Rima Bhattacharya, PhD
Abstract: This paper traces the geographical expansion of the
trend of writing Language Poetry from the 1950s, which gradually influenced the
broader spectrum of literature world-wide. A new group of uprising poets known
as the Language poets were opting for technically disruptive writing in place
of rhetorical and representational writing in order to reflect the spirit of
the age. The paper draws a comparison between the poems of the famous beat poet
Allen Ginsberg and the poems of some of the Hungry Generation poets of Bengal
in order to trace out the emotional as well as the technical similarities
between these two geographically diversified yet very similar groups in terms
of voicing a common spirit of rebellion. Be it the poetry of the American beat
poet Allen Ginsberg or the Indian hungryalist poet Malay Roychoudhury, the
emotions, sentiments and angst expressed through their poems are the same. In spite of being separated by a huge
distance their spontaneous and later censored poetry seem to echo the same
rebellious voice and proceed towards the common objective of cleaning the
society of hypocrisies and inhibitions.
Title: The common thread between the Beats and the
Hungryalists
Rima
Bhattacharya
Department
of Humanities and Social Science
Indian
Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
The
history of American poetry since World War II represents a contest between a
formalist approach towards the experimental impulse of modernism and an anti-formalist
revolt that affirms the presence of open forms. Postmodern poetry or avant-garde
poetry has always posed oppositional challenges to the cultural establishments
of a society. Modern and late modern experimental writers have repeatedly
suggested that technically disruptive work is scientific, objective and
presentational–the very opposite of representational and rhetorical writing.
This was followed by the uprising of a new group of poets known as The Language
poets. They were an avant-garde group in United States that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its immediate postmodern precursors
were the New American poets, a cluster which includes the New
York School, the Objectivist
poets, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Language poetry can be
defined as the work of an associated network of writers who share in the main a
number of questions about the relation between language and the politics of
cultural production.
By
the time Allen Ginsberg was reading out his poem “Howl” for the 6 Poets at the
6 Gallery Reading, San Francisco, 1955,
poetry has become a tangible social force, moving and unifying its
auditors, releasing the energies of the audience through spoken, even shouted
verse. Young poets did then engage in an enthusiastic, free-spirited
celebration of poetry. The audience participated, shouted and joyfully
applauded at times. Ginsberg’s poem is a howl against everything in our
mechanistic civilization which kills the true spirit of life. It uncovers the
nerves of suffering and spiritual struggle. However, its positive force and
energy come from a redemptive and eternal quality of love, although it
meticulously catalogues the evils of our time, from physical depravation to
madness. Nearly all of Ginsberg’s poems which
were based on so-called beat themes–allegiance to spontaneity, rejection of
artificial forms, commitment to physicality, pursuit of the non-mimetic, are
excellent examples of Language Poetry. All these poems generated a poetics of
their own along with their own academically respectable theorists William
Carlos Williams and Charles Olson (Merrill 16).
It is extremely interesting to trace the geographical
expansion of this trend of writing Language Poetry which has influenced the
broader spectrum of literature world-wide. With the
first reading of Howl in 1955,
Ginsberg explodes on the page with a driving challenge of language, perception,
and the development of a new American vocabulary, similar to that of Walt
Whitman. Ginsberg's greatest contribution as a poet was the development of a
new poetics. Upon the release of the poem as a part of his 1956
collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the bookstore's manager, Shigeyoshi
Murao, were charged
with disseminating obscene literature, and both were arrested. Only a few years later,
in a completely different part of the world, in India, a similar incident took
place. On September 2, 1964, arrest warrants
were issued against eleven young alienated young poets of Bengal who called
themselves The Hungryalists. The group
included Malay Roychoudhury, Saileswar Ghosh, Subhas
Ghose and Pradip Choudhuri, who 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, in which Stark Electric Jesus was Malay
Roychoudhury’s contribution. Later that summer charges were dropped against
five of them, 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. The court case went on for years. News of the
persecution appeared in the November 4, 1964, issue of Time magazine, which brought the Hungryalist movement worldwide
coverage. Poets like Octavio Paz and Ernesto Cardenal, and Beat poets like
Allen Ginsberg visited Roychoudhury1.
Soon
after Independence, poetry in most of the Indian languages went through a
turbulent phrase at approximately the same time. As a result of this various
“regional” poetic movements were launched; these were often simply called new
poetry (for instance, naikabita in
Hindi and nayakavya in Marathi). The
major context of nineteenth and twentieth century Indian poetry cannot be
grasped if one does not take into consideration the vast gamut or network of
Indian and foreign literatures surrounding it. It is almost undeniable that
“foreign influences” have played a crucial role in the emergence of Indian post-modern
poetry. English literature has been an obvious influence, and it has permeated
all the Indian language traditions since the nineteenth century. American Beat
poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, especially the poetry of Allen Ginsberg also had
a widespread effect, on the Indian literary scenario, drawing strong and
favorable responses from all over the subcontinent. During the postcolonial
decades, the Indian literary world saw the advent of powerful new writers from
formerly suppressed or marginal social groups and communities. In the 1960s and
especially in the 1970s, poets from lower middle class and lower class
backgrounds began challenging the canons of middle-class and upper- caste
literary establishments in languages like Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali,
Marathi and Hindi. Among the poetic movements that emerged from this wider
phenomenon were the Digambara (“naked
poetry”) movement in Andhra Pradesh, the controversial and short-lived Hungry
Generation movement in Bengal and the Marxist- Leninist (Naxalite) movement of revolutionary writing in different parts of
the country (Dharwadker 220)
For a diversified nation like India it is impossible to maintain a
tidy clarity and present a singularly unified poetic attitude to the world. No other
country in the world can offer greater extremes or variety in the total
experiences which shape poets. The poetic vision of the Hungry Generation
erupted in Bengal and rapidly spread to such cities like New Delhi, Bombay and
Allahabad. This kind of poetry was dangerous and revolutionary like the Beat
poetry, and did seek to clean the society by violence and destruction. This was
the poetry of the disaffected, the alienated, the outraged, and the dying.
It was a kind of poetry which alarmed and disgusted the bourgeois, for it laid
bare their sickened state more clearly than they wished to hear, and exposed
the hypocrisy of their decency2. In an
interview with Subhankar Das, the editor of Graffiti, Kolkata Roychoudhury
states that “the Hungryalist movement has changed the course of Bengali
literature once for all. We definitely created a rupture in terms of time,
discourse, experience, narrative diction and breath span of poetic lines” (See
“Conversing with Malay”). One of the reactions of good citizens had been to accuse
the hungryalist poets of hysteria and obscenity, which is reminiscent of the
first line of Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,/ Dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix” (Collected Poems 126). The
long and painful persecution of Malay Roychoudhury, ended in his conviction on
28th December
1965 on charges of obscenity. This is an indication of the disturbance that the
poets had created in an apparently well-wrought society comprising mainly of
corrupted and hypocritical people.
During
his India trip, Bengal introduced Ginsberg to a group of anti-establishment
writers like himself and the other beatniks. This group include people like
Shakti Chattopadhyay, Malay Roy Choudhury, Samir Roychoudhury, Subimal Basak,
Debi Roy (HaradhonDhara), Utpalkumar Basu, Binoy Majumdar, Sandipan
Chattopadhyay, Basudeb Dasgupta, Roy and last but not the least Falguni Roy,
who is considered to be responsible for heralding the postmodern era in
Bengal. Falguni Roy’s book Nashto Atmar Television (The Television of
Ruined Subjectivity), published on 15th August 1973 was supposed to signify
the end of modernity in Bangla poetry and thereby herald post-modernity. Falguni
Roy completely rejected collectively proclaimed rules and canons and wrote poems
which veered toward open, playful, disjunctive, displaced, hybridized,
immanent, fragmentary, selfless Bangla indigenous forms. His poems too are
strikingly different wherein lines, stanzas, voice-grids are interlocked as
against the interlinking form of pre-Hungry Generation Bengali poetry.
In
his prose and poems Falguni Roy made constant efforts to dismantle modern
poetry's beliefs in unity, hierarchy, identity, foundations, subjectivity and
representations, while celebrating counter-principles of difference and multiplicity
in everyday life3. It is possible to draw a comparison between the
poetry of Ginsberg and Roy on the account of the tremendous fatigue and hopelessness
expressed by their poems. Allen Ginsberg’s collection of early poems The Empty Mirror begins with a poetic
statement of the profoundest uselessness and hopelessness:
I
feel as if I am at a dead
end
and so I am finished.
…
are
true but I never escape
the
feeling of being closed in
and
the sordidness of self,
the
futility of all that I
have
seen and done and said. (Collected Poems 71)
One would
encounter the same feeling of hopelessness and despair in Falguni Roy’s poem “Personal Neon”:
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 Ray4
The poem expresses neither
exultation, nor the certitude of life that provides the human soul with a sense
of comfort, but the mood of a spirit that has long been besieged by doubts
regarding one’s own abilities and has experienced a face-to-face encounter with
the sense of despair. In both of the poems one would find echoes of existential
complaints. It is also important to note that both the poems make use of
similar spontaneous language and emotions. One would find that Ginsberg’s
poetry usually depends upon the existentialist formula: existence precedes
essence. While he is writing, he claims to be living or existing through the
experience. Thought about that experience (i.e. essence) would reduce the
immediacy of the experience itself.
Hungryalist manifestoes contain several points to second Ginsberg’s
methods. In fact in more than one way Falguni Roy can be considered to be one
out of the group of outcast seekers suffering persecution, madness, suicide and
among whom Ginsberg includes himself, in his poem “Howl”. The Moloch, which in Ginsberg’s Howl is a representative of social ills, equally oppresses
Falguni’s life, although he belongs to a different culture and country.
At that time, Kolkata, then called Calcutta, was undergoing
change at a fast pace. Partition had unleashed a catastrophic inflow of
displaced people, which was gradually changing the social fabric of border
towns as well as the city of Calcutta. Migration began before Partition and
continued into the 1960s and beyond. By late 1959 there were processions of
hungry migrants; many died or were killed. Malay Roychoudhury’s poem Wolf Dynasty (translated by the poet
from the bengali version Nekrayr Bangsho)
depicts this sour time of putrefaction:
They pressed a
pistol on my temple, yelled:
Why have you basterd turned up again
We'll slap hungry lips with scarlet fangs
tongue will lick the sunbeam from your nails
and stop the tinsel Jatayu's hinged-wing strain.
Oilsoot penury in me lees whatever is stark
designs in secret teak trees behind screen of bark (Malay Roy Choudhury Poems 80)
Why have you basterd turned up again
We'll slap hungry lips with scarlet fangs
tongue will lick the sunbeam from your nails
and stop the tinsel Jatayu's hinged-wing strain.
Oilsoot penury in me lees whatever is stark
designs in secret teak trees behind screen of bark (Malay Roy Choudhury Poems 80)
The poem in its
spirit and use of language is reminiscent of Ginsberg’s poem “America” and a later collection of poems
named “The Fall of America”. “America” is a poem, as spontaneous as “Wolf Dynasty”. It is also comic,
tedious, honest and yet highly incisive. The poem is an attempt to catch the
mood of a particular attitude towards the United States without the
interference of logic or rationality. However through all the turmoil,
gibberish, and illogicality of the poem, a broad-based attack, which rational
discourse can only hint at, is launched against American values. The seemingly
hopeless illogicality of the poem, which is also a characteristic of “Wolf Dynasty”, acts as a mirror for the
hopeless condition of the Nation it reflects. First and foremost Whitman’s exuberant
optimism towards America turns into disillusionment in the voice of the poet: “America
I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing” (Collected
Poems 146). This admission is followed later in the poem by an appeal to
America to shake off its hypocrisy and be equal to Whitman’s challenge:
“America when will you be angelic? / When will you take off your clothes?”(Collected Poems 146). The real impact of
the protest in this poem is conveyed structurally. The total bewilderment and
confusion that one feels in reading the poem reflects the American dilemma
Ginsberg attempts to mirror.
One key concern
of the language poets all over the world has been to point out the manner in
which traditional poetic genres and forms tend to naively reflect
establishmental and institutional values of societies. These writers
consciously identify poetry as conditioned by the ideological limitations and
power of the written word in traditional cultures. For all these reasons,
language poets are considered to be radical revisionists of existing poetic
forms. They tend to reject traditional forms, lyricism, narrative,
subjectivity, and naively representational writing. They have also accepted that language is
constructed by relations of power, and that it cannot naively access either
transcendence or the natural world, or unproblematically represent the way the
world "actually is." Therefore Ginsberg writes in Wichita Vortex Sutra:
The war is language,
Language abused
For Advertisement,
Language used
Like magic for
power on the planet (Collected Poems 401)
The Fall of America shows
Ginsberg moving closer to Kerouac’s conception of the writer as memoirist. Much
of the book is drawn from journal transcription, or composed directly on the
tape recorder as Ginsberg traveled about the country by car, plane, and train. This
is Ginsberg’s most despairing and least affirming book, haunted by a constant
sense of doom. The basis of The Fall of
America is the violence of Vietnam during the 1960s as reflected in an
inner violence of America. The destruction of foreign war is complemented by
the devastation of America’s own natural environment. Ginsberg’s poems are
based on the Buddhist notion of karma that promises that any present action
will affect future incarnations, or the biblical maxim on sowing and reaping.
Instead of the ecstatic resources of drugs or mysticism, the only relief
Ginsberg projects in this poem is an apocalypse of self-destruction.
On the other
hand if one can take a look at India, specially at Bengal, then one would
discover that during the period of 1959- 60, the Post-partition Bangla polity
was definitely a time of turbulence. The society was filled with angry young
men. Indifferent politicians and not concerned intellectuals governed the
sphere of influence. A post-Partition turmoil had overtaken West Bengal. It was during this time
Roychoudhury had started the movement with his elder brother, Samir
Roychoudhury, and two other poets, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Debi Ray. 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 the licensed
existence of a corrupt bureaucracy-politician nexus and the country was
hurtling towards a nightmare after partition of the Bengali time and space5. Such an
atmosphere which is comparable to the atmosphere described by Ginsberg in The
Fall of America, was responsible for the production of Malay Roychoudhury’s
poem “Shame on you Calcutta”:
Stay and live with your eunuchs
You are their nurse who piss in
bed in winter rain
Lift their legs and change wet
pants
Write great words on walls to be
urinated by pimps
I don’t want to meddle in your
affairs now.
Lips will turn sour if I kiss you
after death.
(Malay Roy
Choudhury Poems 60)
Both the Beats
as well as the Hungryalists believed in spontaneity and acceptance of reality.
They were both trying to reintegrate humans with the natural world and thereby
to establish a world of “natural humanity”, instead of an “artificial ideal”
and for this it was necessary to accept both the holy and evil side of one’s
own nature and surroundings. Samir Roy
Choudhury, like his younger brother Malay, criticizes as well as accepts the
bad side of his city, Calcutta in his poem “So”
(translated by the poet from the bengali version “To”) :
Oh
Sir, nobody uses the Jadavpur subway for road crossing
during
night aristocrat lunatics sleep thereat
a
passenger queried- is the taxi-meter OK?
I
delivered a counter- is the country OK?
In
front of Tollygunj Metro both flyover and subway are being constructed
that
does not mean pedestrians will not come under wheels
how
will then media-fedia dailies-failies run6
During
his Indian sojourn, Allen Ginsberg struck great friendship with Malay and his
older brother Samir Roy Choudhury and lived in their Patna house for several
months. These were the formative years of the Hungryalist Movement. While Allen
cast a certain Beat influence on the Roychoudhury brothers, they too, were
instrumental in creating profound cultural influence on Ginsberg. Allen Ginsberg's Indian Journal bears ample proof of that although he
fails to mention the Roychoudhury brothers in the book. Touched by the raw and
fiery poetry of the Hungryalist poets, Ginsberg brought back to America in
1962-63 translations of a whole bunch of Bengali Hungryalist poets which
Lawrence Ferlinghetti published later in a special issue of the City Lights Journal. According to Alden
the beat generation and the last World War as a whole did not leave the Indian writer
untouched. He by that time has developed a new attitude and has matured a lot.
The poets of Bengal gradually started moving away from the Romanticism and
elegance of the poetry of the early 1900’s, landing up in a new individualized space.
Poets started experimenting with new forms, drawing inspiration from
Apollinaire, Rimbaud and Baudelaire. It was believed that this kind of “new
poetry” took recourse to ugliness and led to the destruction of the human soul
in contrast to the previous task of poetry that persisted in the pursuit of “beauty”
(See Alden 398).
Ginsberg’s
famous poem Kaddish dedicated to his
mother, written quite a few years before his trip to India, shows an obsession
with the idea of death. For various reasons it had seemed to Ginsberg at that
point of time, that the best thing to do was to drop dead or not to be afraid
of death but go into death. He began to believe that God was death, and if he
wanted to attain God, he had to die: “Nameless, One faced, Forever beyond me,
beginningless, endless, Father in death” (Collected
Poems 212). The “Hymmnn” which
follows Kaddish, ends with the words
“Blessed be Death on us all” (Collected
Poems 225) and this once again reinforces Kaddish’s consolation for the dead. For Ginsberg, death was a
release from the miseries of an unfeeling time and world. One can find a
similar obsession with death in Malay Roychoudhury’s poem “Stark Electric Jesus” which begins with the line: “Oh I’ll die I’ll
die I’ll die” and again in the same poem, where the poet writes:
I
do not know whether I am going to die
Squandering
was roaring within heart’s exhaustive impatience
I’ll
disrupt and destroy
I’ll
split all in to pieces for the sake of Art
There
isn’t any other way out for Poetry except suicide.
(Malay Roy Choudhury Poems 68)
Ginsberg’s Kaddish is the personal diary of a son’s witness to his mother’s
acute sufferings under the accumulations of life that ultimately result in
death. It is also an “autobiographical” narrative because the real history
presented is not that of Naomi Ginsberg but the history of her son finding himself
in reliving his memory. Ginsberg calls on his Origin, and exploits his
recollection of Naomi’s anguish to help him understand the nature of his own:
O
glorious muse that bore me from the womb, gave
Suck
first mystic life and taught me talk and music,
From
whose pained head I first took Vision –
…
What
mad hallucinations of the damned that drive me out of my
Own
skull to seek Eternity till I find Peace for Thee,
O
Poetry – and for all humankind call on the Origin. (Collected
Poems 223)
In Kaddish
the poet expresses a strong desire to return to and fuse with his mother in
death. For Ginsberg separation from his mother was never independent but always
an absolute, sterile and frustrating isolation. The separation was so radical
that it could not be resolved by mere verbal or emotional communication and
therefore Ginsberg longs to be delivered from this agonizing isolation by a
kind of self-annihilating fusion with the mother. From this point of view, one
can understand his incestuous desires, as expressing his wish to get inside his
mother and see things as she does:
One
time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her-
Flirting
to herself at sink –
…
Seemed
perhaps a good idea to try – know the Monster of the Beginning Womb –
Perhaps
– that way. Would she care? She needs a lover. (Collected
Poems 219)
One
would find the same desire to merge with the Origin in Malay Roychoudhury poem
“Stark Electric Jesus”:
Let
me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of Shubha’s bosom
I
remember now the sharp – edged radiance of the moment I was born
I
want to see my own death before passing away
The
world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury
Shubha
let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus
…
Let
me create myself in your womb with my own sperm.
(Malay Roy Choudhury Poems 68)
Shakti
Chattopadhay’s poem Yarasandha
vibrates with the same spirit and the poet makes an appeal to his mother to
take him back. His unique voice spoke to the urban youth of post-World War II
generation. His distinct style, like his friend Ginsberg was filled with a
sense of deep angst: Why did you bring
me in?
Take
me back
The
face cold as dark
The
sad eyes poor as dry lake
Let
your mother take you back
…
Why
did you labor
On
the crunched bed of straw
To
usher me in? (Poems of a Rebel 8)
The
appeal of Naomi’s cryptic advice at the end of the poem, “The key is in the
window, the key is in the sunlight at the window” undoubtedly bears an
unwitting resemblance to Shakti Chattopadhay’s poem The Key (translated by the poet from the Bengali version Chabi), in which Shakti Chattopadhay
gives a similar kind of advice to his dear friend Malay Roychoudhury:
Till
this day here lies with me
Lost long ago, your dearest key
You open still that chest of yours? (Shakti
Chattopadhay Poems 27)
Interestingly, Ginsberg’s masterpiece “Howl” and Malay Roychoudhury’s poem “Wound” (translated by the poet from the
bengali version Jakham), bear a
striking resemblance. In “Howl”, the
first part of the poem attempts to create the impression of a kind of nightmare
world in which people representing “the best minds of my generation”, in the
author’s view, are wandering like damned souls in hell. This is done through a
kind of series of what one might call surrealistic images, a kind of state of
hallucinations. Roychoudhudy dwells on the same hellish atmosphere at the
beginning of his poem “Wound”:
Awning
ablaze with toxic fire above me
I
lie watching the winged blue of this crawling sky
Putting
down the crushing anger of my suffering
I
crossexam my nocturn doubts
Pushing
a gramophone needle over the lines of my palm
I
scan the prophecy. (Malay Roy Choudhury
Poems 81)
The mood of the poem “Howl” changes in the second section and
becomes an indictment of those elements that are destructive of the best
qualities of human nature and of the best minds. “What sphinx of cement and
aluminium,” it begins, “based upon their skulls and ate up their brains and
imagination?”. “Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness!”, he answers, and thus
begins to list the soulless, materialistic, sexless mechanized elements of
Moloch whose presence leads to destruction and war (Collected Poems 131). In Roychoudhury’s poem “Wound”, however, the poet himself becomes the representative of the
decadent society he depicts. Ginsberg’s mental Moloch takes the shape of ravens
at times for Roychoudhury as one finds him describing his state in his poem “Wound”:
16
dvn ravens whirl around my torso for 25 years
My
bones reel clutching my raw wounds
My
peeled fleshblood
Flaying
my skin I uncover arrogant frescos of my trap
Ageless
sabotage inside the body (Malay Roy
Choudhury Poems 81)
At
other times it takes the shape of hounds that haunt him:
2000
hounds released from out of my skull
Haunting me for 25 years (Malay Roy Choudhury Poems 82)
At
the end of the poem Roychoudhury even mentions a list of atrocities which he
imagines himself to have committed but the atrocities seem to reflect a common
attitude of the generation he represents:
I
had lifted a 5- paise coin from a blind beggar’s palm
I
had looted benevolent money of hearse- corpses (Malay Roy Choudhury Poems 83)
Ginsberg’s
famous and revolutionary poem “Howl”
was initially a highly censored poem. Both Ginsberg’s and Roychoudhury’s poems
reflect a common sentiment which is clearly stated in the latter’s poem “Wounds”: I may be censored I can not be
disregarded (Malay Roy Choudhury Poems
83)
Although both Ginsberg and Roychoudhury
were considered to be rebels by their society, both of them at some of time,
did realize their limitation as human beings and felt like succumbing to their
cruel fate. Thus one finds that at one point of time Roychoudhury is almost
ready to give up and accept all tortures. Thus he writes in his poem Humanology (translated by the poet from
the bengali version Monushyatantra):
I
am ready to be mugged O deadly bat come
Tear
off my clothes, bomb the walls of my home,
Press
trigger on my temple and beat up in jail
Push
me off a running train, intern and trial. (Malay
Roy Choudhury Poems 31)
Ginsberg’s
humanology is the same as that of Roychoudhury as one finds him reflecting the
same sentiments in his poem “The End”
where he too is ready to accept death:
I
sit in the mind of the oak and hide in the rose, I know if any wake up, none
but my death,
Come
to me bodies, come to me prophecies, come all foreboding, come spirits and
visions,
I
receive all, I’ll die of cancer, I enter the coffin forever, I close my eyes, I
disappear.
(Collected Poems 259)
In the “Author’s Preface, Reader’s
Manual” to Collected Poems: 1947 – 1980,
Allen Ginsberg provides an insight to the manner in which his poems were
composed: “First thought, best thought. Spontaneous insight - the sequence of
thought- forms passing naturally through ordinary mind – was always motif and
method of these compositions” (Collected
Poems xx). The technique adopted by both the Beats and the Hungryalists was
that of the confessional, where the confessor willingly gives priority to the
catharsis of thought and feeling over the structure that the catharsis itself
is to discover. As early as his first contact with William Carlos Williams,
Ginsberg began experimenting with ways to restore speech to the language of
poetry. William in turn, while advising Ginsberg was anticipating Olson’s third
dogma of “Projective Verse” that “One Perception must immediately and directly
lead to a further perception” (Merrill 19).
Like all American tourists, 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, and 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 (See Tridib Mitra
and Alo Mitra). Allen Ginsberg, the poet of Howl and Kaddish, after his interaction with the painters and poets of the
Hungryalist movement, could never remain the same person. Ginsberg’s
biographers and critics, most of whom are American, are almost ignorant of
Indian complexities and have never taken into account the contributory factors
that impacted the poet to such an extent that his post India poems changed
structurally, semantically. Poems written by Ginsberg after his India visit are
composed in the breath-span of mantras, pranayamas as well as Bangla poetry of
1960s, all of which remained beyond Euro-American academic comprehension.
Ginsberg’s chanting and singing of mantras were pregnant with values inculcated
in a historical faith-penumbra of the people he lived with in India. Thus in “Wichita Vortex Sutra”, one finds
Ginsberg invoking “Harekrishna as preserver of human planet”, challenging all
other powers usurping state consciousness and thus delivering the sacred
formula bringing peace:
I lift my
voice aloud,
Make
Mantra of American language now,
Pronounce
the words beginning my own millennium,
‘I here
declare the End of the War!’ (Collected Poems 407)
The central implication of the poem seems to be
clear. The poet tries to find out whether the ‘mantra’ of the American language
can in some vigorous and magical way put an end to the slaughter in Vietnam
(Hyde 293). This particular poem
embodies an experience of contemporary American language and also focuses on
the cultural irresponsibility of language which in turn establishes the kinship
of “Wichita Vortex Sutra” to Carlos
William’s and Charles Olson’s lamentation of the separation of language from
reality. One can find a similar use of mantric language at the end of the poem
“What would you do if you lost it?”
where he calls upon the prominent Indian divine figures, to bid them a final
goodbye, but which also makes one feel that he was aware of and affected
by their existence:
Bom Bom! Shivaye! Ram Nam Satyahey! Om Ganipatti, Om
Saraswati Hrih Sowha! Ardinarishvara Radha Harekrishna faretheewell
forevermore! (Collected
Poems 594)
One finds similar use of language in Ginsberg’s other poems
like “On Illness” in which the poet
calls upon his dead mother and fuses the Hindu chant of OM with the word MOM, bestowing
on the mother, a divine quality to cure, as it is only the mother figure who
can provide the best respite from illness:
Om
Saraswati Hrih Sowha
MOM
Mom Mom
Mom Mom Mom Mom Mom (Collected Poems 603)
Whether be it Benaras, Kolkata, Tarapith,
Chaibasa or Patna, Ginsberg invariably visited the burning ghats (where the
dead are consigned to flames), accompanied by one or several members of the
Hungryalist movement. The experience was so earthshaking for him (quite a
normal one for any Hindu) that he could, for the first time in his life,
understand the difference between the occidental quest for immortality and the
oriental quest for eternity. His biographers and critics, who are either Jew or
Christian, have never taken into epistemic consideration the dedication page of
Ginsberg’s Indian Journals (See Indian Journals 3). Ginsberg, however,
could comprehend that the Hungryalists had dispensed with the colonial
compartmentalization such as Good/Evil, God/Devil etc binary opposites. The
Hungry Generation poets explained to him that each of the triumvirate Brahma,
Vishnu and Maheshwara embody traits which exist in nature itself and nature was
never monocentric7. This idea has been articulated by Ginsberg to
several of his interviewers. Allen Ginsberg was in awe with the depth of tolerance and resiliency
of Indian masses. On his way back from India to USA
in the Kyoto-Tokyo Express he had realized that in order to attain the depth of
consciousness that he was seeking, he had to cut himself off from the Blake
vision and renounce it. While expressing this realization he was actually
revealing the impact of the Hungry Generation on him. He was talking about a
new awareness gained, which sought cosmic consciousness not in visions but in contact
with what was going on around him.
One cannot help but notice the similarity in the spontaneous use of
language by both Allen Ginsberg and the “wandering minstrels” or “bauls” of
West Bengal, those who like Ginsberg rebelled against the generalizing and the
discursive use of language and constructed their songs likewise in order to
restore the other function of language i.e, “speech”. Close to the end of his
nine-month stay in Calcutta, the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg—accompanied
by his partner, Peter Orlovsky, the Bengali poet Shakti Chatterjee, and their
would-be spiritual guru, Asoke Fakir—had travelled to Siuri, home to a large
clan of Bauls, the troubadour poet-singers of the Bengal countryside. After
visiting Tarapith they had arrived at a little hamlet outside Siuri. There
Ginsberg found the aged, legendary Baul master Nabani Das Baul living in a
small mud hut, bedridden and unable to sing. When Nabani spoke to Ginsberg from
his sick bed, reciting with difficulty the songs he had once sung so lustily,
Ginsberg scribbled Asoke’s roughly translated words dutifully in his notebook.
He spent a week with the Baul family. From Nabani’s wife he learnt to eat with
his hands, from Nabani he learnt to play the single-stringed ektara and four-stringed tanpura, the instrument that
provides a background drone to Indian classical music. He was also schooled in
the chanting of the mantra “Om
Namah Shivaya.”. In an interview with Suranjan Ganguly, Ginsberg mentions Asoke
fakir being “both a fool and at the same time a devotional man” and states that
he was a person who almost instantly understood the motive behind their visit
to India (Ganguly 26). Ginsberg hoped
to find, in Baul spiritual teachings and songs, a new wellspring for his own
poetic work. Bauls were distinguished from the usual run of men by flouting
social convention, avoiding temples and mosques and any denotation of caste.
Song and dance were their only form of worship and their bodies their only
temple. 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. He
translated the word baul as “madcap”8.
Ginsberg’s realization that if a poem was not composed on the
tongue, it would become an essay was an insight he received from the stories of
oral poets of 19thcentury Kolkata. Ginsberg came to know about
people like 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 from Asoke Fakir, whose Champahati
hutment used to be frequented by the Hungryalists. Like the Hungryalists and the Bauls of Bengal, Language poets all over
the world emphasized the use of metonymy ,synecdoche in their compositions,
which, even when employed in everyday speech, created a different texture. The
result was often alien and difficult to understand at first glance, which is
what Language poetry intends: for the reader to participate in creating the
meaning of the poem.
It is quite easy to guess the reason behind Ginsberg’s fondness and
appreciation of Baul songs and poetry. For many
years, Ginsberg had convinced himself that poetry held the key to mystical
experience and spiritual awakening. As a young college student in New York
City, he had had a spontaneous and beatific vision of God while reading the
poems of William Blake in his Harlem tenement in 1948. After this visionary
experience, he was probably heading toward a path of self- destruction. His
India trip, his conversation with numerous sadhus, Hungryalist poets, Bauls,
and finally his commitment to Buddhism made him realize that the Divinity for
which he had been searching within external sources, actually resides within
his own body. The Baul songs, which Ginsberg came across in Bengal were stuffed
with enigmas and codes and summed up the similar Baul philosophy of Dehattaya (Truth in the Body), which is most
probably the central theme of Baulism9.
Bauls' body-centric philosophy can also be connected to the thoughts of the
transcendentalist Emerson, and also to the thoughts of Tagore who talks about
the Supreme Being, expressed through the physical existence of a human being.
In order to understand the body-centric Baul songs, conscious efforts should be
made to decode the songs, filled with language riddles, using imagery from
daily life-activities, such as fishing, farming, sailing, trade and even
robbery, foreclosure, and litigation as spiritual metaphors. Therefore one can
easily arrive at the conclusion that it is the common philosophy of viewing the
body as the microcosm of the universe, which is responsible for bringing two
geographically diversified groups
together (The Beats on one hand, and the Hungryalists and Bauls on the other)
and unifying them for a common cause.
Excellent analysis! - Abdullah Shahid, Cornell University
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