Maitreyi Devi: Crossing Borders and Traveling in Cultures
Born into a socially conservative but intellectually liberal family, Maitreyi was the daughter of scholar-philosopher Surendranath Dasgupta and Himani Madhuri Rai ( sister of Himanshu Rai, owner/ founder of Bombay Talkies). Her early childhood corresponded with the trying years of the First World War while in her youth she was exposed to the political lessons of the Second World War — to fascist Italy, to the Hitlerite regime in Germany, to Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia, to Republican and communist China — when Maitreyi, was perceived as a left-wing sympathiser. This was the era of the emergence of nation-states, of obsessive nationalism and revolts against hegemonic and capitalist forces. As an intimate protégée of Rabindranath Tagore, wherever she travelled, to China, Russia, Eastern and Western Europe, she practised the transnationalism that marked out the travelogues of Tagore. This meant that both colonial perceptions and the nation-state centric approach were disrupted by discourses of inter-connectedness that in turn challenged conceptual boundaries of difference and ethnicity
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