Mircea Eliade of 82 Ripon Street

Leaning against the walled edge, I looked down into the courtyard. I remembered the day I had seen Maitreyi stretched out on the steps, laughing - a day which had seemed to last for several years. Years had also passed since Maitreyi had come to ask me nervously, "When will my father be back, please?"... I did not understand her. She seemed a child, a primitive. Her words drew me, her incoherent thinking and her naivete enchanted me. For a long time, I was to flatter myself by think­ing of our relationship as that of civilized man and barbarian...

From BENGAL NIGHTS, Mircea Eliade

Once the ‘City of Palaces’, the ‘London of the East’, much of Calcutta – 70 years after Indian independence – is in advanced decay. The colonial buildings of the city are rotting from sheer neglect. A prime example is 82 Ripon St., formerly a large, elegant, colonial boarding house at which the great scholar of religion, Mr. Mircea Eliade, was resident during his eventful but personally tragic sojourn in the city in the late 1920s. The present writer made the journey down to Ripon St. on foot yesterday and found the residence in complete disrepair. It is still there, but now boarded up, and occupied by families of poor people who elsewhere would be described as ‘squatters’. It is a sad spectacle and underlines the melancholy story of Eliade’s time in the city. It is a story worth relating, since readers may not be aware of it.

Eliade had been invited to Calcutta by the foremost Indian scholar on Samkhya Yoga, Mr. Sarundranath Dasgupta, author of a voluminous and prestigious history of Indian philosophy, and one of the most important and most celebrated Indian scholars of his day. Young and brilliant, Eliade took a room at 82 Ripon St., then owned and managed by a Mrs. Perris, and from there attended Dasgupta’s lectures and received personal instruction in Indian languages. At this Eliade excelled. It is said that he acquired Sanskrit, Hindi and Bengali concurrently in a matter of months and showed such promise that Dasgupta embraced him as a protégé. Once or twice a week he would travel from Ripon Street to visit Dasgupta’s home and there began assisting the Indian scholar’s young daughter, Maitreyi Devi, herself a poetess, in the arduous task of compiling an index for her father’s masterwork.

A terrible misunderstanding followed. Dasgupta saw the European student as a vehicle for relocating his family to Europe. The political situation in India was increasingly agitated and Dasgupta needed medical care difficult to access in India. Accordingly, he set about “adopting” Eliade and approached various contacts in Europe using Eliade’s name. To this end, he invited Eliade to move from the boarding house in Ripon Street and to take up residence in the Dasgupta household in a role that Eliade described as “his favorite pupil and, in a certain sense, his adoptive son.”

Eliade, however, interpreted this gesture differently. It seemed to him that Professor Dasgupta was very deliberately grooming him as a son-in-law and that the father had engineered a situation of intimacy between Eliade and Maitreyi Devi. The two young people worked together in the family library for hours every day and spent more and more time in each other’s company. Then, as Eliade relates it, the inevitable happened, and one day their hands met over a box of index cards and both of them found it impossible to let go. They fell madly in love. Eliade was twenty-three at the time, and Maitreyi Devi sixteen. Living together in Dasgupta’s house, they began a romance which consumed both of them until, on a fateful day in September 1930, Dasgupta discovered what had been going on.

He was enraged. A huge scandal broke. Dasgupta’s own plans came undone. He believed his hospitality had been betrayed. The terrible force of Hindoo propriety had been violated by the foreigner. The very sanctity of the household itself had been violated. The aggrieved father immediately threw his “favourite pupil and adoptive son” out of his house. Crushed, shocked, heartbroken, Eliade scuttled back to Ripon Street before fleeing Calcutta altogether. The love-stricken Maitreyi Devi was shamed and eventually moved by her father into the countryside where she was made to marry a Bengali man.

The matter did not stop there, however. Repercussions – terrible repercussions - continued for many years. Most famously, Eliade later wrote a loosely fictionalized version of the events in a novel entitled Bengal Nights in which he made it clear that his relationship with Maitreyi Devi was a physical one. He portrays her coming to his room in secret in the night. This account was published in Europe but, for various reasons, did not reach Calcutta until decades later, except by rumor. Maitreyi Devi had heard that Eliade had written a novel about their love affair but she did not read it until quite late in life. When she did, in 1972, she was outraged that the novel compromised her virtue. She, in her turn, wrote a rebuttal entitled It Does Not Die, in which she vehemently denies that her romance with the foreign student was ever sexual. There are thus conflicting accounts of the romance, although both Eliade and Maitreyi Devi – who never met again – seem to have both regarded it as the great love of their life up to the day they died. It was a tragic romance of Shakespearean proportions.

Worse, though, it destroyed Dasgupta. His wife had pleaded with him on behalf of Maitreya Devi but, in the role of traditional Hindoo father, he was intractable. This left permanent tensions in his marriage and his family. The work of indexing his book was taken up by another student, a Hindoo lady, Sumara Mitra, to whom the professor drew ever closer. It seems that the scorned and vengeful daughter, Maitreyi Devi, took exception to this working relationship and accused her father of the hypocrisy of having an extra-marital affair. She returned home from the countryside to spy on her father. At one time, it is related, as Sumara approached the family home one day, Maitreyi climbed onto the rooftop and called out to the neighborhood, “Come and see what scandal is happening in our house!” She led a conspiracy against her father, and eventually convinced her brothers of her father’s misdeeds. The sons beat their father up.

Maitreyi Devi also distributed leaflets around Dasgupta’s university denouncing him as an adulterer. She set out to destroy his reputation. She was largely successful. In the process, she also destroyed his health. After a row with his wife, Dasgupta suffered a heart attack and fled the family home to be nursed by friends in a guesthouse at Sanskrit College. When he finally found the opportunity to travel to Europe – this was now after the Second World War – he was estranged from his family and in such poor health he remained bedridden in England for almost five years. Sumara Mitra fled Calcutta with him and they married – although this seems to have been for administrative reasons (and technically made Dasgupta a bigamist).

In any case, Dasgupta’s life was left in ruins. It all followed from the dreadful day he uncovered the love of Mircea Eliade and Maitryi Devi. Events left Eliade and Maitryi Devi as star-crossed lovers, but an even more savage fate befell the hostile father. Readers should be aware that, prior to these events, Professor Dasgupta was a man of extraordinary renown, and not only as a scholar. At a young age he was hailed as a “khokā bhagavān”, a “boy god” and the saint Vijay Krishna Goswami had once declared him to be in that special class of being who remember their previous lives. He was regarded as a person of great spiritual qualities. At one time, when he was young, his father had to take him away from Calcutta to protect him from the crush of people who longed to be in his presence. He was guru to many. Eliade himself, as he makes clear in his autobiography, regarded the professor as his guru, his life-teacher, and speaks of a bond that transcended earthly life. Dasgupta’s knowledge of the Hindoo philosophical tradition was unsurpassed in his generation. He was awarded several PhDs and an array of medals for high academic achievement. He was made a Commander of the Indian Empire, the highest honour of the land.

After the Eliade affair – that tragic and catalytic misunderstanding - and then the scandal involving Sumara Mitra that followed it, orchestrated, it seems, by the mortally disappointed daughter, Sarundranath Dasgupta’s reputation, like his health, was in tatters and it never recovered. He was largely forsaken by the academic world and was then forgotten. He moved to Europe on the eve of independence in circumstances of disgrace and, for whatever reason, modern India has never seen fit to restore his name to its former glory. His work, especially his multi-volume History of Indian Philosophy, endures, but it has never received the recognition it deserves. He was a man eclipsed by events. Poor Dasgupta. These days he is an obscure name from a former era.

This is the harrowing tale of human weakness that the present author had in mind when he stood outside the dilapidated shell of 82 Ripon Street in Calcutta yesterday. These are the events that defined Eliade’s twenty month visit to Calcutta. The events were a full generation ago now. They were immortalized in book and counter-book (and even in a pretty ordinary 1990s film starring Hugh Grant) but they tell a timeless story of love, loss, pride, bitterness, revenge. The pity is that it has faded so completely from the local memory. It belongs to a Calcutta that no longer exists. There seems no readiness in contemporary Calcutta to revive it. It is only because Mircea Eliade went on to become one of the great pioneering scholars of the 20th C. that these events, which are otherwise all too human, like the predations of time itself, mean anything at all.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black