Bowering, OC, OBC (born December 1, 1935) is a prolific Canadiannovelist, poet, historian, and biographer. He has served as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate. He was born in Penticton, British Columbia, and raised in the nearby town of Oliver, where his father was a high-school chemistry teacher. Bowering is author of more than 100 books.
When the Indian Hungryalist, also known as Hungry generation, poet Malay Roy Choudhury, was arrested at Kolkata, India, Bowering brought out a special issue of Imago for helping the Indian poet in his trial.
Rudyard Kipling and Allen Ginsberg, Madhya and Uttar Pradesh, India
While Rudyard trekked around tirelessly for the Civil and Military
Gazette, Allen sought inspiration from the Bengali poets of the
Hungryalist movement and tested the limits of the bohemian lifestyle in
India's holiest city, Varanasi. Voyages Jules Verne's tour covers both –
nights under the stars in the landscape that gave birth to The Jungle
Book and Kim, and time in Varanasi for some Ginsbergian howling.
Dom Moraes. Francis Newton Souza. A painter and a
poet brought together in a cross pollination of occupations, both
linked by lines and names distorted or undistorted as the case may be.
In a sputter of interviews, to begin with, by Dismus Bambai, who, of
course, lives in Mumbai. There is a priest from the school shaking his
head over toilet distortions, in brilliant schoolboy lines, when Francis
Newton, or rather New, expressed himself and signed it X. There is a
jump cut forward to a woman called Miss Henry, who modelled nude and who
seems to have been borrowed from Miss Henrietta, the one Dom Moraes
abandoned on the pretext of buying cigarettes and never saw again. There
is a mad mother who was driven to chase FN around the kitchen table
with a knife because of the nude painting he made of her. The daughter
who talks about life with her father in Delhi during the Emergency when
he painted Indira Gandhi as two eyes in a black dot.
Advertisement opens in new window
Dismas’s world is
more or less straight but stuffed with the odds and ends of Thayil’s own
experience in New York—the immigrant colony and the Indian diaspora in
Jackson Heights.
Skip to the way Dismas got his interview with New, who
is living in New York, accompanied by artist girlfriend Goody
Lol—shades again of another living person, Souza’s artist girlfriend or
muse whose surname was Lal and who was learning to copy his work against
a time when he would no longer be able to paint. The result is a tangle
of canvases, a room called Disorder Central and a panjandrum of
paradoxes, forget the collective noun nonsense, but that is the way
Thayil tinkers with words and sometimes with worlds. Dismas’s world is
more or less straight, but stuffed with the odds and ends of experience
that Thayil gleaned during his stint in New York—the immigrant colony
and the Indian diaspora dotting Jackson aka Jaikisen Heights.
Unsurprisingly, Francis Newton Xavier is elusive and sparing with his
interviews—but he can be summoned in a crisis, like getting someone out
of jail after a heroin bust. Dismas finds out more about the
painter-poet or blocked poet than he wants to during his stint with the
Times of Bharat with Mrs Merchant—by now the reader has got to the point of wondering who everyone is, so hello, she sounds familiar.
In this dark atmospheric text Thayil encapsulates the turbulent chaos
that makes up the artistic world of lines—while emphasising that poetry
is no use unless it picks up a gun. Terrorism and suicide are poetry
and nothing else is. FN’s painting actually loses out to his poetry—that
single book which was printed and a plummy English accent from nowhere.
Interlinked is a Dalit poet called Doss, who steals the term
Hungryalists from the Bengalis or at any rate is credited with inventing
it, since Ginsberg and the Beat poets were well hung. Inevitably,
fornication is part of this poetic verses over the first non-English poet who won the Hawthornden
prize and his unpublished book of chocolate saints, even while the
chocolate saint art exhibition recalls all those saintly art
installations concocted out of unmentionable materials.
At one level, this is Thayil writing about himself, struggling with
poetry and poets and the way people assess them, especially the critics
who are possibly the worst of all. Arun Kolatkar has a cameo confronting
a journo whom he wishes would just leave him alone. Artists prefer
solitude, though once they hit the public eye it becomes a cult kind of
thing—their quirks and their lives attract stalkers and the wrong kind
of fans. Dismus, infected by FN, starts out to write his own book on the
heels of a drug bust that leaves him jobless. The question is, who is
who and what is why? Does Thayil’s story need real lives to fictionalise
or is reality the crutch to fiction—at one level it possibly does. The
poetic underbelly needs actual excess, though we instinctively expect it
after all; all excess is the same violation. Dismus turns against New
when he writes his own book and New, teetotaller, no longer poet, serial
deserter, visiting India for show 66 fades out of the canvas. The
various voices and the back and forth of concept, brush, pencil and love
distorted ends—but not completely without trace, and the end is given
to Goody, the last of the chocolate saints in New’s life, the one who
held out against all odds and mad mother’s voices. In struggle, Thayil
hints, lies hope for the artist, in my end is my beginning.
Malay Roychoudhury (b. 1939 ) is a Bengali poet, best known for launching the Hungryalist movement
in the 1960s. The author of more than seventy books including novels,
poetry collections, drama, short stories, essays, he has also translated
Blake, Ginsberg, Tzara, Cocteau, Cendrars, Lorca, Mayakovsky, Rimbaud,
Rajkamal Chaudhary and many others. He has edited the literary
periodical ZEBRA and co-edited anthologies of Postmodern Bangla Poetry and Postmodern Bangla Short Stories which include writers from both India and Bangladesh. He was prosecuted for his poem Stark Electric Jesus in 1964-66. He has refused to accept a Sahitya Akademi award, which is the Government of India's highest award for literature.
This is a path-breaking literary movement that took form in Kolkata. Hungryalists comprise
of avant-garde writers who have challenged contemporary ideas in
literature and culture, making significant contributions to the
language, since the sixties. Some of the famous poets of this movement
include Binoy Majumdar, Malay Roy Choudhury, Tridib Mitra, and Falguni
Roy. Fiction writers attached to this movement include Basudeb Dasgupta,
Malay Roy Choudhuary, SandipanChattopadhyay and others.
Victoria Memorial: Is poetry regaining relevance? Not
yet, said poet-author Jeet Thayil during a talk on Day 2 of the Tata
Steel Kolkata Literary Meet, co-organised by the Victoria Memorial Hall
in association with The Telegraph, on Tuesday.
Thayil's latest book, The Book of Chocolate Saints, is a novel about poets and he has used some techniques of poetry while writing it.
The world around him may not warm up to poetry yet, but the
poet and novelist in Thayil are never at odds. "You bring the same kind
of tools and obsession to your writing, only the form is different,"
said Thayil, who inaugurated the latest edition of Kalam with a
self-composed verse, along with three other poets.
"Inaugurating a literary meet with poetry can only happen in a city like Calcutta," said the author of These Errors Are Correct, giving the city a thumbs up.
Thayil read out excerpts from his new book to the eager audience before talking to novelist Sandip Roy about its making.
Thayil had hit on the idea of a book while working on a BBC
documentary on the Hungryalist poets of Bengal, especially Malay Roy
Choudhury. "The characters literally jumped out at me," he said.
The Book of Chocolate Saints is about a poet, Newton Francis
Xavier, who is full of gloom and doom. His partner and muse, Goody Lol,
is on the other hand full of hope. "Xavier comes alive with destructive
behaviour, a truth about most people battling an addiction," said
Thayil, who said he presented his protagonist without any filter.
Xavier's character comes alive in the memories of others,
mostly artists and poets of the '70s and '80s in Mumbai. "Xavier is easy
to admire from a distance. But you won't like him till the last part of
the book," Thayil said.
The other inspiration for the book was the first chapter of Thayil's own Narcopolis.
The book about a "cruel, self-destructive" poet who like
Picasso and Ayn Rand elevated his art but led a broken life makes
fiction meet non-fiction. Some real personalities like the author's
father, journalist-writer T.J.S. George, make their way into the plot
that offers readers a taste of dark humour.
"During my journalism days I had covered the murder of a Sikh
American, Balbir Singh Sodhi of Arizona. The research that went behind
my news report now finds a place in my book," Thayil said.
Speaking about the Mumbai poets of the '70s, '80s and '90s,
Thayil said: "These poets were not a generous lot. They never welcomed
women and newcomers. I was not even allowed on the fringes."
The conversation was peppered with personal experiences, some of which have been woven into his current book.
Thrice I’ve exchanged glances with a dog with no duties
Noting at the base of every lamppost on the street
A distinctive self-contradiction I advance it can also
Be called retreating there’s no fear of being ambushed
All movements are unrestrained and using the alphabet
Words like ‘love’ and ‘death’ are utilised for sport
Every day on the beach just this instant I have put
A hand prone to criminal acts in my empty pocket
With the other I chuck the featureless chin
Of the world, saying, ‘dance little lady dance’ –
2. Sanjukta and the seventeen horsemen
I don’t know what you were doing then
A wrinkling of the nose curling of the lips then phooey?
Dismounting one by one, the seventeen galloping horsemen
Bowed their heads and turned to stone
The horses cantered haphazardly
Towards the lake
I don’t know what you were doing after that
You wound up a top and let it spin
Gathering diurnal and annual momentum it revolved around you
Sinking to their necks in the mud the horses
Stretched their necks to neigh in unison
And the helmets of the seventeen soldiers began
To fling themselves at your feet
And then
When you could not find a single unbloomed bud
In your belly, breasts or anywhere on your body
Tying themselves into a knot, your nerve-endings
Took you swiftly beyond joy and illness, to a place
Where you kept giving birth, one by one,
To seventeen horsemen, and climbing upon a dome
Touching the sky, you dried your hair with the sun on your back
And when the sunlight died you narrowed your eyes
Shielding them with your hand you began to search
For the seventeen cowards from your womb.
Shaileswar Ghosh
1. I am hungry
As soon as I put my hand on a woman’s body she turned to gold
I’m a penniless labourer I live in Port Commission Quarter No. 5
The touch of my breath split the Communist Party into two
My arms lengthened, legs shortened, organ remained unchanged
I have seen my mother in bed with a god.
My father lost all he had gambling – an insane Van Gogh
Had seen flames in the rice fields and in Tahiti’s islands
Gauguin’s dog spread syphilis – from my mouth I have pulled out
The kind of sea whose tides don’t swell, resist all attraction
Watching a boxing match on television I ran to my male friend.
I move around with you eat and drink with you sleep with you
I steal your money I buy one woman after another
When I enter a church its spire collapses, I am hungry
All the doors and windows of libraries close at my sight.
I was given hashish as payment for roasting the rotis
On the streets I hear nothing but my own footsteps
My words light up India’s nuclear furnaces instantly
When I’m really upset I exchange blows with my friends
A friend stole ten rupees I didn’t return a hundred I’d borrowed
I don’t give a damn, for I have tasted heavenly flesh
Poetry rises like the Ochterlony Monument, destroying my mind
I tell the truth when I hallucinate – I see an angel
They’re dismantled when struck by a rocket – when I’m hungry
They drag me away where my intestines fill with people’s love
One of my mates is a bastard, another a traitor, one a murderer
They escaped to our gathering without passports – another one
Broke into railway wagons to loot all the aluminium ovens
I take my girlfriend into the bathroom – I am blind in one eye
I have never seen a Rolls Royce – I like smoking by myself
And when necessary I push myself all the way to Dumdum Airport.
2. I plucked a single flower
I plucked a single flower it was enough to break my world
Every day I find my clothes ill-fitting on my body
I killed a bird whose song was meant to wake the world
I will be released after destroying every faith.
Memories of sleeping with her father figure makes a monk woman seek more darkness
The grass knows the lightning that strikes its breast is a play of power
At last I know that severing the stalk is the creator’s finest act.
When there’s celebration on the ground we’re made to fear shipwrecks from a height
Our life is to watch, mesmerised, the male character playing the eunuch
An ascetic had to lay down his life because his heart had overflown with love
All the flowers that blossom from my deed are witches used to worship you.
I open my eyes to see the swan writhing in pain from the embedded arrow
When I nurse it back to life the hunter wants half of what I’ve saved
Peace descends only at those moments when gold and iron cost the same.
When I pluck the flower I’m a terrorist - I have offered my senses to the world
On the last train I heard the professional whore’s enchanting singing with the thieves
All weapons are off on pilgrimage now – murderers have located their personal sorrows
The gods we have come to adore change their positions every day
Satan coils himself around a young girl like a serpent to drink from her breasts
The form in which I saw my mother from the womb burns bright in my memory
Life demands to know from life, are all forms of violence your children?
I plucked a single flower it was enough to break my world
A single tear falls on my face from space – I only gaze upwards
All the streams flowing from my body have gathered in a river
Many kicks await you still if the scars from the shackles remain
The moment terror was born, the world split into two, proponents and opponents
When the deluge begins every exponent of life seeks safe sanctuary.
Thrust your son into the wedding bedroom, father, stand guard with your stick
Over the iron bedroom, tonight he will be born and die soon after
The shortcut to heaven passes through hell.
I plucked a single flower it was enough to break my world
A droplet of light lay down its life to reveal the image of my darkness
Calcutta: The Hungryalists, [ca. 1963].
Single 8-1/2 x 11 inch sheet folded once to make 4 pp. Only 2 pages
printed. Manifesto of the Hungry Generation, a group of avant garde
writers in Bengal during the 1960s. The movement was active from 1961 to
1965. This manifesto was probably published in 1963. The leaders of the
movement, including Choudhury, were persecuted and jailed. Their work
is now conisidered an important contribution to Bengali literature. Item
#59-3369
Shot Two Innumerable black dots on green, innumerable.
Shot Three Millions of people’s wails howls ridicules on green each
black dots are transformed into human faces of various races, the faces
form a line and relentless wails howls ridicules are heard.
Shot Four People of various races with various dresses the march in
procession Vaishnava beside Muslim Jew beside worshipers of African
demigods beside Christian beside Buddhist.
Shot Five Single colour vultures fly over the procession of men of
various countries various colours of different ages, innumerable
vultures over the procession continuously flutter deep blue sky
flapping wings wails howls ridicules are raised further Sudden soundless. Everyone stops in his own place.
Shot Six Vultures float in void, still ; men are in single line, some of them raise one feet some raise closed fist, are motionless.
Shot Seven Darkdarkdarkdarkdarkdarkdark. Shot Eight Cutting through the belly of green widespread valley and
solid slanting sky a mountain whose soundless waves have crossed horizon
and gone afar.
Shot Nine A bunch of naked babies, cry laugh make tantrums the lie on
the widespread valley’s grass in the form of dewdrops make tantrums and
cry.
Shot Ten Touching the peak of mountain a waterfall skip jumps below, waterfall’s water is blood red.
Shot Eleven Floodwater from the blood red waterfall washes away the babies, the babies float in blood river cries laughs.
Shot Twelve Flocks and flocks of vultures suddenly descend on floating
babies vultures leave their immobile position fly down – descending they
put their beaks into each baby’s eyes – tear off navel and penis of
boys vagina of girls with their claws — blood oozes out of babies’ eyes,
blood oozes from navel penis vagina, blood flows mixes with blood
river.
Shot Thirteen Hundreds of birds’ waking up morning songs and countless white birds chirping white Everything stand still.
Shot Fourteen From the left side of Christ’s statue a colourful procession
of men come forward, people of various nationalities wearing their
national dress come forward large procession of men, each having a
testicle in place of their left eye and blood river flows from the right
side of Christ’s statue, torn pieces of flesh of babies in the river,
some with only head some with heart stomach vagina or legless belly and
on them are seated tired vultures.
Shot Fifteen
.................
Shot Sixteen Procession of people go round Christ’s statue fall in blood
river’s water, country of green slanting valley drowns in blood Christ’s
nailed legs gradually stand in blood red river up to his thighs eyes of
people of various colourful precession cry drops of water from their
right eye, since they have penis in left eyes from there semen drip out —
white semen mixed with blood floats — battered baby-limbs, vultures on
limbs.
Shot Seventeen Black snakes from around Christ’s body slither down into
blood stream — snake with easy swim reaches each human being and before
they could restrain them they climb up and enter their mouth from far
away voices reverberate I am soul I am soul I am soul I am soul I am
soul…
Shot Eighteen From the mouth of each man the hood of a snake protrudes
snakes are found on the head of vultures which were seated on floating
babies.
Shot Nineteen Christ’s statue starts stirring, shakes up all men tremble
each visible square foot minute portion gets loosened in heavy water
wails blood river starts ringing siren fast quite fast Christ’s stone
hand stirs vultures cry fly out into sky flap wings torn pieces of
babies get joined again one’s head joined by some other baby’s thigh –
some having leg in place of hand some have vagina in place of navel.
Shot Twenty In order to save themselves from tidal waves people start to
swim around Christ’s statue – in place of smile two headed snakes peep
out of their mouth in place of left eye stuck up penis queer limb babies
crowed around Christ’s penis vultures on them. Snakes wave their hood on the crown of vultures.
Stoical Charminar Cigarette
Mother, I would not be able to give polished sly smile with
compassionate God’s chipmunk white teeth of Satan’s intelligent eyes I
would not be able to treat my wife in matriarchal fashion on the lines
of saint Ramakrishna.
I would not be able to eat saccharin instead of sugar scared
of diabetes with my unhappy penis
I would not be able to become Devadas
at Khalasitola on the day of marriage registration of my erstwhile
beloved.
My liver is gradually rotting my grandfather had cirrhosis I
do not understand heredity I drink and read my poems my father used to
abstain from food for religious worship big brothers of our area press
breasts of area-sisters on the day of Dolyatra festival in the name of
religion. Mother, during foreign visits many of your aristocratic
society members drank vodka I am stoical would light my Charminar
cigarette from your burning pyre when I think about your death my eyes
start crying at that time I do not think of earthquake in land and flood
waters with my hands unlacing virgin girlfriend’s petticoat I did not
think of Vaishnava poetry
Mother, I will also die one day.
Mother, at Belur temple ogling at a obeisance performing
foreigner’s skirt-covered international python arse my sexual urge had
become limitless Mother your sexuality will remain associated with
father till death that is why I a drunkard am envying you with my
unpretentious filth looking at my penis I feel like I am a species from
another planet at this moment the warm light of sundown brightens my
face and smearing colours of sunset in their wings flocks of birds
without family planning are flying toward the peaceful eye nest of
Banalata Sen – their time for egg incubation has arrived —
I am a Beauty Monster
Mankind moves on from estrangement to marriage after watching the painted wings of butterflies – I am a beauty monster I have torn off scent-fetching antenna of butterflies
. I do not have faith on anyone lazy wicked sometimes I think of becoming a hooker’s pimp to lead my life when hangover of drinks wear off and seated among rejoicing joking friends I realize my failure in love I look at the full-moon and find a burning dead body there
. I am lie inside drawer of a morgue just a corpse my alive body has been towed away to broken-bangle widow’s menstruation napkin I am lie inside drawer of a morgue – crematoria wood lie inside trees there is no love no maternity hospital wife is ready to give birth I lie inside drawer of a morgue this is the way I live days nights lightnings drought on breasts of so many girls flesh heap grew up so many girls became pregnant aborted – from Satyajit Ray’s country Love In Tokyo film went to East Africa – in Marcus Square Bengali culture Bharat circus poets’ gathering at Rabindra Sadan and Vaijayantimala’s dance performance was held – I got nothing neither redemption nor failure From hooker’s toilet to lover’s bed my seamless journey has not ended – from the womb of sky that is why even today star ashes rain on earth nevertheless I lie inside drawer of a morgue and my corpse towed away my living body from her broken-bangles estrangement to marriage people move on I am a beauty monster I have torn off scent-fetching antenna of butterflies
No Dispute With Mankind
No, I do not have any dispute with mankind anymore if a creditor meets with an accident I can take him to hospital borrow cigarette without qualms from erstwhile girlfriend’s husband just like growing beards in this life quite easily I in Ramkrishna’s Kali devotion I find sovereign sexual power in Babli’s husband devotion I find universal sexual happiness If a sandal of mine is lost would I No, I do not have any dispute with mankind anymore
. My uneasy stare mover off from my sister’s breast on Brothers Day I loiter around the hookers lane after death I would be able to see the corridor of reincarnation I am an unredeemable terror struck man I have noticed a dog keeps on crying within me for his bitch an ascetic mendicant gets busy with his lecherousness in order to ravish virginity of a nun and in front of that lecherousness even heavenly love is turned to dust– after all I am in favour of searching happiness of life in poetry instead of rhymes that is why I do not have any dispute with life I do not have any dispute with mankind
Right Here
Right here a Greek hero of 323 BC forgets his desire for sex and rape to implant valour and prowess in history right here Chaitanya’s raised-arm love spreads toward humanity forgetting taste of soft body of ladylove Vishnupriya – above all erect human phallus remains wide eyed above history and religious consciousness right here
. Right here lust struck unsatisfied lover faces millions of ridicules my ambition grows right here my heart sinks if eyes face real questioning eyes right here Right here one has to tread ahead to avoid respectful stare
. With a wish to see a girl’s face I walk mile after mile but find only crowds of tarts Twenty seven years alone twenty seven years sleeping on my personal bed I find brainless futureless sickly-nerve poems of poets’ poets all around me solid soundless dark in mud built four walls
My Rifle My Bible
Two poems titled ‘My Rifle My Bible’ in my pocket I walk toward Galpokobita periodical’s office – on this path there is a road and a market named after a revolutionary of Independence movement and a pulpit in the memory of a Seventies martyr
in the water of College Square reflection of old University’s new library at a distance is the morgue of Medical College opposite to it between temple and library a street has gone to the quarters of whores I walk through this road toward Galpokobita office – in front pocket instead of bank notes two poems – beneath pocket I have my undershirt beneath undershirt my skin beneath skin there is heart heart’s bone in abstract noun has been cut
even then I have not gone to Bonecut lane of whores till now have visited Galpokobita office with my manuscripts I have walked – with hunger for reading have gone to books for love and hunger for my sex I ran to my girlfriend books have not refused me – girlfriend has – womankind have – thereafter I sat beside red blue fish aquarium and ate fish fry I have noticed on inflated boobs of whores there are flesh heaps instead of sexual attraction in my erstwhile girlfriend’s present husband’s shining teeth I had seen advertizement of toothpaste – not smile
. Nimai saint eats burned human flesh as blessed food at Ramkrishna crematorium he even eats Ganges-mud and his own shit smokes marijuana and sings God’s name people consider Nimai saint to be a liberated man I also want to be liberated but that liberation does not mean eating torn flesh from dead man’s burning corpse or mud or one’s own shit – Che Guevara also wanted liberation and colonial period’s Indian poet had written that God resides where the farmer tills cultivates harvests all twelve months and not inside the house – this sort of references to liberty was written before independence – today I a poet of independent India watch unblemished smiles on the faces of hundreds of children trapped in poverty and think about liberating them – instead of grenades two poems in my pocket I walk towards Galpokobita office on this path there is a road and a market named after a revolutionary
and a pulpit in the memory of a Seventies martyr on this path
Unnecessary Poem
I am a new intruder on the surface of this earth when the doctor draws blood from cut vein of the poem I remember I had sold my blood to drink wine to enable me to write poems. Have I become depraved ? Even now lot of mysteries are hidden presently I am scared of dying which means I love to live that is why Red Book in one hand and Jibananda’s poetry in another beneath cloudy sky I walk ahead – people who wear sunglasses in cloudy shade I dislike them – people who contemplate God after getting kicked in family life I dislike them – those who kicks statues of gods and questions
‘what is what’ I love them very much – I rejoiced in Coffee House puffing cheap cigarettes with Marx Lenin Sartre Joyce Kafka by my side thereafter I walked alone in crowd of humanity ; actually I am not getting anything from books – presuming I might get something from girlfriend I ran to her but found out – she was sleeping with my elder Officer brother became her lover after gifting her a dress purchased with his bonus money with that much amount I would have met my food expenses for a month which means my would-be wife’s cost of covering her body is equal to my food bill – can you imagine how we live our lives
. Even then I love smiling naked babies – the old world becomes new in front of my hungry eyes beautiful women in bone-structures proceed toward crematoria through time- I sold off a thick book of philosophy for purchasing bread and wine just to live and sometimes I write down believe me, I write down Unnecessary Poem
0987654321
Watch how nasty it seems talking about pissing at the time of love in hisses of kisses ah ha ha tents blow up inside trousers of young men abracadabra red flag sway marching towards the future after public vote young lady wants to talk for going to shit through red lipstick lips a drunk elite at the Olympia bar abused me — bloody toddy drinker when I was returning from Gabbu’s joint walking on the street I would have buried God’s living corpse and thrown Him to be devoured by Satan who is more attractive — wine, women or poetry I can not decide — my pen wanted to write ‘ringworm’ but wrote ‘oh lady oh beauty’ ; while writing ‘oh lady oh beauty’ wrote about ‘ringworm and rashes’
Personal Bed
1. Not only Radhika, even prostitutes menstruate Father of three children — ideal family planning man had masturbated in youth — didn’t he 2. I do not want to be Tagore — nor Raghu Robber I want to be Falguni Ray — just Falguni Ray 3. The road on which I live have at one end a maternity hospital and at the other a crematorium I you don’t believe you may find out yourself — bus route 4, 32, 39, 43 4. I have noticed that the word magazine is associated with rifle and poetry
Personal Neon
I am devoid of genius that is why I touch my nose with my tongue to prove my genius Sometimes while walking in front of novelist Manik Bandopadhyay’s house I brood about the street on which he once walked I, Falguni Ray, an idiot, trod along I often travel in second class in tramcar and contemplate that this was the tramcar which overran and crushed the body of poet Jibanananda Das This is the way I loiter earth sun stars follow me during my embryo moment death descended on solar system A friend of mine drinks wine of far away lands in a bar he angrily scolds me as a toddy drinker and cannabis smoker one day for chopping off Ekalavya’s thumb I felt Dronacharya was a murderer.
Obscenity and Desecration: Practices of Dissent in the Bengali Hungry Generation movement of 1960s Daniela Cappello (M.A.)
My project focuses on practices of obscenity in the Bengali
anti-establishment literature of the 1960s, most notably on the Hungry
Generation Movement (1961-1965). Assuming that the “aesthetics of
obscenity” was seen as a form of political resistance by many
anti-establishment writers and artists of Western counter-cultures, this
study aims at showing how some practices of dissent were used in
post-Independence Bengali literary culture to shape an alternative
identity for the Bengali urban intellectual. Moreover, this very debate
on obscenity and ensuing censorship made space for a wider discussion on
freedom of speech which filled political newspapers and reviews
throughout India. Despite the alleged “indigeneity” of the movement’s
background, the study wants to show how the Hungryalists actually
“filtered” through their writings some of the most typical practices of
Western counter-cultures, as was the case for obscenity, in order to
break with the Bengali cultural establishment.
The study will focus on the Bengali Hungry Generation movement by
investigating its “little magazines” and other kinds of small
publications (i.e. bulletin, leaflets, anthologies) which were seen as
an alternative cultural practice intended to reshape the Calcutta
postcolonial literary space. These little publications represented in
fact the only press promoting new literature and socio-political protest
whereas the big publishing industry remained silent due to government
censorship. The Hungryalist movement exemplifies the wave of postmodern
experimental writings of the 1960s – which was widespread in little
magazines – attempting to subvert the urban (Calcutta) cultural
establishment that was still imbued with colonial influences. Despite
the trial that sentenced the authors to jail for obscenity in their
poetry, the movement had a great impact on the shaping of literary
counter-cultures in Bengal. The research therefore raises questions
about the much debated search for a postcolonial cultural identity which
constantly evolved throughout the decades after the Independence of
India. Following this assumption and using written, oral and visual
sources, I intend to explore this subversive literary culture of post-colonial Independent India.
I am devoid of genius
that is why I can touch my nose with my tongue
and prove that I am really a genius
Sometimes while walking in front of
Manik Bandyopadhyay's house I brood
about the street on which he once walked
I am also on the same road, but worthless, Falguni Ray
walking, sometimes I travel
in second class in trams and I
imagine this was the tram that overran and crushed
the body of Jibanananda Das
This is the way I travel--
earth sun stars accompany me
Bakul, I envy you only, how easily
you sink into her excited hair bright
no proverbs in your past, shadow, peace,
worms of buds
my endless blood falls among fire communites
because at the end of reaping such huge hay
man has never carried, I too never have seen
such wealth in any hair.
chaitre rachita kabita 3
2.
The boats, lying on the solitary sands know you
all the days in their shades you sing of soul crops
sometimes have got into waves, into the blaue and bathing,
a thin smoke from your meagre meals
Sands not so hot as my uphappiness was.
I’m not dying for hunger, love and thirst
being in a grove of palms, something
more to be narrated,
another phase started before that
with the camels’ harness bells and the horizontal riches
they move continuously to the east along the brink of water
an endlessness and helpless net flots
in my eyes, in a magic way of
masculinity and feminity.
The light of anger washes the broken shord
and brings a topsy turvy day to any thing
favourable or not favourable
chaitre rachita kabita 7
3.
The twilight sun sets behind the yamuna bridge.
The night-train has just passed. On the far corner of
a field of oilseeds, a sand-beach, hill-tops
all sound like a sad tune of the river bank.
Is the river then one of tears?
In the ether, in the sky the foreign boat
moves to the last light with the insect-call
as if the river yamuna ends in some horizon where
countless boats float in the flow having no
current, no water. From one forgotten bank
to another, to the farthest brink. You, the sad tune
drives your boat eternally.
chaitre rachita kabita 8
4.
Peacock, perhaps you have been born in some twilight
And at the time of beginning of your first game
with your new wing’s opening under the clouds
I have seen you first, dear bird in that moment of eternity.
Having embarked such a distance, to profound silene
I have come to see your swift race, as if terrified you have called
us towards silence - the dark pine forest,
its complex being.
Then, at the forest’s brink, to the naked sight of youth
your talent appeared to be a lightning, It seemed new,
the newest creativity, thus gradually merges into eternity.
Take me back to seas, my being back to the tumultous waves.
I have seen its roaring break-up over stones of the end less earth,
the thuding waves take out boards and oars of the drawning ship.
Yet at the storm’s end, the day’s end in the dard forest
the terrified call is heard under the rain-clouds.
Perhaps in silence you have unfolded
your star-decked wings. Have you got any message?
chaitre rachita kabita 10
Puri Series
1.
Raise your hands from distance. Consent if possible
otherwise signs prove futile. Night trains move away
keeping us half-awake. Is a continuous journey hard?
Sparks from iron-buds fall even to-day
on long, echoing station. On the doors, on excited nests
broken hands, spoiled eyes, remember the accident
I’m walking on crutches, liberationless, and old
man’s play of wealth None our proposals are agreed.
Puri Series 3
3.
Look, these sea-beaches have been used time and again.
Smooth iron cages have been harsh for nothing, look.
Once the cage was mode tasionable than the cacatoo
Ambiguous, Roygunkar, the poet was very talkative.
One took him to be ultramodern and on the beach
each house seems to be worthdwelling.
No more the children play with sands on this ivory beach
They have grown up. They don’t expect anything from their children.
White worms eat up arithmatic pages. Still things
thrown into the sea return-sea’s unreasonable prestige, these things.
Puri Series 4
White Horse
White horse, I’ve come to understand from your mane’s
white pigeons, health, milk and the sun’s hatch to felt
But I’ couldn’t understand how men, there arms amputed
go away with huge cargo, embarking, gradually to sunlessness
to the west, to the sliding. Parentless war-torn content nose
the hince pammer to build only religion. A hue and cry.
Strange wind-will it away the date-palm leaves?
The blue tents swelling, alas, buyers, along the cats
the dead horses bowells swell on, the hungry hands.
Sada Goda
Indigo House
1.
Some horses are no more today
and the riders themselves are not relevent
so grass return and grass is born
in the autumnal season
we feel tired.
2.
In the bush of berries I find an immortal
friendless cub’s loitering, in the tiger’s yellow
stripes. I only see in the old bush of berries
a procession of human beings. That bush of berries
is no more safe.
Sewing Machine
1.
I don’t have any count how often you scolded
me in dreams,
I was in deams - waking in spring’s world
alas, in that spring water
a gramaphone works - a low sewing machine moves
I think all day long
how many a time you scolded me
dreams end times, very little left,
I move a small piece of writing
along a few springs
2.
This spring I may get a sewing machine
in a top branch of sky
I make a mistake - the deer explains that
half - lit nights and days to be put out.
Sitting in labyrinths in famous rustling of petals.
You may be a king, a godess, wise or recently
you have sunk
shadow-lit wings days in deer-shed
dependes on cook. His name...
Dedication to a Day of small Diversity
While diving into water I see those fish, names
of which I don’t know- but know that you have
left our country for long. Leaves fall on
water, fish floating on them a flag
flying that in silence and in your absence.
Khandabaichityer din er Utsargapatra
A Day of Small Diversity
That
greenness may break up - so the mythical crane flying with a piece of
crystalmeat, veins scattered over the paddy field as if webs, downs
tie up the crop’s green ness, its vacuum, its tarror, its oozing blood
that gift, today’s birthday at the age of fifty.
Khandacaichitryer din
Orchid
Orchid an easy flower-but its complexities
too needed in wind, in air. In air. In winter cold
I find them flowering in sarcasm.
We are disciplined, truck’s bricked path
distant canteen, some ordinary pines
no fraudery in these habildar tents
comes, is that no good news?
Only orchids mutilated faces float,
The matter to be looked in another way.
Archid
Works on Silk-carpet
1.
bright pillows and cloud covered quilt
darkcarpets, silver insense sticks
burning, stone cheaps brought from kota
red bricks form Bhopal, in the low land
the triangle-shaped house yet to be complete,
neem trees and thickets of pomegranates,
charming cool of fig-leaves, when it to be completed
tearless joys and sorrows seen to be the reply...
Salma-jarir Kaj 3
2.
a flying ox, an elephant’s lion countenance
a child skeleton, fire in seas
fruitful fish, clothing crane,
loving crops, desert boat,
thirst-temple lonely from it birth
visible at a distance, let us stretch
our palms, worked out palms and ask:
give some water,
- a roar of laughter for this...
salmajarir kaj 4
3.
My friend, on keeping my palms in yours I come
to feel you to be in a cripping amount of debts,
your son a wayward one and the daughter
always gets late in returning at night, relieve
of your secrets you have, speak of your
storm speaking wife, of your cheating collegues,
of your insomnia, and if you must weep,
keep your head on this shoulder and weep, my firend
salmajarir kaj 7
5.
Here I -
half-mad, thunder-struck,
I, another hare- bodied
say to some one naked:
Is love a fool?
I take down physical wormth, a female gardener
lying in this garden of flowers,
I wirte grass
having abundwnce
and the insects,
those in habit of lies, and
mortality to be of thunder-beauty
salmajarir kaj 9
6.
The
habit of thinking is lost. So recently I have chats with birds and
beasts. I sing. They listen. Not days ago, the eagle said, “your music
practice is better than that of a cuckoo. Perhaps artificial praise,
sycophancy, but why for me? The jackle doesn’t feel music, such
dedication, he too says, ‘Now it’s about four in the afternoon, take
some curds with sugar candy.’
salmajarir kaj 12
7.
This
body is no beauty, the mind decorates it in prosperity, with
sandal-riches and watery foams of soup, wounds treated with ointment,
ice-cakes bought in reference to black-spots, the mind loves the body
likewise, some stories of his licentionsness are kept silent, some
secrecy, we do know now where he strolled on last 21st April’s night,
the mind pretends to be a dullard as if indifferent to others affairs as
the murder witnessing neighbours, the body understand entirely, it
teases and starts singing with its hands raised - my mind, O non-chalant
mind of mine
salmajarir kaj 13
8
On breathing
trouble I understand the Fuldongri-hill not to be far away, if not why
am I gasping? why it not to be cured by any medicine? I don’t know what
things, I know find, reaching the hill top.
The stone-slab which we wrote our names on
has perhaps tumbled down,
The water-flow which I jumped over has ment
for redirecting to the crop-field. If so, I not find out it,
I think thus and the hospital-bed gets filled with dry branches, torn paper-bits and abandoned sloughs.
Who will remove these debris? Will I manage to get time?
I have almost reached the Fuldungrihill.
Cheparam’s house
is visible from here. Let me walk
a bit faster towards the hill.
salmajarir Kaj 14
9.
A
swirling green snake crawls among those of you who are born as pumpkin
leaves. My terrified cry has resulted in a crowd. They have rushed here
to kill the snake with bricks and sticks. I point to the crawling snake.
Look, it hides there, lifts it hood again, now I start explaining it to
the school children, it is a green snake, how cleverly concealed,
matching with Nature’s colours, a nature mystery. But every body,
present there, starts smiling, pooh! where leaves, whose snakes, those
are members of Gopal’s family, there Sarada returning from market,
Janardan Babu has gone out for a walk with his pet...
Strange! Another blunder...
Salmajair kaj 16
10
Music is supposed to preceed the twine
birth of truth and falsehood.
Before their being fashionable youths,
before learning to comb, long before
giving clarion call to the near by tent’s
girl, i.e. a long colours bearing history
at intervals of battle and blood-shedding
they certainly gave a side night
to this small pump-set,
in midday sun the machine adjacent to the garden house
would croon a song - and over its shade
countless colourless write karabi-flowers would
fall down thick...
salmajarir kaj 17
Dance of Kahavati
1.
The
sands of the river named Tamasa, its bank I have been seated on
intends to explain diference between me and its water - its waves wish
to convince me that I’m no tree, the youth from some slum, drinking
behind the trees intends to reveal that I have dropped from the clouds,
just now, to the wonder of his eyes.
May be then let me wait with my folded wings in the darkening morning of rains. With the sunlight I’ll take off.
kahavatir nach 2
2.
With
my hands raised higher I cry, ‘Lord you must give it to me.’ People
derive pleasure and say, ‘your cajolement has no limit and let us see
your trick again.’ I repeat it, only here and there I add a few
breathing spaces more as ‘came I to this world’ or ‘cruel you’, these
insignificant songs, you too can sing; people laugh. Is there anything
more important than this?
Countless crickets fall thick in the
forest in the scorching heat of the sun, speech less and dying, some of
them burn with blue flames, their bodies.
kahavatir nach 3
3.
If
I return here, I will return to be blue. I’ll try to articulate
something as light as the blue of the bare sky after rains - such
hesitation free articulation which if not understood will make none’s
liverhood difficult. None can say, ‘You are not understood at all’.
Then
you too please come to be white-colour, to drip into our consciousness
as hard spun non-violence of cotton - the white that demands ‘Make me
bullet-shot, blood-smeared, give me liberty’.
kahavatir nach 7
4.
Inertia
settles down, sage, let us call our sister and brother. Let the reading
table be there that I reach at it that I can swiftly write this day’s
internal haemarage how ears taken the song, coming from leafless void
what thought come to him, this body paralysed? Who has sent these torn
jerssey, half pit left photo’s died garland, and whom these exercise
collected? How have they returned? All mistakes remained alike. Why none
corrected?
kahavatir nach 8
5.
When wax being
rubbed on paper, a picture distinct in the cloud covered midday, rains
in chalta forest I see bride daughter plunged into a silmy pond. Slims
cover the cricle. Is she lookin for lost utensils or to wake up to the
next bank? None knows. At least not I. Wax and paper hill decide the
girl’s fate.
kahavatir nach 18
6.
Have you seen
any flowerboat? I’m yet to visualise it, which I read only in books
Rather I boolishly took a boat full of melons for the pleasure boat of
Kangali, the ordinany for It was to take us all to the bathing place for
doing marriage-rituals beside the river. First I’ll board at, smart
with garlands in hands make my self seat at some distance
While
thinking from the soil to the blue I come to discover that it board came
to be full of burning flowers and burning leaves. The guills are
burning. Then house bodes are there?
kahavatir nach 19
Night School
1.
But I alas! Preparing to write about nostalgia. Recent memeries seen to
be inseribed rocles that will not be value washed in course of time Its
alphabets will be readable after the cooected for is subbed off.
Someone at last will decipher. Today or tomorrow. But from third day
outards, the sport will be under the contorl of distant memories. “Forty
two years ago”, on the other day Gauesh Nandi told me placing his hand
on my soulders, “you had visited our Purua cinemer branch to open an
account your first month’s pay cheque. Rupees three hundres twenty one
and seventy pease. Number C two four nine seven sevings. D’ you
recollect sir? ” I get startted. No, nothing comes to memory. Those
memories are alphabets euggoved on rocks. Perhaps on hiltop covered in
bushes. Cattle graze. One day any Mr. Rakhaldas, climbing up from my
side, will certainly decipher the complete tast in a span of one noon’s
sushinne. Today my confusion of Howrah station vicinty will be
Gaueshbabu’s (after retirement, in chandan Nagar, an the very bank of
Ganges, small two storied house roof laying is yet to be ene why den
you visit oneday cause of extreme satisfaction, ‘That about your music
lesson, he moves a bit further in meaning entertainment. No no, you used
to engage yourself in writing as well my younger brother in law also
had that had bodied know tarashankabalis sen in law once it so happened.
I, preperaed a leap, ascended the rightnow jetty auchored book
Babughat ferry is on that side.
night school
2.
I
had trade of glass, the canopy which I have made of broken mirror
covered with a cloth is now today fling in the sky, in the soft breeze,
the evening settles down on its body, I as if feld the shadow of leo
the face of shibnath shstri, the Eden garden in that tarpausin rolling
un employed trade science Tapan’s sister in law’s sovy my trade
deprtment likes to by such mismatched.
night school
9.
Ther has come a strange ove which says: I am running from Roy’s house. It adds: Not alone a few more persons are with me.
Water-
flow, plastic mugs and tubs come running with wood-pieces,
burthbamboos, it seems a few human bodies too feoating half burned as if
dead
Is then the five of that house still burning today?
night school
Tusu, My Considerate Girl
1.
It cann’t be likewise.
Either be fully mad or die.
This field is meant for sale of men,
Here cotton and women get to balance together
Here snakes and scorpions wait together for customers.
This house lonely, this body a broken market
Only death would not do? An experiditure
for last rites follows.
tusu amar chintamoni 3
2.
Myrabalan: I look at the fruit with endless worder
doze in the eyes, fallen on the ground, the lamp
lighting noon, those who came returned,
the high branch of the pepul tree treambling
in the wind, but alas, the lamp which burns
useless at this moment...
a myrabalan to some extent, left, it
may be extinguished, the prayer of the last
winter suceeded in, Rukshini’s dumb
boy now a days speak fluently.
tusu amar chintamoni 5
3.
No water-meeting here No lake
The more you walk the more the tower of pride
The more you come out of you, the more you find
the mine of rejected metals,
riverless bridge and dead wells.
Walk miles and mileds along the way of joy.
Have you heard of a mad girl at Basudevpur?
Perhaps still there,
be sure to visit here. Give her some water and guava.
Much more water...
tusu amar chintamoni 8
4.
That endearing, covered with garlands and
trigs, see if none sit now on that seat,
something more to be done- We are to go
to some distant land, to the junle, to willside
my travell-path is lit with sight-I
am dharmadus, the resisiowl minded- I’ll find
sal-leaves, basuetfull of bamboo leaks, and mouse soils...
tusu amar chintamoni 9
5.
You
who are reading this piece and will leave after a white will lthink
that some body gone with the doors left open, why no nuss. flowers
fallen, you, a maniac think if you yourself have left the door open
broken box shattered think the gas over lighted.
tusu amar chintamoni 11
6.
I do like to enter the stomach of tjhat old great gird
as it food, like corns or as insects, but with
my own complete consciousness, living sense and
intellect, perhaps to see the universe
And after returning from it inside I like
to recount properly the fearful tale of travelling
to the meditating saints in the forests
in the fall of darkness...
tusu amar chintamoni 14
7.
Continuons lying on this bed of grasses.
No tree-stone-count of duration of my sleep
perhaps there’s disurbances of bears and tigers.
No chanse for me to be afraid with me I have
bells of bear-dance. They will come to use
Will be not dance? And a fire-ing for tigers!
It will surely want to jump through the burning
ring - to and fro.
tusu amar chintamoni 18
8.
No moon struck to another moon - a feather
A bird was moving form the east to the west.
such accident on the way.
I myself didnot see it. On the first floor in
the tax-collecing office Road, on the? ? ? room, I was
sleeping in the room with windows closed. At
The last phase of night the collector inforned me
the breathed his last, it is long.
tusu amar chintamoni 19
9.
A small piece of veranda existing between
sleep and monipur. Milk and tea leaves
are here. Will some body put the kettle on?
sound of boiling water will rowse me,
the people’s chorus -
Paper boats come floating to this director.
Today is the death - anniversany of a great man.
tusu amar chintamoni 20
10.
While going to buy a match-obx I saw the sky
covered with red clouds, Those dexereties of
old days, restless, open-winged-flying in the sky.
Though all of them are visible, some of them are
not such distinct. In that the countenanle of
Anu, of satyen, of Debu leushari, his hand amputed
Is that Banani whose younger brother shouts
Fly away, the police on raid on the high road
tusu amar chintamoni 21
A Writing on Cover
That day I stored water in an earthenpot
with a cover, near the window-but the to
the earth’s motion the worldly restlessness touch
it-excite it-pulls it to the west, to the
wintry night-winter-chilled that water,
life -like, it rolls on the floor when the pot broken
- as if waves - as if a dat of thedead -
it means sudden summer has returned.
Fish Fighting
1.
I sit silently near the empty bottle.
It seems the cats mewing here and there.
I have red parts of the hand bill of jalim lotion.
Morning dailies are yet to come.
Family women have manaze to get
a few rupees as a mock payment of
doing-up his bed.
The new son-in-law laughs pleasure.
The son is the Ketu’s place.
The fish has moved to the fronts.
meen yudha 1
2.
I will wake up in the orchard of apples and grapes.
I will ask each and everyone.
Why will it bring victory only to truth, not to false hood?
It is impossible to get reply to such question in the affirmative.
Its seems so. Some one seems standing on the door steps.
I remove the latch. The local peon looks for me.
He says: a registry for you from Nurpur, at wrong address,
so this unnecessary delay, where do you roam
all day long?
meen yudha 2
At Baksigunj on the River Padma
1.
You have kept coloured leaves, words in colours
sound of snake movement.
The sun above the head, blue, each asks
the lost child about its home, name,
whereabouts its parents, their own country,
it does not know who has taken it here-
it can remember only the noise of snake movement
since birth. It can remember this little.
colourful, it does not forget even that
The rest is irrelevent, dark and fallen from tradition.
baksignje padma pare 1
2.
A floating day of light clouds,
as if love, as if a document
I have folded the net of thoughts.
The web of sight gets dry in the sun.
Why have the singers not yet arrived?
This life meant for wounds, for glands of blood
Give me some time, a few minutes more.
For long I have not got down to seas.
baksignje padma pare 3
3.
Now I don’t have any responsibility, except
to move to seas and forests with my note book.
I have no assignment except counting waves.
Silence reigns.
Water gradually evaporates, the perplexed law
of Nature. Winter returns. Locks of hair
open and fly in the wind, as if it’s evening
as if silence.
Heard that people like birds them selves
fly in the nooks of fields, jump from the air.
Even they climb trees and peck fruit.
My savings are this beach, assuring huge book,
this understanding
baksignje padma pare 4
4.
Listen, my daughter to this arabian tale
of both travell and luxuries.
A son of grass and penance in the Nile basin.
This worldly life, an earthen geometry,
has lost direction in stormy rains-floating
ghost stone in canal.
The more I look up words, down words and breathe in
the more the distance grows, anger and geographical tevror,
distance of a few mile seem to be
that between the planets.
I add: I’ve come to teeach songs and fables
of morality and immorality in the crop markets,
the new way of slaughtering.
Someone has concealed the setting sun,
they have made the skin trunsparent in fire;
now a new music instrument -
of another province musical
a musiic-flow of mountain side.
baksignje padma pare 5
5.
Who will wake up is the songs of dawn?
Helpless I implore - O the beautiful find some remedy.
The time table of the frontier rail is leaf-fringed
I thought of going some where. I note it down.
Images, new art, look at the flying vulthres above
the day ends in the departing sun light.
baksignje padma pare 7
6.
Turbulent water. I’ve been standing by it
I’ve asket, “Only I know the secret of pacitying you
none any more.”
Water has got calm. It knows me.
I’m Raju, a boy from kash-bush, working in hostel.
I comply with orders. I talk a bit much.
baksignje padma pare 8
7.
Just after death I met a green hibiscus.
‘Do you remember me, blooming by Ramani babu’s
rail quarter? ’ A strange looking
manolia asked, “You must recognise me,
I bloomed at the foothill, slightly fragrant”.
Then the sagoon-bunch aked with a mild smile
I am no true follower, yet I know that you
haven’t forgot me? Then after the session
of questions and answers, if successful
you will get a degree with papers
caligraphical letters on it tell that
he is truely dead; at the end the
labyrinth of government inopector’s
signature with impressions of seal.
baksignje padma pare 10
8.
Rain-filled clouds emerge out of blood sea
Rains fall. Rains evaporate.
They say, “We know you, the brother of
fire and soil.
As we are. But it is residetral
suffering from incureable disease.”
I wanted to know- what’s remedy for me?
-‘Carry this talisman’. They tie to
my arm such as a string whose content
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? : O fearful, O desert,
you continue to be? ? ? , honnoured.
people leave seat to you, ask you to join
in the dinner party, you continue to stay
procreate like ugly creatures attached
to environment
baksignje padma pare 14
9.
I move to the direction which you startled algae direct.
I get clashed with fish in water,
quickly I come to shore
Algae indicates the direction of current,
the damages of men boat-carried
Sleep, sleep my son; the halessman sings
I, a hydrophobic one, ghost live in water
ghost-fish, I bow to it from sank, a bamboo,
this consideration.
baksignje padma pare 18
10.
Standing at the end of a long summer day
I’m thinking to cross the frontier camp.
Is there anything which not diven to me by others
shirt, shoes, card-packet,
a bunch of false tickets
even the ticket collector’s black coat, though old
empty plastic bottle thrown into the pond of water
spotted with palm trees around.
Standing at the end of a long summer day
I like songs coming from distance,
not that from proximity.
What left by others, useless,
whom corelessness glorifies,
I under their shadows lie, breathe in
sometimes I move to some distant land
but that is temporary transportation
The most important
poet of the 60s is Malay Roychowdhury . He started the world-famous
Hungry Movement in Bengali poetry and literature . The Movement was
initially spearheaded by Roy Choudhury, Samir Roychoudhury (his elder
brother), Shakti Chattopadhyay, and Haradhon Dhara (alias Debi Roy).
Thirty more poets and artists subsequently joined them, the best-known
being Binoy Majumdar, "Utpal Kumar Basu, Falguni Ray, Subimal Basak,
Tridib Mitra, Shambhu Rakshit, and Anil Karanjai. Roy Choudhury is to
the "Hungryalist Movement" as Stéphane Mallarmé was to Symbolism, Ezra
Pound to Imagism, André Breton to Surrealism, and Allen Ginsberg to the
Beats.
The movement is now known in English as Hungryalism or the
"Hungry generation", its name being derived from Geoffrey Chaucer's "In
the sowre hungry tyme"; the philosophy was based on Oswald Spengler's
"The Decline of the West". The movement's bulletins were published both
in Bengali and infrequently in English as well as Hindi Language by Roy
Choudhury since November 1961.
The movement, however, ended in 1965. Thereafter Roy
Choudhury ventured out, apart from poetry, into fiction, drama, and
essays on social and cultural issues that Bengali people have been
suffering from. Howard McCord, formerly English teacher at the
Washington State University and later professor of English language and
literature at Bowling Green University, who met Roy Choudhury during a
visit to Calcutta, has succinctly traced Malay's emergence in these
words in Ferlinghetti-edited City Lights Journal 3: "Malay Roy
Choudhury, a Bengali poet, has been a central figure in the Hungry
Generation's attack on the Indian cultural establishment since the
movement began in the early 1960s". He wrote, "acid, destructive,
morbid, nihilistic, outrageous, mad, hallucinatory, shrill--these
characterise the terrifying and cleansing visions" of Malay Roy
Choudhury that "Indian literature must endure if it is to be vital
again".
The
Books and web pages we have read so far on Allen Ginsberg, the American
poet of Beat movement, have one thing in common. They do not bother to
examine the impact India had on his inner self and identity, and the influence we Bengali poets, artists and thinkers of the Hungryalist movement had on Ginsberg’s post-India poetry and literary persona. This is despite the fact that Allen Ginsberg’s longest span outside USA was spent in Kolkata and Benaras where the Hungryalists resided during the sixties.
Allen
Ginsberg was the poet, short-story writer and editor Samir
Roychoudhury’s guest for about a week at his Chaibasa hilltop hutment
during Hindu Rathayatra festival in 1962.
In April 1963 Ginsberg visited younger brother of Samir, i.e. Malay Roychoudhury at their Patna
residence..Ginsberg along with Peter Orlovsky resided in the same
locality, i.e. Bangalitola , where Hungryalist painters Anil Karanjai
and Karunanidhan Mukhopadhyay had their studio.
None of the Hungryalists knew about him prior to his arrival in India. We read his poems for the first time in 1963 when Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent us books of Beat poets.The
Hungryalist movement had been launched from Patna in November 1961 by Malay Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Debi Roy and Samir Roychoudhury.
The word Hungryalism was coined by the Hungryalists from English poet Geofrey Chaucer’s line In the Sowre Hungry Tyme.The Hungryalists felt that the post-colonial dream of a new,ecstatic , resurgent India
had turned sour due to license and permit raj of a corrupt
bureaucracy-politician nexus and the country was hurtling towards a
nightmare after partition of the Bengali time and space.
The
philosophical base of the movement, in keeping with the Chaucerian idea
of Hungry time, was drawn from Oswald Spengler’s sense of history.
Spengler,more or less like Hindus, had seen history not as a linear
progression, but as the flowering of a number of self-contained
cultures, each with a characteristic spiritual tone, or conception of
the space within which they are to act. Spengler had also argued that
cultures go through a self-contained process of growing, going through
their seasons, and perishing. There were no historically intelligible
laws to this process.
The
Hungryalists were impressed with the idea. Spenglerian argument that a
culture is creative during its ascendancy, when it depends upon its own
productive resources. Once the creativity reaches its zenith, the
culture starts waning, and starts feeding on alien resources. As a
result, the culture starts degenerating, and its hunger for outside
supplements becomes insatiable. The Hungryalists felt that there was no
further scope to produce cultural and intellectual giants like Rammohan
Ray, Vidyasagar, Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore.
ALLEN ARRIVES IN INDIA
Like all American tourists, including Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky had landed at Bombay
(now Mumbai) port in formal Western attire. They visited North and
North-East Indian tourist spots and hill-stations with their coat,
trousers, tie, shirt, shoes, socks on. Once they arrived at Calcutta
(now Kolkata), their metamorphoses began, They threw away their Western
dress and clothed themselves in home-attire of the Hungryalists of the
time, viz., handloom kurta-pyjama and rubber chappal footwear, with a
cotton sling bag hanging on the shoulder. They allowed their hair and
beard to grow like some of the Hungryalists.
The
reason why Ginsberg was attracted to this Bengali literary movement is
because there had been continuous media coverage of activities of the
writers, poets, and artists preceding his arrival in India.
It is interesting to note that he did not make friends with poets and
artists of Marathi, Hindi, English, Punjabi etc. languages though he
visited those states also. When he arrived in Kolkata the movement had
on its platform such literary names as Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Binoy
Majumdar, Utpalkumar Basu, Basudeb Dasgupta, Pradip Choudhuri, Subimal
Basak, Subo Acharya, Falguni Roy, Saileswar Ghosh, Sambhu Rakshit, Tapan
Das, Ramananda Chattopadhyay, Subhash Ghosh, Satindra Bhoumik,
Arupratan Basu, Haranath Ghose, Bhanu Chattopadhyay, Nihar Guha,
Amritatanay Gupta, Shankar Sen, Ashok Chattopadhyay, Jogesh Panda,
Manohar Das and many others.
Allen
Ginsberg’s logo of three fishes with one common head displayed in all
his post-India publications, albums, cassettes, exhibition cards etc,
which appeared for the first time in his India
journals published by City Lights, was a replica of the engraved
drawing on the stone floor near the entrance to the tomb of Emperor
Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar. The meaning of this drawing was explained to
Ginsberg by Malay Roychoudhury, when they visited Khudabaksh Library at Patna
where the same drawing was found on the cover of a Persian book, which
was the famous “Deen-E-Ilahi” written by the Emperor, a treatise in
which the Emperor had aspired to combine the tenets of Islam, Buddhism
and Hinduism. Christianity had not entered the kingdom till then.
Ginsberg had come to India for a makeover of the image for which Jack Keruak had warned him of a quick burn- up. He did not go to Nepal like other foreigners who used to halt for a couple of days at Malay’s Patna house. Instead of a makeover, India
gave Ginsberg a genuine new image .Even Peter Orlovsky had a changeover
through his torrid affair with the lady guitarist Manjula Sen. In fact
when Ginsberg departed for the USA, Orlovsky had stayed back in the company of Hungryalist artists of Benaras.
A CHANGED GINSBERG
Allen
Ginsberg was in awe with the depth of tolerance and resiliency of
Indian masses. For the common Indian man, as well as the Hungryalists
who all came from Hindu family, such binary opposites as God and Devil,
and therefore, pure good and pure evil, were non-existent. In the
company of Shakti Chattopadhyay, Asoke Fikir and Karunanidhan
Mukhopadhyay, Ginsberg met many religious persons such as Sri Sitaram Omkardas
Thakur, Swami Sivananda, Meher Baba, Swami Satyananda, Sri Gopinath
Kaviraj, Sri Kalipada Guharai, Sri Bankebihariji, Sri Shambhu Bhartiji
and sundry godmen at the burning ghats. Being born in a Jew family,
absence of the binary opposites was a riddle for him. A professor from Illinois
who visited Ginsberg at his Kolkata hotel, remarked that Ginsberg was
transformed into revolt of the shudras poet;that is exactly what the
Hungryalist poets were called before Ginsberg’s arrival.
Allen
Ginsberg’s “Howl” and “Kaddish” were products of a social consciousness
squeezed out of clash of monotheistic binary opposites. After his life
in India,
and time spent with Hungryalists, he was unable to write poems in the
same vein as that of “Howl” and “Kaddish”. This is evidenced from his
failed attempts that we find on the pages 134, 135, 136, 176, and 177
(City Lights edition) of Indian Journals. His post-Indian poems have
Indian breathing span and Hungryalist rhythm sequences.
Acceptance
of Akbar’s three-bodied fish by Ginsberg as his logo reveals that he
had spiritually disowned monotheistic American inheritance in 1963
itself though he converted to Buddhism in 1972. Malay Roychoudhury has
written in April 2007 issue of “The Storm” that when Ginsberg visited
his Patna
house, he had shown Malay a brick-size stone from an ancient Buddhist
temple on which small Buddhas were carved out. Ginsberg had washed it in
soap water and cleaned the stone with his tooth brush. This real-life
experience was enough to relieve him from his Blakian hallucinations,
and extra-mundane claims of visionary supernatural senses and
impalpability of consciousness. He went back a different man.
CONCEALMENT OF INDIAN INFLUENCE
Allen
Ginsberg did try to conceal, it appears, the Hungryalist literary
inputs and change of spiritual persona by jamming his Indian Journals
with photographs of naked Hindu saints, famishing fakirs, beggars,
lepers and destitutes. Malay Roychoudhury’s photo shop owner father had
rebuked Ginsberg when he found that all the shots of a film contained
such snaps. Ginsberg’s subsequent activities reveal that the
postcolonial Indian social turmoil of the sixties sharpened his post-
McCarthyan American teeth.
Though
TIME magazine in its issue of November 20, 1964 had written that it was
Ginsberg who influenced the Hungryalists, the fact is other way round.
Hungryalists had indelible impact on all dimensions of his identity.
Simply look at him how he was when he came to India,
and how he looked when he went back. One wonders why Ginsberg preserved
manifestoes, bulletins, magazines etc of the Hungryalist movement at Colombia and Stanford University archives, and at the same time kept silent about them in his published journals!
Ginsberg carried a harmonium from Benaras when he returned to USA,
and introduced the custom of extempore poetry composition, and singing,
while playing on the harmonium. When he was in Benaras , Anil Karanjai
and Karunanidhan Mukhopadhyay, the Hungryalist painters, and Hindi poet
Nagarjuna (a Buddhist), had introduced him to this musical instrument,
which is played on by devotees when they sing poems composed by
Tulasidasa, Kabirdasa, Meera Bai, Tukaram, Krittibas, Ramprasad Sen and
other saint poets. Ginsberg had found the same tradition at the
Vaishnava, Shaivaite and Ramakrishna ashrama temples in Mayapur, Nabadwip, Puri, Chaibasa, Patna, Gaya,
and Kolkata. According to Malay Roychoudhury, Ginsberg perfected
playing on the instrument at the residence of Malay’s cousin sister
Savitri Banerjee, where her daughters were playing on the harmonium and
singing compositions of Bengali poets Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul
Islam, Atulprasad Sen and Dwijendralal Roy.
The Hungryalist influence in this regard had gone beyond Ginsberg in USA, inasmuch as several young American poets adopted this tradition after importing harmoniums from India. Moreover, during the sixties, translated Hungryalist writings appeared inmagazines of United States, Europe, Australia and the Latin American countries, such as City
Lights Journal, Salted Feathers, El Corno Emplumado, San Francisco
Earthquake, Trace, Burning Water, Inetrgalactica, Imago,
Klactoveedsedsteen, Ramparts, Whe’re, El Rehilite, Guerilla, Panorama,
Kulchur, Trobar ,American Dialogue, Evergreen Review, Folder etc.
THE HUNGRYALIST OUTREACH
It
would also be worthwhile to mention that Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Leroy
Jones (Amiri Baraka), Margaret Randall, Carol Berge, Eric Motram, Howard
McCord, Daisy Aldan, Allan de Loach, Robert Kelly, Dick Bakken, Gordon
Lasslet, Allan Van Newkirk, Carl Weissner, Barney Rosset, George Dowden,
Ida Spaulding, James Laughlin, Lita Hornick, Bonnie Crown, David Antin,
Joel Oppenheimer, Dan Georgakas, Diane Di Prima, Octavio Paz, Ernesto
Cardenal, George Bowering, Paul Blackburn, Allen Hoffman, Clayton
Eshleyman, Carol Rubenstien, Armand, Schwerner, Ted Berrigan, Jerome
Rothenberg, Roberto Juarroz and several other writers, poets, artists
had creative contact with the Hungryalists. Some of them had visited India and participated in Hungryalist happenings. In New York,
poets used to read from Hungryalist writings to raise funds to enable
Hungryalist writers to defend themselves during their 35 month long
tortuous trial at dinghy Bankshal Court. Washington State University had published Malay Roychoudhury’s controversial poem Stark Electric Jesus. Bowling Green University had a writers’ workshop on Hungryalist writings. Illinois University has a Hungryalist archive. Anil Karanjai had a painting exhibition in a gallery at Washington. In India Prof. Swati Banerjee has done her M. Phil.on a comparative study of Hungryalist and Beat Literature.
Ginsberg’s
declaration that “if it isn’t composed on the tongue, it is an essay”,
is an insight he received from the stories of oral poets of 19th
century Kolkata (Bhola Moira, Anthony Firingi, Ram Basu, Jagneshwar
Das,Gonjla Guin, Nityananda Boiragi, Nilmoni Thakur, Nrisingha Rai,
Bhabani Banik, Krishnakanta Chamar, Raghunath Das, Haru Thakur, and many
others, who incidentally were mostly “revolt of the shudras poets”).
Ginsberg came to know about them from Asoke Fakir, whose Champahati
hutment used to be frequented by Hungryalists for substance celebration.
Allen
Ginsberg has described Asoke Fakir as “saffron robed long black hair
Negro” in his Indian Journals. Asoke was rather good looking. Author
Shyamal Gangopadhyay had written a novel based on the colourful life of
Asoke Fakir. The first thing Asoke did to foreign writers was to give
them a shock of their life by taking them to the Nimtalla Ghat, the
Hindu funeral place where dead bodies are regularly burnt on pyre logs.
This was an experience which Allen and Peter had never encountered
before. Thereafter whichever city or pilgrimage centre Ginsberg visited,
he invariably went to the Burning Ghat like a haunted man, even in such
remote tribal places like Chaibasa.
Hindi
poet Nagarjuna had told us that Allen used to spend brooding hours all
alone at the famous Manikarnika Burning ghat almost everyday at Benaras,
and that his tanned skin and long black hair gave him such an Indian
identity that he freely entered all Hindu temples, which are otherwise
barred for non-Hindus. Ginsberg was fascinated with the funeral pyre as
the burning dead body was a constant reminder of inevitable mortality, a
reminder that the living flesh is tender and vulnerable. A grave, on
the other hand, gave a false notion of immortality. We are sure that his
post-India discourse is built on this premise.
The
anti-substance law was enacted in 1980s. Ginsberg was surprised to find
easy availability of ganja or the Indian marijuana, bhang, hashish,
opium. Etc. at or near all Burning Ghats
from government-approved shops. These herbal inebriants have remained
ritualistc inputs for Hindu devotees of certain order, including some of
the Hungryalists who were devotees of any Hindu cult. Obviously, the
Hungryalists did not consider these herbs to be drugs or narcotics.
However, for Allen Ginsberg they were. He felt like defying US law in India.
He found out that for the common Indian man, use of these herbs was
neither unnatural nor immoral. He drew support from this experience and
advocated loosening of legal restrictions on the herbs after he returned
to USA. The Hungryalists were never into chemical substances.
(Tridib
Mitra and his wife Alo Mitra edited two Hungryalist magazines, one in
English named “Waste Paper” and the other in Bengali named Unmarga. They
also edited collections of letters written to Hungryalists: one in
English and another in Bengali. These collections and manifesto,
bulletins etc .are available at the Hungryalist archive of Little
Magazine Library and Research Centre, 18M,Tamer lane, Kolkata 700 009.)
