Indian scholar Amita Bhose
Amita Bhose is known in Romania as the Indian scholar who produced the first translations of national poet Mihai Eminescu into Bengali, but her contribution to closer cultural and literary ties between her country and Romania extends far beyond.
Cristina Mateescu, 14.11.2025, 14:00
Amita Bhose first came to Romania in 1959, and that’s when her love affair began with the country that she would make her own in the early 1970s.
Fascinated with Romania’s national poet Mihai Eminescu, Amita Bhose produced the first translations of his poems into Bengali and penned dozens of articles and essays about his poems, his connection to India and the influence of Rabindranah Tagore and of Indian philosophy on his work.
Apart from her work on Mihai Eminescu and her translations from other Romanian writers, like playwrights Ion Luca Caragiale and Mihail Sebastian and novelist Mihail Sadoveanu, she also helped popularise the work of Rabindranah Tagore in this country, translating many of his works into Romanian for the first time. Tagore himself visited this country in 1926, as part of a tour of a number of European countries.
She also taught a course in Indian civilisation, Sanskrit and Bengali at the University of Bucharest for two decades and wrote the first Bengali-Romanian dictionary.
In an archive interview, Amita Bhose spoke at length about her first contacts with Romania.
and how she came to settle in this country.
