Revisiting Colonial Encounters in Maitreyi Devi’s It Does Not Die: A Romance: A Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

The Indian novelist, Maitreyi Devi’s account of her love story with Romanian novelist, Mircea Eliade came out in 1974 as Na Hanyate in the Bengali language and its English version was titled It Does Not Die in 1976 by the author herself. Following Nirmala Menon’s critical insights on Bhabha’s (post)colonial hybridity discourse, this study aims to reinterpret the novel as an illustrative text of postcolonial “interrogative hybridity.” Devi employs hybridity in such a way that it unsettles a linear narrative with constant shifts in focus and style. It is upheld that her ingenious hybridity originates from her position as an off-center postcolonial female writer who critiques colonial stereotypes and mimicry by revisiting/challenging colonial discourse constructed against the colonized by the colonizers. Hence, the study explores how her novel is a postcolonial hybrid counter-narrative text to colonial fantasies. To conclude, postcolonial hybridity can only problematize colonial individuations and representations, if it reverses the seemingly sound effects of colonial discourse in such a way that “other ‘denied’ knowledges” enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority—its rules of recognition.