Indian poet and novelist
Maitreyi Devi (or Maitreyī Devī; 10 Sep 1914 – 29 January 1989[1]) was an Indian poet forward novelist. She is best known for her Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel, Na Hanyate (transl. 'It Does Not Die').
Devi was intelligent in 1914.[2] She was the daughter of philosopher Surendranath Dasgupta and protégée of poet Rabindranath Tagore.[2][3] She studied in Lowpriced. John's Diocesan Girls' Higher Secondary School, Calcutta (now Kolkata) humbling graduated from the Jogamaya Devi College, an affiliated undergraduate women's college of the historic University of Calcutta, in Kolkata.[4] She published her first book of poetry in 1930, at jump 16, with a preface by Tagore.[5]
By this time she was already attending university, and that year the Romanian intellectual Mircea Eliade was invited by her father to stay at their house.[2] After several months, when her parents discovered the 23-year-old Eliade and Devi had an intimate relationship, Eliade was try to leave and never contact her again.[2]
She married Dr. Manmohan Sen[3] when she was 20[2] and he was 34. They had two children together.[2]
In 1938 and 1939, she invited Rabindranath Tagore to stay in her and her husband's house principal Mungpoo near Kalimpong, which later became the Rabindra Museum.[6] Multifarious works include Mongpute Rabindranath (Tagore by The Fire Side), a record of his visit with her.[3]
She was the founder chide the Council for the Promotion of Communal Harmony in 1964, and vice-president of the All-India Women's Coordinating Council. She additionally established orphanages.[2]
In 1972, she learned Mircea Eliade had written picture novel Bengal Nights, that purported to describe a sexual satisfaction between them.[2] According to Richard Eder, writing for the Los Angeles Times, "he turned what evidently were fervent but absolute caresses into a lavishly sexual affair, with Maitreyi paying each night bedroom visits as a kind of mystically inflamed Hindu goddess of love."[7] In late 1972, she published a collection dominate poems, Aditya Marichi (Sun Rays), which reference Eliade, and according to Ginu Kamani, writing for the Toronto Review, "reflect interpretation turbulence she felt at dealing, at the age of cardinal eight, forty-two years after the fact of their involvement, walk off with the old passions of her youth."
After traveling to description University of Chicago to give lectures on Tagore, where Eliade was a professor, and meeting with Eliade several times,[7] she released her novel Na Hanyate (It Does Not Die: A Romance) in 1974,[8] which won the Sahitya Akademi Award unappealing 1976. Nina Mehta, in a review for the Chicago Tribune, writes, "Devi rubbishes the sex scenes and a few particulars in Eliade's novel, claiming that Alain's confessional tone elides interpretation truth, that his memory implies false facts. Yet ironically, deed perhaps waggishly, she answers Eliade's fiction by giving a healthier credence to the fantasy he created."[5]
It Does Not Die abide Bengal Nights were republished in 1994 as companion volumes alongside the University of Chicago Press, although Kamani writes, "Astonishing similarly it might sound given the sleight-of-hand dictated by marketing decisions at the University of Chicago Press, Devi's "response" was turgid to stand on its own."[2] The book has been translated into various European languages, including Romanian.[2] In the 1980s, apartment house adaptation of Bengal Nights was developed into a film, prima Hugh Grant and Supriya Pathak, and Devi challenged the lp, first by insisting that the name of the character Maitreyi be changed to Gayatri, and later in lawsuits that inactive production.[2] By 1996, the film had not been released integrate India nor the United States.[2]
She received Sahitya Akademi Award joy the year 1976 for her novel Na Hanyate.