Na Hanyate

Na Hanyate is Maitreyi Devi’s reply to Mircea Eliade’s novel about her, and it is one of the most unusual books in modern Indian writing. Eliade had been a young Romanian student in her father’s house in 1930s Calcutta, and decades later he published a thinly fictionalised account of their relationship. Maitreyi Devi wrote her own version of the story, in her own voice.

It is a powerful, painful, and quietly furious book. It also won the Sahitya Akademi Award.