Prof Howard McCord
Poetry of Chaos and Death
Every
attitude has its poetry, and a small, neat nation may, in one age,
present a singularly unified attitude and its poetry to the world, as
did England in the last sixteenth century. But such a tidy clarity is impossible for India.
No country in the world offer greater extremes or variety in the total
experiences which shape poets. Every social ordering from the most
primitive to the most sophisticated, may be found; every major religion
and most of the minor ones are practiced: the world views and value
structures of India are nearly endless and expressed in 723 languages.
The only area in the world that offers even remotely an equivalent
complexity and confusion is the whole of Africa.
Two things give the country what unity it has: the first is false
generalization---that there is an Indian temperament, discernable both
in the North and the South, composed of egoism, agility of mind,
quickness to violence, a penchant for vaporous theories and an honest
material avarice; the second is a terrible truth---that nowhere else is
there such an omnipresent doom, of the implacable approach of absolute
disaster and collapse.
India
produces many kinds of poetry; I am familiar only with that in English,
and it falls roughly into three categories. The first is simply bad:
the sentimental outpourings of the young or heartsick; formal and
bombastic occasional verse; a gauche and florid romanticism: grotesque
prayers and pious exhortations, and such like, all of which suffer from
banality, false emotion, and technical incompetence. The second is
compromised and serious, often well-written poems which sometimes move
me but most often seem too dependent on the poetic traditions of England
a generation or more ago, and the bland and inoffensive taste of the
upper middle class. These works exist in the limbo of the lukewarm, and
represent a timid art that dares neither to hate nor love too much. Like
our own academic verse, these poems reflect calm intelligence, tamed
passion and the polite despairs of gentlemen born into a world they
never made. The poems are cultured, introspective, sensitive, and are
most true to the plight of the Indian estranged from his own culture by
his mastery of English, but whose situation is tolerable, and who would
not admit that poetry is a criminal occupation. These are sincere and
harmless poems, and aside from a little local colour, could have been
written in Leeds or Philadelphia. The denatured cosmopolitanism that infects the poetry of the West prevails in India
as well, and few of the poems carry any sense of place, or the sound of
a man speaking, or the rasping smell of cow-dung fires. The academic
poets of India have yet to grasp the vernacular and all that implies.
The poetic vision of the Hungry Generation erupted in Bengal five years ago, and has rapidly spread to such cities like New Delhi, Bombay and Allahabad.
This kind of poetry is dangerous and revolutionary, cleanses by
violence and destruction, unsettles and confounds the reader. This is
the poetry of the disaffected, the alienated, the outraged, the dying.
It is a poetry which alarms and disgusts the bourgeois, for it describes
their own sickened state more clearly than they wish to hear, and
exposes the hypocrisy of their decency. One reaction of good citizens
has been to accuse the poets of hysteria and obscenity. The long and
painful persecution of Malay Roychoudhury, ending in his conviction on
28th December 1965 on charges of obscenity, indicates the virulence and depth of the fear which these poets have uncovered.
The
energy of the poets is hysterical: the imagery of the poem is obscene.
It is meant to be. But I take obscenity to be a just and natural
reaction to a vile existence.. Obscenity is the desperate music of poets
who dare speak out against the rape of mind and soul that marks our
demented and vicious civilization. Obscenity is the last attempt by
honest men to speak their agony to those who torture them. Obscenity is a
moral weapon with which to attack the degrading and filthy use of power
that characterizes our age, and assert contempt for the managers of our
lives.
These
poets say what poets and prophets have said for a hundred years---that
our civilization is desperately sick, that our consciousness is
polluted, our values murderous. They are outraged at the cruel and
deliberate waste of beauty and intelligence that world culture
represents, and sickened by the perversions of life our societies
demand. Their poems record the ugly, numbing truth that most men delight
in these horrors, lust after their own destruction, and fear life
insanely. The poets are nihilists. They are pessimists. And most will
die before their time. But each of them has a vision of what man ought
to be, and should be, and their poetry stems from the sad knowledge of
what he is. I value their work most because it is an honest response to
the reality of life in India. And India
endures now what will come to us all before long. Pound said that poets
were antennae of the race, and they are---but they are also gotten on
Cassandra, and will not be believed until too late, when the vacuous
mouthings that pass as earthly wisdom are known by all to be empty,
dreadful lies and the hideous future we have let to be prepared for us
arrives. We will not be saved. This is the obscenity their poetry must
celebrate.
Malay
Roychoudhury, a young 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 sixties. The Indian press believes to
this day that the group’s origins can be traced to the 1962 Indian visit
of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gary & Jeanne Snyder. But
however stimulating the visit of these American poets, however inspired
by such writers as Artaud, Genet, Michaux, Burroughs, Miller, and
Celine, I believe the Movement is autochthonous and stems from the
profound dislocations of Indian life.
There
was little notice of the Movement in the United States until 1963 when
City Lights Journal carried news of the group; In 1964 the Hungrealist
Manifestoes appeared in KULCHUR#15, and EL CORNO EMPLUMADO and
EVERGREEN REVIEW printed letters telling of the Movement’s legal
difficulties. For in the autumn of 1964, as many learned from a November
issue of TIME, six poets of the Hungry Generation, Malay Roychoudhury,
Saileswar Ghosh, Subhas Ghose and Pradip Choudhuri, had been arrested
and charged with conspiring to produce and distribute an obscene book in
violation of Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code. The book was an
anthology of their writings, and STARK ELECTRIC JESUS was Malay
Roychoudhury’s contribution. At their arrest, all were suspended from
their jobs, and when I saw them in June 1965, they had been out of work
nearly ten months. Later that summer charges were dropped against five,
but the prosecution of Malay Roychoudhury continued. On 28 December 1965
he was found guilty by a Calcutta
court and sentenced to a fine of 200 rupees or one month’s
imprisonment. The poem was banned. He has not been reinstated in his
job, and life, as he writes, “has become hard and difficult…I am more or
less living on alms”.
In
spite of prosecution and harassment, the Hungry Generation has
continued to produce and publish poetry and prose. Acid, destructive,
morbid, hallucinatory, nihilistic, outrageous, obscene, mad,
shrill---these characterize the terrifying and cleansing visions that
the Hungrealists insist Indian literature must endure. With few
exceptions, contemporary Indian literature is school master’s stuff:
pallid, otiose, and dull. It is timid and moralistic, and when it is not
politely realistic, it is romantic and aimlessly and endlessly
philosophical. Bhabani Bhattacharya and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are among
the exceptions, the one possessing a dank tartness like that of Albert
Cossery, the other the lucid wit of Jane Austin. But only the Hungry
Generation, excluded from the academies and the literary aristocracy,
can the fullness of urgency and despair be seen, for they more than any
other group have realized that there is very possibly no hope for India,
that what lies ahead is chaos and collapse. They are not
revolutionaries, only mourners. Revolution is pointless when betrayal
has been so deep. All that remain is to protest, scream, love everything
to foolishness---especially India---then nod wisely and callously at death.
(Courtesy: Tribal Press, Washington DC. 1965)
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