This story spans 70 years and is actually ridiculous.
The Salman Khan starring Bollywood movie Hum Dil Chuke Sanam (1999) was based on one of the first documented inter-racial Indian romances between a Romanian and a Bengali in the 1930s Calcutta!
Here's what happened 🧵
Mircea Eliade was a Romanian author born in 1907 with vivid memories of the WWI as an adolescent. He started writing books in his teens, eventually becoming a professor in Philosophy and Religion at UChicago.
When he was 21, in 1928, he set sail to Calcutta..
In Calcutta, Mircea studied under Surendranath Dasgupta, a Bengali scholar from Cambridge. In 1930, he fell in love with his then 16yro daughter, Maitreyi Devi—reprehensible at the time—whilst barely speaking the same language.
Maitreyi herself was no ordinary girl...
Maitreyi was a protegé of Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore and wrote her first book at 16. In a retro act of kiss and tell, Mircea wrote a book about their time together, called Bengali Nights / Maitreyi [1933].
It chronicled details of their sexual encounters...
The story was well-received and translated into many languages. According to it, when Maitreyi's father found out, he threw Mircea out, and that she had sex with a stranger to convince her parents to marry Mircea.
Meanwhile, Maitreyi had no idea this novel existed until...
Until 39 years later, in 1972!
What's worse? She claims the sex scenes are lies. In a pretty badass move, she gets invited to UChicago to give lectures to confront Mircea. She asks him to promise to never translate the book to English.
Then, she plays her move...
She publishes Na Hanyate (It Does Not Die) [1974] in Bengali – her side of the story, to much praise. She claims to still have loved the person he was and rubbishes claims of them being physical.
Doesn't end there. After Mircea died in 1986...
Mircea's widow sold off the rights of the book and a French movie, The Bengali Night (1988), shot in Calcutta, is made starring Hugh Grant as Mircea and Supriya Pathak as Maitreyi. Maitreyi died in 1989, without seeing the film.
It was never released in India / US, but...
A low-res English version is on Youtube!
But that's not it — Sanjay Leela Bhansali film Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), riffs on the same premise of two lovers fight through books they write, culminating a 70 year saga past both of the original protagonists' desk.
As a Bengali, I was quite drawn to the story and astonished at how progressive it was for its age. Spanning 70yrs, 2 books and 2 films, and a "love" story that could well be set in 2023.
Even today, Indo-Western relationships aren't exactly smooth sailing!
Sources:
Ginu Kamani —press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/143651.html
The Bengali Night (1999) —