It Does Not Die: A Romance

By Maitreyi Devi

Book Overview

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. 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. It Does Not Die is Devi's response. 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.

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. "We were two good exhibits in his museum," Devi writes. They were also, as it turned out, deeply taken with each other. When their secret romance was discovered, Devi's father banished the young Eliade from their home.

Against 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. 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. On its own, It Does Not Die is a fascinating story of cultural conflict and thwarted 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.

"In two novels written forty years apart, a man and a woman tell stories of their love. . . . 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

"Recreates, with extraordinary vividness, the 16-year-old in love that she had been. . . . Maitreyi is entirely, disarmingly open about her emotions. . . . An impassioned plea for truth."-Anita Desai, New Republic

"Something between a reunion and a duel. Together they detonate the classic bipolarities: East-West, life-art, woman-man."-Richard Eder, New York Newsday

"One good confession deserves another. . . . Both books gracefully trace the authors' doomed love affair and its emotional aftermath."-Nina Mehta, Chicago Tribune

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226143651
• ISBN13: 9780226143651
• Release Date: April 1995
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A minor actor in the drama

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the early 1970's, I was assigned to shepherd visiting scholar Maitreyi Devi around during her visit there to speak on Tagore (Rabi Thakur). She requested that I take her to Mircea Eliade's Mead Theological Seminary office. What happened in Eliade's office was a bit puzzling. But several days later a Bengali faculty member told me about Eliade's book and their earlier love. I've been telling that story for thirty years. This spring I told it to another Bengali scholar at a cocktail party in Canada. He was stunned. He said, "You are in her book!" I bought the second book, and I am in it. The incident is the last chapter of "It Does Not Die" - I am the Shirley in the story. Now I have an even better story to tell.

The other side of a fascinating story

First of all, this book makes a lot more sense if you also read Mircea Eliade's "Maitreyi"... "It does not die" reveals not only a Bengali woman's views on love, marriage and life, but also the relationship between a writer and its subject. For the sensual, tragic Maitreyi from Eliade's novel reveals herself as a woman with her feet down to earth and a lot of common sense. I was charmed by her serenity and tenacity. We don't get to hear "the other side of a story" too often. This is one of the rare instances where we can meet both the literary heroine (from Eliade's novel) and the real woman, with her personality so different from what we might have expected. I could go on talking about inspiration and influences, about social norms and the ideas of "exotic beauty", but I will let you enjoy the book :)

A semi-autobiography of am emotional adolescence.

As a Bengali reader of the novel "Na Hanyate" (It Does Not Die) by Maitreyi Devi, I've got charmed with the true essence of not the story only, but the language it was written in also. To tell about the literary value, I have to tell the fluency and the story-telling style of the novel. As was associated with the family of Rabindranath Tagore, 'Ru', as the writer called herself in the novel knew how to write such a story in a descent and controlled way. The story about the love of Mircea Eliade & Maitreyi had flourished secretly quite unknowingly to her parents, who were very conservative and respected persons in the early-20th century Bengali soceity. If anybody knows the true history of that society, he can easily understand how much 'unlawful' it was to make love and then to marry in those days, even if they were Bramha in religion (which was well-known as the religion of those educated in Western culture & believed to be beyond all kinds of conservativeness). So unfortunately the affair had been public & Mircea, who was in their house as a helper to her father's work and stayed with so-called good will had been thrown away. Now starts the tragedy. Maitreyi got consolation from Tagore and then got married to another goody guy. She was happily living in her marital life. But after publishing of 'Bengal Nights', by Mircea, Ru went to him and chraged him for exploting their relation. Ru then felt that their love would not die. All the stars of night are in the depth of sunshine. I think as a chracter Ru has not correctly portrayed Mircea. What disturbed her later, was a madly work of Mircea, according to Ru. But the feelings of them are really touching to one's heart. Sometimes Ru seems to be selfish and cruel, the reader can get an easy sympathy for Mircea. But still a very good readable book indeed. Quite unforgettable affair with tragic end, one of so many in today's world even.