Sanjay Leela Bhansali had just finished making Khamoshi. The film didn’t set the box office on fire, but praises and compliments were floating in from various quarters. Some may still consider it one of his finest films. However, during this period of rest and rumination, Bhansali got a phone call from a sexagenarian named Pratap Karvat. Mr Karvat was a writer and he had a story he felt the filmmaker must listen to. Now, Pratap Karvat is a name in the footnotes of history that keeps popping up from time to time. He finds mention in old All India Radio journals as having written a Gujarati “roopak” (dramatic composition) called Pavagadh, and hosted some shows. Mahesh Bhatt, in his book A Taste of Life: The Last Days of U.G. Krishnamurti mentions Pratap Karvat as the individual who introduced him to the great U.G Krishnamurti and his fascinating world.
Bhansali agreed to meet Karvat and listen to his narration. The plot was rather unusual. Bhansali felt he had come upon something really special. Frenzied writing sessions followed, and the final screenplay took shape. Bhansali made his own modifications but retained the core of the story. Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam was released on June 18, 1999, and was a thumping success. Salman Khan was in his prime, and Aishwarya came into her own as a mainstream heroine. At the time, some sections in the Bengali media claimed that the film had an uncanny resemblance with a Bengali novel from 1974 written by Maitreyi Devi, a writer and intellectual of some repute. Internet was still a toddler, but online forums and blogs were filled with allusions to this. The stories soon died down.
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Calcutta, 1930
Wikipedia calls Mircea Eliade “a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago”. But he was also an exponent of Indology, a bona fide field of study that deals with Indian culture and philosophy. It was in vogue in the early 19th century, and scores of white men and women thronged to western universities to learn more about the mystical nation of snakes and maharajas. Mircea Eliade was one of the most prominent Indologists ever known. He wrote many books about the religious practices, philosophy and mysticism of the Orient. He also wrote more than 40 works of fiction. But in the year 1933, Mircea authored a book that stands out in his impressive bibliography. It was a novel in Romanian called Maitreyi, which was soon translated and published in French with the title La Nuit Bengali (The Nights of Bengal). It talks about a young man called Alain who travels to India on a quest to study Indian mysticism. In Calcutta, he runs into Narendra Sen, an engineer by profession but an expert on Hindu scriptures and Indian philosophy. Alain accepts Narendra as his teacher and takes up residence in his quarters. In the course of living with this hospitable Bengali family, Alain finds himself drawn to the fiery Maitreyi, Narendra’s daughter. What follows is a somewhat sexist narrative of the erotically charged advances of Maitreyi and how Alain gave in to her charms. As soon as Narendra gets wind of these amorous escapades, he promptly throws Alain out of the house, and that was the long and short of it.
