![]() Suleri, however, does not quite address the intricate arena of Indian nationalist discourse in its reciprocal transactions with narratives of Orientalism, and devotes her critical attention exclusively to the work of imperial writers, or postcolonial migrants writing in English, such as V.S. Sara Suleri has suggested that narratives of imperialism and Indian nationalism are both implicated in the structure of romance:Ī claim for the antecedent of imperialism in the construction of British national identity I make a parallel claim for the autonomy of a similar Indian establishment of nation, but further wish to suggest that both modes of cultural arrival are implicated in the structure of romance, causing their stories to achieve an idea of nation only after dislocation and disbandment have demanded a requisite cost (Suleri, 10).īuilding on Suleri’s suggestive and fertile hypothesis, I wish to emphasize simultaneously the autonomy and agency of Indian nationalist discourse, and its mutual imbrication and dialogic relation with Orientalism, which it subjects to effects of strategic appropriation, reversal and displacement. Reading her Bengali novel Na Hanyate alongside Eliade’s versions of the encounter poses fascinating questions not only of intertextuality and of literary mediations of “real” characters or events, but also of the erotics of the East/ West encounter and of the Indian woman writing back from within a script of cultural nationalism to her representation in an exoticizing fiction. In responding to Eliade’s fiction, Maitreyi draws on archetypes of Indian cultural nationalism, also structured by a trope of discovery or recovery of submerged aspects of self. Maitreyi’s critique shows up Eliade’s narrative of heterosexual romance with her as a disguise for a more primary homosocial relationship that he formed with Surendranath Dasgupta, Maitreyi’s father and Eliade’s mentor during his trip to India. What is most remarkable in the case of Bengal Nights, however, is that Maitreyi Devi, the protoype for the heroine of Eliade’s novel and the figure in whom Eliade sums up the otherness and enigma of the East, wrote her own version of this romantic encounter in response to what she perceived as her misrepresentation in Eliade’s exoticizing fiction. The desire/ fear of the exoticized other and the cloaked violence around this issue in Forster’s text receives more direct expression in Bengal Nights, Mircea Eliade’s romance with a colonial Indian setting. A structuring principle of such texts is that the other is denied a speaking part, and registers itself as an absence. Passages to India are often passages into the unconscious, a site of covert desire which could reveal a secret of the Western self not apparent or available to it. Forster’s A Passage to India may be taken as a paradigmatic narrative of this class. Narratives with a colonial setting are often marked by such a structure E.M. One desires the archaic and the exotic insofar as it remains the other, but insofar as it retains its ontological difference the encounter with it is liable to be marked by frustration, failure, lack. ![]()
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