Eliade kept the promise as long as he was alive. When Maitreyi Devi found out about the book, she wrote to Eliade and extracted a promise that he would not allow the book to be translated into English. Much later, Eliade would write about his experience in a novel and it was an instant hit in Romania. When Maitreyi Devi’s father found out about the relationship, he sent Eliade away. Legends say, Mircea Eliade had come to India to study under Maitreyi Devi’s father, and the young couple was infatuated with each other. The real life inspiration of the character played by Pathak, called Gayatri, Maitreyi Devi, had lot of objections about the film, as the film was ostensibly laced with orientalism. The film was based on an autobiographical novel, ‘The Bengali Nights’ (1933) by Romanian novelist Mircea Eliade. There’s another film, ‘The Bengali Night’ (1988), starring Hugh Grant and Supriya Pathak. It’s the film that gave a break to Satyajit Ray.
The first film comes to mind is Jean Renoir’s The River (Le Fleuve, 1951). Today’s Kolkata is filled with the relics of the colonial past than any other city in India, including Delhi - from Victoria memorial to all those grand buildings on the banks Hoogley to Park Street, everywhere.Ĭalcutta has also inspired a number of foreign films, a long time before Danny Boyle and Hollywood. And you can still see vestiges of it, spread across the City of Joy, the eternal city. Moving the capital to New Delhi was a political decision, Calcutta was still the darling. It was the first capital of British India, and remained their first love. Calcutta was, and perhaps will be always be the essence of what British Raj was.
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