Ambivalent Colonial Encounters: A Postcolonial Rereading of Mircea Eliade’s Bengal Nights

Being inspired by the Western hegemonic discourse, the Romania novelist, Mircea Eliade’s Eurocentric line of thought renders the Others/Indians as uncivilized, primitives and exotic in Bengal Nights. The present study upholds that the novel offers ambivalence-based stereotypical colonial-expressions and the interactions between Eliade and Devien vision such a third space of enunciation, which not only exposes the instability of colonial discourse from within but also underscores the hybridization of the contacting cultures simultaneously. Bhabha’s theory is congenial in bringing to light the stereotypical thinking of Eliade about colonial India. Therefore, the objective of the study is to discover how Eliade’s construction of colonial discourse depicts his ambivalent self-articulation. By doing a re-reading of the novel, it has been found that despite the permeability of the colonial relationships suggested by Eliade’s adventure, cultural and racial divisions between East and West seem to be collapsing, paving the ways for hybrid colonial encounters