The Bengali Night


The Bengali Night is a 1988 semi-autobiographical film based upon the Mircea Eliade 1933 Romanian novel, Bengal Nights, directed by Nicolas Klotz and starring Hugh Grant, Soumitra Chatterjee, Supriya Pathak and Shabana Azmi.

Plot summary

Allan is an engineer working in 1930s Calcutta. He is invited to stay with the family of his boss, Narendra Sen which includes his wife, Indira and daughter Gayatri. Gayatri and Allan become romantically involved leading to tragedy.

Cast

  • John Hurt as Lucien Metz
  • Hugh Grant as Allan
  • Soumitra Chatterjee as Narendra Sen
  • Shabana Azmi as Indira Sen
  • Supriya Pathak as Gayatri Sen

    Production history

Production of the film occurred about a decade after Maitreyi Devi published her version of the story Na Hanyate. She also extracted a promise from Eliade that his version would never be published in English as long as she is alive. According to Ginu Kamani in "A Terrible Hurt:The Untold Story behind the Publishing of Maitreyi Devi," Maitreyi witnessed the making of the film "The Bengali Night," which was shot in Calcutta from 1987-88. Her protests culminated "in court cases against the film for insulting Hinduism and for being pornographic." The film was only shown once in India at a film festival in 1989 to mixed reviews and was never released in theaters in the U.S. Kamani also notes:
Bengal Nights by Mircea Eliade and It Does Not Die by Maitreyi Devi were released in 1994 by the University of Chicago Press as companion volumes depicting two sides of a romance.
The film was mostly shot at the huge Zamindar Mansion - "Gaine Bari" - of the village of Dhanyakuria and some parts were filmed at Indrapuri Studios, Kolkata.