Desire and Divide in La Nuit Bengali and Na Hanyate: A Deconstructive Analysis

Abstract

This paper explores how Mircea Eliade’s La Nuit Bengali and Maitreyi Devi’s Na Hanyate paint rich tapestry of love, longing and cultural dislocations. These two stories, from the same lived experience, however, crafted from completely different vantage points, navigate the tensions between personal wants and historical reality. Eliade’s vision of a brief, intoxicating romance is pit against Devi’s righteous reclamation of agency, pushing back against the gaze which distorts and appropriates. At heart, this study inquires into how love, rather than being a straightforward or apolitical force, is vitally braided into arrangements of power, colonial nostalgia and the weight of memory. This paper examines this experience comprehensively and illustrates how longing transforms into a contentious arena for authorship and identity when the tenuous distinctions between East and West, fiction and reality, and self and other are disrupted.  Ultimately, this research speaks to the conversation about postcolonial literature, how stories are gendered, early and recent, and how silent negotiations inform how but also why histories are remembered—and who gets to tell them.