Book Box: Anna Karenina to Na Hanyate: Who gets to tell a marriage story?

DCapitulum Reader,I am raging. And maladjusted. In my head up, a bazillion thoughts buzz. Ahead of me is a red traffic light. Buses, cars, autos. A food-delivery man squeezes his scooter through the gap between a car and a bus.Inside the car with me is Prince Stepan Oblonsky. His affair with his children’s governess has just been revealed through an incriminating letter. The household is in disarray because his wife has withdrawn. We see her in agony, terrified and bewildered. We see him have his toast and coffee, his calm existence disrupted a little as he has had to sleep in the library. She, by contrast, hasn’t slept at all.Just as I am giving Leo Tolstoy full marks for the skill with which he sets up this contrast, the man’s adultery as a ‘minor inconvenience’ to his life, the woman’s as an unforgivable crime, I reach the part describing Darya, the wronged wife. I am listening to the audiobook of Anna Karenina. Her once-luxuriant hair is thin, he tells us, her face is worn. Nowhere do we get an equivalent description of Stepan – instead we hear he is very agreeable and liked by all, never mind he has gambling debts and presumes upon his relations for his position. The traffic starts but I am a century away in Imperial Russia.That afternoon I sit down in my home office. The rains have paused, the sea air outside is heavy, and the palm trees are still. On my computer there are twenty tabs open – tickets to book, letters and emails to write, payments to be made.I find myself unable to address any of these.Instead, I open a tab entitled Na Hanyate, It Does Not Die. It’s a book written by a Bengali woman, a scholar, a poet, a thinker. When she was a young girl, her father invited his Romanian student to stay in their house, the two fell in love and wanted to get married. But then the girl’s father found out. The father banished the student from their Calcutta house and got his daughter married to a man fourteen years her senior.All this is sad, but okay, it’s the kind of tragedy life often produces.What makes it terrible is that the foreign student writes a book eight years later, a thinly veiled fictionalized version of this love story; he uses our girl’s real name, Maitreyi Devi. In the book titled Maitreyi, he writes a version of their story that is so full of physical passion that he was actually jailed for writing ‘pornography’. The book, not surprisingly, becomes a bestseller; it gets translated from the original written in Romanian to many other European languages including the French version La Nuit Bengali. The book is later made into a film starring Hugh Grant, Shabana Azmi and Supriya Pathak.I read an English translation of this book called Bengal Nights. As I turn the pages, I find myself getting angrier and angrier with the book’s descriptions of Maitreyi Devi as an exotic, sensual ‘creature’ of the East.Imagine Maitreyi Devi discovering this book. Years after its publication in various European languages, when she comes to know something of its contents, she is shaken. There is no English language version yet, but friends and acquaintances translate it for her.Maitreyi Devi feels compelled to set the record right.She writes her own version, a novel she titles Na Hanyate, translated as It Does Not Die, a description from the Bhagavad Gita about the immortal soul.Her book, which won a Sahitya Akademi award, makes me both sad and angry.XXXXMaitreyi calls her fictional self Amrita. And this Maitreyi/Amrita persona speaks. She has thoughts and ideas, she is analytical and interrogates cultural assumptions and ideologies in a way that shows up Mircea Eliade’s rendition of her for what it is - so terribly boorish, sexist, and racist.Through her book runs the inspiring presence of Rabi Thakur, Rabindranath Tagore. Amrita/Maitreyi adores the Poet and turns to his ideas and his advice for succour, and Mircea Eliade is wildly jealous.I am angry, not just with Mircea Eliade for his book, but with the entire ecosystem that has let this happen.There is her mother, who tries to help her daughter to start with but can’t stand against her husband and ends up betraying her daughter, and then later ends up being betrayed herself. I blame her, but really how can I blame her?The person I blame the most is Amrita’s father, that careless man who thoughtlessly brought his foreign student Mircea Eliade home to live with his family. He encouraged his daughter and the student to study Bengali and Sanskrit together and when they fell in love, he refused to let the two marry citing culture, caste and morality, never mind that he himself later abandoned his wife for a younger woman, thereby breaking up his family.This morning I wake with a feeling of heaviness. Outside my window the trees are very still. A kite glides by. In the kitchen I take my glass jar of Devan’s coffee powder out of the fridge and ladle three large spoons into the coffee machine. Separately I heat the milk.I have a day full of work ahead. I must write on ‘The Future of Work’, I must assemble my reading list and begin my reading, I have a complicated bank transfer that’s pending, and a whole list of errands. But I cannot get Na Hanyate out of my head. What have other people said about this book?I discover that the University of Chicago Press published Na Hanyate and the first English translation of Bengal Nights in 1994 as companion books. Critics saw it as a ‘She says. He Says’ and also as a confrontation between gender, colonialism and differing ideas of love.Then I discover Ginu Kamani’s essay, “A Terrible Hurt: The Untold Story behind the Publishing of Maitreyi Devi.” She articulates exactly what has been troubling me, pointing out Eliade describes Maitreyi as “a caricature of a tantric goddess, transforming her inexplicably from virgin to sex queen in his own unrealistic, self-indulgent fantasy.”How brave of Maitreyi Devi, says Kamani, to travel to Chicago to confront Eliade, and to publish her rebuttal to the story he had sold to the world for forty years. Kamani notes the criticism she gets for this; she quotes critics who describe Maitreyi Devi’s book as ‘self-absorbed’. “Her angry response is naive, and rather Indian,” says Ian Buruma in a review titled ‘Indian Love Call’, New York Review of Books, September 22, 1994.“Rather Indian,” they called her anger. “Self-absorbed.” Decades later, these words inflame me. Has the ecosystem really changed?Because the men still walk away with their social lives and second wives, while women are left resourceless with ruined reputations and the exhausting labor of one-parent families.If you think this belongs only to history, consider the recent Strangers by Belle Burden. This bestselling memoir tells the story of a powerful, well-connected woman and what happens to her marriage. Like Darya Alexandrovna from Anna Karenina, she is heir to a fortune. And yet overnight, she is blindsided when she is abandoned by her hedge fund manager husband. If this could happen to her, what happens to everyone else?I sit with these thoughts for a long time. Na Hanyate - it does not die. It stays alive in the heavy sea air, in the still trees, and in my reading of Na Hanyate and Strangers, these stories where women tell their truths. I go get myself a second cup of coffee. My day has begun. I press keys, and I begin to work.Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and Founder, Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. For all questions about life and literature email sonyasbookbox@gmail.com.