"Really, Alain, how could you fall for a Bengali? They're disgusting. I was born here. I know these women better than you do. They're dirty, and there's nothing doing, believe me, no question of love! That girl will never look at you."

I read this book two years ago, and my feelings about it haven't changed for the better. How to describe it best? I think I've asked myself that multiple times over this time. How do I put it into words how awful I felt about this book. How it only proved the colonial mentality of Eliade's and not so much about the customs of our land, that Eliade merely made a mockery of it all, calling it all savagery?



The racism in the story is blatant, what's worse is that hate is thinly veiled as love. The back-story, as you all know, is of his time in India and his relationship with Surendranath Dasgupta and his family, notably his daughter Maitreyi Devi. Thinly veiled I mean, as the protagonist is called Alain, while the heroine is insulted repeatedly on her lack of chastity, her customs are reduced to nothing in writing, there is no effort made to hide her identity. Every detail, right down to her name and her apprenticeship under Tagore were openly and indiscreetly given and described as someone inferior.



Even in ending, after being shunned from Maitreyi's household, our supposed hero is in the mountains making love to a Jewish woman and the racism is still blatant, as he spitefully talks of sex with a Jewess as a stomach-churning experience. I don't want to waste any more words writing about this. It is like reading some 20th century pseudo-intellectual hate-porn disguised as romance. Someday, I'll get around to reading Na Hanyate, or so I hope.