India step by step – 3 – Maytrei Devi
Day 3,026, 12:55
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Published in India 
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by
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by Patanjali
Oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ
First of all, those steps are recalling of my first encounters with India and the ideas that arose from those encounters. It is not in my intention to make statements or to judge how things are, or was, in India, just to express my perceptions and to ask you to comment.
Maytrei Devi might be pretty unknown in India, but she was the daughter of Surendranath Dasgupta and the favorite of Rabindranath Tagore , writing her first poem at 16.
As you could imagine she was born in West Bengal and study in Kolkata, but she was, also, an activist for the rights of women’s in India, founding the Council for the Promotion of Communal Harmony in 1964 and being vice-president of All-India Women’s Coordinating Council.
She received Sahitya Akademi Award in the year 1976 for her novel Na Hanyate.
Yet, she get very well known in Romania, because a novel written by Mircea Eliade. In Romanian the novel title is Maytrei and in English translation it is Bengal Nights – the movie casted Hugh Grant in the Alan role and Gayatri played by Supriya Pathak.
This novel induct the feelings and atmosphere on India, at the end of the century, beginning of the new one, more or less like Gora of Tagore. However, was considered in the west as a new Love Myth and have been compared to the stories of Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, etc.
MIrcea Eliade was the intellectual leader of the generation between the world wars, in Romania, and later he became a sort of father of the History of Religions, that he teach in US, especially Chicago University.
MIrcea Eliade and Maytrei Devi, many ages after them ... story.
To explain how it was to read this novel, you must first understand it happen in a communist eastern European country in which life was, more or less, like in today North Corea.
No TV, nor Radio, except the speech of the leader and the Party ideology.
Not much food in the shops, nor electricity or heat in the winter.
So, without internet or FB, we escape in the books, and we read a lot of them, trying to find ideas and a landscape from the reality, in which we have been forced to live.
It was also hard to have a good book and, if one of the friends group got one, all the rest read it and, then, we meet and talk about it, generally to a chai (it was no coffee on the shops) and a cigar.
Now, the novel is a fiction, how the author claim (and this was he’s defence he used against the scandal that the sexual allegation he introduce in the book, regarding the relation between an European and one of the girls of he’s host), but she reproduce pretty much the real experience of Mircea Eliade in India.
He arrived in India very young, after the college he study a little in Italy (with Papini) and then get an invitation to study in India.
He stay about 3 years in India and returned in Romania only because he’s father, a high ranked officer in Romania army asked him to come back for military service, because otherwise he dishonoured the family name.
In the last year in India, he really began the practice of Yoga, in an Ashram. Unfortunately he never finished the practice (not even restart it).
However, the novel was describing the life in India, and it was so … interesting, with other lights and scents, with another culture, that seem to be so interesting, somehow wild and dark, somehow sweet and luring, but above all, with concepts and ideas that could enlighten.
Sure, the story line, which was basically a love story, lead to a lot of interpretation and relations of a strange type (different from usual, to say so) in my generation.
For example, in the novel it is a scene with the little sister of Maytrei loving a tree, the one in the courtyard of the house, and this lead to a countless links with ancient Europeans cults and customs, related to nature (today space of Romania and Bulgaria was the house of Dionysos - Bacchus and Orfeus in ancient Greek mythology).
From my point of view, it was another major step on my walk toward India.
Question / problem of the day is :
Love is an incentive or an hindrance for a good life ?
Sure, love could be an objective of life in herself, and in this case she is the aim, not the problem, but ancient Greeks used to say that a man in love is a kind of mad person, lacking the sense of reason and behaving … strangely.
Eager to hear your opinions …
Meri shubhkaamanaaye aapke saath hai !
First of all, those steps are recalling of my first encounters with India and the ideas that arose from those encounters. It is not in my intention to make statements or to judge how things are, or was, in India, just to express my perceptions and to ask you to comment.
Maytrei Devi might be pretty unknown in India, but she was the daughter of Surendranath Dasgupta and the favorite of Rabindranath Tagore , writing her first poem at 16.
As you could imagine she was born in West Bengal and study in Kolkata, but she was, also, an activist for the rights of women’s in India, founding the Council for the Promotion of Communal Harmony in 1964 and being vice-president of All-India Women’s Coordinating Council.
She received Sahitya Akademi Award in the year 1976 for her novel Na Hanyate.
Yet, she get very well known in Romania, because a novel written by Mircea Eliade. In Romanian the novel title is Maytrei and in English translation it is Bengal Nights – the movie casted Hugh Grant in the Alan role and Gayatri played by Supriya Pathak.
This novel induct the feelings and atmosphere on India, at the end of the century, beginning of the new one, more or less like Gora of Tagore. However, was considered in the west as a new Love Myth and have been compared to the stories of Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, etc.
MIrcea Eliade was the intellectual leader of the generation between the world wars, in Romania, and later he became a sort of father of the History of Religions, that he teach in US, especially Chicago University.
MIrcea Eliade and Maytrei Devi, many ages after them ... story.
To explain how it was to read this novel, you must first understand it happen in a communist eastern European country in which life was, more or less, like in today North Corea.
No TV, nor Radio, except the speech of the leader and the Party ideology.
Not much food in the shops, nor electricity or heat in the winter.
So, without internet or FB, we escape in the books, and we read a lot of them, trying to find ideas and a landscape from the reality, in which we have been forced to live.
It was also hard to have a good book and, if one of the friends group got one, all the rest read it and, then, we meet and talk about it, generally to a chai (it was no coffee on the shops) and a cigar.
Now, the novel is a fiction, how the author claim (and this was he’s defence he used against the scandal that the sexual allegation he introduce in the book, regarding the relation between an European and one of the girls of he’s host), but she reproduce pretty much the real experience of Mircea Eliade in India.
He arrived in India very young, after the college he study a little in Italy (with Papini) and then get an invitation to study in India.
He stay about 3 years in India and returned in Romania only because he’s father, a high ranked officer in Romania army asked him to come back for military service, because otherwise he dishonoured the family name.
In the last year in India, he really began the practice of Yoga, in an Ashram. Unfortunately he never finished the practice (not even restart it).
However, the novel was describing the life in India, and it was so … interesting, with other lights and scents, with another culture, that seem to be so interesting, somehow wild and dark, somehow sweet and luring, but above all, with concepts and ideas that could enlighten.
Sure, the story line, which was basically a love story, lead to a lot of interpretation and relations of a strange type (different from usual, to say so) in my generation.
For example, in the novel it is a scene with the little sister of Maytrei loving a tree, the one in the courtyard of the house, and this lead to a countless links with ancient Europeans cults and customs, related to nature (today space of Romania and Bulgaria was the house of Dionysos - Bacchus and Orfeus in ancient Greek mythology).
From my point of view, it was another major step on my walk toward India.
Question / problem of the day is :
Love is an incentive or an hindrance for a good life ?
Sure, love could be an objective of life in herself, and in this case she is the aim, not the problem, but ancient Greeks used to say that a man in love is a kind of mad person, lacking the sense of reason and behaving … strangely.
Eager to hear your opinions …
Meri shubhkaamanaaye aapke saath hai !
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