘Such marriages are born of nothing more than sentimental fantasy… and could bring no lasting happiness.’ Only matches ‘tempered by tradition – in other words, by the family’ could bear good fruit (123). When Sen hears talk of Alain converting, he is sceptical:
When he heard me speak of conversion, Narindra Sen was visibly angry. I should not hurl myself into a religion simply because I was charmed by its novelty and its curious rituals … If he remained faithful to Hinduism, it was only because if he gave it up, he would lose his position in society (101).
Sen described himself as ‘not orthodox’(35).
In the end, it is little Chabu (sick for some time) who brings about the tragic end of their relationship. Apparently jealous that everyone loves Maitreya and not her, Chabu complains to her mother that Alain had kissed Maitreya. Immediately, stiffly, politely but brooking no discussion, Mr Sen (himself on sick leave) tells Alain that he must leave, ‘an energetic lad like you will always fall on his feet. If you leave at once you will be able to find a room before lunch’ (135). Alain never sees Maitreya again, although the end pages of the book do record some final communication between the two. In fact, it is Maitreya who initiates communication but Sen accuses Alain of breaking his promise to cut of all contact. As a result, Alain loses his job. He is so despondent that he contemplates suicide. Instead, he sets off walking aimlessly into the Bengali countryside for several days. Then, for a little short of a year, he retreats to a bungalow in the Himalayas, spending the not inconsiderable sum he had saved while living with the Sen’s. It is now that he writes the novel, attempting to make sense of his feelings for Maitreya and of what had occurred between them. He hears that her father punished Maitreya for bringing shame onto the family and decides that any more contact with her will only worsen the situation. ‘What is the good of starting it all again’, he writes, ‘it can only end in tears and madness’ (172). Finally, Alain leaves India for a new job in Singapore.
Of particular interest to religious studies’ students are several passages that describe a profound sense of the sacredness of place and of moment; see for example:
The rational being inside me was floundering in the unreality and the sanctity of our presence at the edge of that silent lake … A miraculous tranquillity, that did not belong to this world – yet which manifested in me a flaming power – inhabited me (99).
Alain became increasingly ‘enchanted’ by Indian life (54), learning many social rituals (69) from Maitreya. He also learnt Bengai and actually began to take pride in his linguistic proficiency: ‘My efforts to speak only in Bengali, the unforced interest I had in the ceremony [Mantu’s wedding] all won me a genuine popularity’ (54) which sounds like an anthropologist delighting in his ability to blend into the culture he or she is researching.
I ate with my hands in the Indian fashion, much to the surprise and delight of the other diners, who had already heard me speak in proficient Bengali (153)
Earlier, as noted, Alain had thought his inability to speak Hindi very well indicated his social superiority! Now, his enchantment with Indian life includes spiritual and religious traditions. He becomes interested in Vaishnavism, which he describes as ‘one of the most sublime religions’ (74). With Maitreya, he regularly visited Vivekananda’s ashram at Bulurmath, especially when some celebration was being held there (100). He spoke about converting to Hinduism. Harold had already started a rumour to this effect (68). Alain tells Harold that the ‘truest Christianity … had its home in India, in a nation that has the most serene relationship with God’, although he could never completely shake the notion that thus ‘Hindu brand of Christianity’ had its ‘origin in his love for Maitreya, nothing more’ (103). Now, he could only ‘love what she loved – in music, literature, Bengali poetry’ (91). He even sat with Maitreya listening to a pundit comment on ‘“Shakuntala” for hours at a stretch. Even though he did not understand the Sanksrit, he became captivated by the translation. He tried his own hand at translating ‘several vaishnava poems in the original’ (91). Alain started to support swarjism (self rule), condemning
the British out of hand and every new brutality reported by the newspapers sent [him] into a rage; whenever [he] passed Europeans in the street, [he] looked at them with disgust (102).
He describes his new superior at work, an English educated Bengali who ‘spurned Indian tradition’ as ‘totally ridiculous’ (114). Having entered Indian life, he believed that he had ‘eschewed civilization, torn it roots and all from [his] soul’ (107). What he calls his ‘new life’ is so ‘rich’ that he could ‘fill a notebook on each of those days’ (91). He considered this new existence ‘sacred’ (69), although he was by no means uncritical of everything he experienced. He feels ‘amusement when [he] saw what a tangled growth of superstitions lay in Maitreya’s mind, in her love: Rhythm, Karma, Ancestors … How many Powers will have to be consulted and invoked if we were to be certain of marriage’ (105). Later, too, a visit to Belurmath fails to offer him any comfort,
‘these people [the monks] live to divinely to descend from their state of perfect, supreme serenity. Their atrocious ideals of detachment puts them in another world to that inhabited by the poor human being, who suffers, who struggles in his experience of life (151).
He is also critical, towards the end of the book, of what he calls ‘Indian pseudo-culture, so fashionable in Anglo-Saxon countries’ which sounds like a reference to Theosophy: ‘All the popular superstitions about a mystical, magical India, all the nonsense of Ramacharaka’s books’ (165). Alain describes Ramacharaka as ‘an English trickster’. Books by Yogi Ramacharika, published by the Yoga Publication Society of Chicago, are still in print. The Yogi, who helped to popularise Yoga in the West, appears to have been a pseudonym for an American lawyer, Willian Walker Atkinson (1862 – 1932) who never himself set foot in India (see http://users.pandora.be/ananda/ramach.htm). Some sources say that the Yogi was born in Hull (UK).
On the other hand, Alain speaks of a sense of mystery, including, ‘I felt besides me the presence of an impenetrable, incomprehensible soul, as chimerical and sacred as the soul of that other Maitreya, the solitary figure of the Upanishads’ (100).
The novel’s descriptions of life in a Bengali household ring with authenticity. For example, the roles played by Mantu, Sen’s cousin, and Khokha, the poor relative who comes to ‘take advantage of the hospitality during the wedding feast’ (p 56) but stays on indefinitely. Khokha tries to act as a go-between Alain and Maitreya after Alain’s expulsion from the house, yet also manages to profit from this role, ‘My mother is very ill and I have no money to give her. I was thinking of borrowing something from you, while waiting for my money from the Bengal Film Company’ (144). Khokha kept sending scripts to film companies, which were returned with rejection slips. It is Khokha’s sister, a widow, who ‘continually advised Maitreya not to let herself be intimidated by the laws of caste and family but to act on her feelings’ (p 110) (her own marriage had been very unhappy).
Some Points for Reflection
Does Alain take advantage of a younger, naiiver girl or is Maitreya as much in control of her action and emotions as Alain?
Was Alain’s interest in Bengali culture genuine or a passing symptom of his romantic attachment to Maitreya? A former colleague of mine told me that for a while she had confused love of a culture with attraction to a particular person from that culture. In her case, this resulted in a failed marriage. However, she remains a teacher of the language and culture concerned. We do not know whether Alain’s interest in things Indian survived the end of his affair, although we do know that Eliade continued to be very interested in India after his own return to the West. Written within a decade of E. M Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), it is interesting to compare and contrast these two novels. Both describe colonial attitudes of superiority. Both have references to the swarjist movement, though Bengal Nights is perhaps a little more sympathetic towards India’s aspirations for independence. Fileding, in the earlier novel, never really penetrates Indian society very deeply, in contrast to Alain, who does. Both novels explore the possibility of cross-cultural friendship, which does not in the end result in much happiness in either text. Has anything been lost in translation through three languages? There is an interesting reference on p 151 to children calling Alain 'white monkey' - children in Bengali usually shout 'lal banor' (red monkey) after Europeans!
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© Clinton Benett 2002
Clinton Bennett
worked in Bangladesh and has also spent some time in the Indian state of Bangla (West Bengal. He has lived in Bengali households, including that of his parents-in-law.