There
is a certain kind of magnetic attraction that literary figures of the
past hold over young struggling writers of today. We often look to their
work, their lives and lifestyles for inspiration, adopting their
methods and styles into our own experimentations with finding our own
writer’s voice. We look to the past movements and revolutions that have
created the literary landscape of today. Nothing seems to pull a writer
in more than the Beat generation in 1950’s America. Young, scruffy
anti-establishment writers living life on their own terms and rejecting
dominant societal rules has a kind of attraction that makes you
fantasize about travelling across cities with Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg, with the sun shining on your face – there’s definitely someone
playing the harmonica – living the ideal hippie writer’s life you’ve
imagined through romanticised notion of the Beats.
But once you
wake up to the reality of adulthood and working, these images slowly
start to change. Depending on the kind of writer you want to be you
still strive to change the world with your words, create worlds of
wonder, magic and whimsy, or even trigger entire revolutions. While we
may all not end up being these ideal selves we’re created in our minds,
there was a literary movement in India itself, our own Beat generation,
in a way, that changed the way Bengali literature was received, read and
written in the 1960’s.
The Hungryalist Movement was founded by what is referred to as the Hungryalist quartet by Dr Uttam Das in his dissertation ‘Hungry Shruti and Shastravirodhi Andolan’
– Malay Roychoudhury and his elder brother Samir Roychoudhury, Shakti
Chattopadhyay and Debi Roy, alias of Haradhon Dhara. These mavericks of
the avant-garde shook an unsuspecting Calcutta’s (as it was named at the
time) literary and cultural world and became a real force to reckon
with. Members grew in number as more and more poets and writers came
into the folds of this new generation of writers, resulting in one of
the most historically and culturally significant trials of the Indian
literary world.
The
Hungryalist movement picked its name from Geoffrey Chaucer’s phrase
“the sowre hungry tyme”. “When a civilisation falls, people tend to eat
every thing that comes their way,” said Malay Roychoudhury in an interview with Nayanima Basu. “Today when I look at West Bengal, the Hungryalist premonition appears prophetic.”
The
1960s was host to a generation of disaffected youth in post-partition
Bengal. They voiced their anger and sense of displacement by creating
literature that challenged the pre-existing colonial perspectives and
traditional readings of Bangla writings to make reader’s question how
Indian literature is perceived and received. As Prof. S Mudgal explains,
“The central theme of the movement was Oswald Spengler’s idea of
History, that an ailing culture feeds on cultural elements brought from
outside. These writers felt that Bengali culture had reached its zenith
and was now living on alien food.”
The Hungry generation was more
than just a group of angry young men. At the time, Bengali literature
was, for lack of a better word, limited and inaccessible for most
people. The Hungryalists wanted more – they wanted a new language, a new
literary space that was open, accessible and representative of all
Bengalis, not just limited to an elite few. “Their entire position was
extremely iconoclastic. To break whatever was held sacrosanct till then,
including the way n which they wrote poetry and the way in which they
lived their lives,” said
Ipshita Chanda, professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur
University, to the BBC. Their frustration was shared with not just other
poets, she explains, but with an entire generation of over-educated
people who felt they had no future.
The Hungryalist quartet grew
in number and was soon joined over the years with writings by renowned
Bengali voices such as Subimal Basak, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Saileswar
Ghose, Basudeb Dasgupta, Tridib Mitra, Subhas Ghose, Falguni Ray and
Arunesh Ghose, to name a few. These were young writers who came from
humble backgrounds and meagre means, and the political and social
climate of the time only made their voices louder. Source: Hungryalist Photos This
was a difficult time in the region’s history. Thousands were displaced
and forced to migrate following partition, with no money and no place to
go – no place they belonged to. There was rampant poverty, food
shortages and homelessness, but this immediate reality would never find
its way into the writings and literature of the time – into the living
rooms of the elite who lived sheltered lives in the comfort of their
homes. The Hungryalists were very aware of this reality, and carried
these people’s stories, their histories through words into the limelight
in their pamphlets/bulletins.
The movement broke all conventions
of writing – they were different in form, in content and rhythm from the
traditional, ‘elitist’ works that dominated the literary sphere. These
used language that was polite, cultured and ‘civilised’ and the
Hungryalist’s disruption came into this space with a sense of pure
anarchy. While they viewed Tagore’s language as ‘vegetarian’, their’s
focused on being streetwise and colloquial, for the people, raw and
relatable – the “language of life” that was viewed by the rest as vulgar
and obscene.
As Malay Roychoudhury explained,
they identified themselves as a part of the post-colonial period that
disconnected itself from colonial canons. They published their work
through single-sheet pamphlets that they would then distribute in coffee
houses, colleges, and offices. While their anti-establishment antics
may have carved for them a special place in the heart of Allen Ginsberg,
who the Roychoudhurys met during his trip to India
in the 60s, it definitely wasn’t for everyone, especially dominant
Bengali society. Criticising society meant a harsh critique of politics
and those in power. As Nayanima Basu writes,
“The administration’s ire towards the Hungryalists reached its peak
when the poets started a campaign to personally deliver paper masks of
jokers, monsters, gods, cartoon characters and animals to Bengali
politicians, bureaucrats, newspaper editors and other powerful people.
The slogan was, ‘Please remove your mask’.” Source: Hungryalist Photos Arrest
warrants for eleven of the movement’s poets were issued, and Malay
Roychoudhury, viewed as the face and leader of this bunch of
troublemakers, was arrested on September 2, 1964. His poem‘Prachanda Boidyutik Chhutar’ (translated as ‘Stark Electric Jesus’)
didn’t sit well with the good Bengali people of civilised society, and
he was charged with conspiracy against the state and literary obscenity.
The trial went on for 35 months, he explains,
during which he spent a month in jail. While many of the Hungry poets
slowly began to break away from the movement during this time – many
lost their jobs, faced regular police raids and some ventured into
different fields altogether – Malay Roychoudhury received tremendous
support from other friends and family, even from writers and poets
abroad who read of the news in a Time magazine editorial, such as Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal, and Allen Ginsberg, who even wrote a letter in his support.
The
charges were subsequently dropped by the High Court of Calcutta, but in
the mean time the Hungry generation seemed to have dwindled to a
handful of people. “Some of them carried the news to Europe and I
started getting translated for the little magazines there,” said
Malay Roychoudhury. “My poems were read at New York’s St Mark’s Church
to raise funds to help me. It would have been impossible to fight the
case up to the High Court without this help. I was poor, all my friends
who were part of the movement deserted me, I lost my job with the
Reserve Bank of India during the case, my grandmother died hearing the
news of my imprisonment, and thus, I stopped writing.” But the spirit of
the movement still lives on in the hearts and works of the
Roychoudhurys and many other writers of the time, even if they separated
themselves from the group.
The Hungryalists left an indelible
impact on not just Bengali literature, but that of India. The Hungry
generation are remembered as literary heroes, however romanticised our
notions may be. These were writers that were hungry for a new voice and
found themselves in a storm of politics and bold, brave words that stood
as a declaration for a change, one that they themselves put into
motion. Read Nayanima Basu’s interview with Malay Roychoudhury and listen to BBC’s podcast about the Hungry Generation .
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