The Poetic Revolution of the Hungryalists : Madhubanti Chanda

“I am ‘Hunger’- Dissent on your Tongue”……The Poetic Revolution of the Hungryalists

By

Madhubanti Chanda

-

May 8, 2016

Scientists at their research lab were contemplating on their novel project of sending a man to the moon.

                             “Man on the Moon Project”

They found their best person in the “common man” who could “survive without water, food, light, air, shelter”.
Nothing captured the decadence and depravity of the previous century better than the lethal pen of R.K. Laxman. His caricatures portrayed the essence of a generation suffering vices, vices political in nature and socially-corrosive in its magnitude. The civil unrest embodied it, Bollywood films epitomised it. Indeed, come to think of it, the 60s, 70s and 80s, lurking below the surface of silenced memories is a seething turbulence of political will gone wrong, economic collapse and a “hungry tide” washing over….

                            A picture of destitution; A slum in Kolkata captured in 1961

Born of these “sore times” was the “Hungry Generation”, a clique of avant-garde poets, based in West Bengal yet spreading across the latitude of the entire Nation, to the further corners of Italy, France, Germany, et al. While “Avant-garde” is what they are labelled with, reading about them made me feel they were much more than controversial bards experimenting with the verses. They were the face of the “hungry”; the displaced, the wounded, the tongawalla riding in anguish through the city streets, the low-paid labourer slurring colourful slangs in an urban ghetto, the migrants cramped breathless in the refugee camps, any picture of destitution your mind could conjure. In Hindi, it was translated as “Bhookhi Peedhi”, in Bangla it was called “Kkhudito projonmo”, the name it was originally started with.
“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”

                                                       Manifesto of the Hungryalist Movemet

……wrote the Hungryalist Malay Choudhury in his most famous poem, “Stark Electric Jesus” a piece of writing that landed him straight inside the prison. The Hungryalist agenda was clear, that it had to be “anti-establishment”. Anything that had to do with the law, the State, with conformity, with order, compliance, the middle-class, the value-structure, were overturned, even if they remotely reeked of the bourgeoisie. But they did not pretend to be the ideologues of Marxism, they were anti-Marxists. Marxists, quite ironically were then holding the reins of power and running the State, they hoped to demolish. Their literary manifesto was made of turbulent goals that featured the essence of “protestor” and “raw commoner’s culture” and thus their verses ran straight into depths of obscenity, scathing the high-brow elites still basking in the glories of the 19^th Century Madhusudan and of course Tagore.

The Hungryalists in their initial days, posing with David Garjiya (as could be deciphered from the label written in Bengali)

They rhymed coitus and dead foetus and wrote in the language spoken by the subaltern Tongawallas. To the middle-class it never was a language but a dialect spoken by their domestic help and that was the language they were immersing in poetry! It was a wild heretical, outrageously obnoxious for some, but for the larger population seething under power-structures, it was their voice.

When Tridib Mitra wrote his poem- “I got thrown out into brain’s chaos from geometric calculations, hated civility and sought refuge in machinations of civilization”

The voice, trampled by societal make-up and hushed by the roaring trams and city-traffic was the Hungryalist instrument and thus many lower-caste writers, who would otherwise have never been allowed into the literary pantheon was given a space. It accorded to them the respectability of a writer, never mind if ushered in a career of death and chaos. But the Hungryalists had a great penchant for turbulence, a pedantic one at that. After stirring disturbance in the literary world, they executed practical jokes by sending masquerades of jokers, drags and caricatures of mythical characters to politicians, erudite writers, bureaucrats and everyone else who was playing party to the oppressive power-structure. Inside the gift was a letter in which would be written, “Please remove your masques”! Their audacity astonished the bourgeois sensibilities, rudely, exasperatingly.

The Beat Generation writings that was influenced by ad collaborated with the Hungryalists. Malay Choudhury in a letter to El Corno said, ” I shall be glad, naturally, if you please send your works translated into English so that we can translate them in our languages and introduce you to a large and interested audience down here.”

Yeates wrote……
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,”
Come to think of the 60s and my mind is infiltrated with images of unrest and more unrest. It was in the time thereafter that the Naxal menace sprang off with great ideological underpinnings. The country was filled with a restless tide stretching across the length and breadth, materialising over the multitude of riots and state-sponsored killings. They were most importantly anguish over the dream ushered by independence broken. But the dissonance was everywhere…..

The Nepali edition of the Hungryalist magazine, edited by Samir Roy Choudhury

The 60s was the time of a great social revolution. British prudery was greeted with the sexual revolution that at once drove the sanity of a traditional family out of the vogue. Hippie communities fringed the urban sidewalks and LSD perforated through a generation of people. Indeed “Stark electric Jesus” resonated with so many people across nationalities and identities and thus translated into Spanish, Italian, French and several other languages. Hunger was a primal problem. What’s common to all of them is the utter suffocation engulfing so many people. The dissatisfaction was growing and structures were dismantling in a sea of uncertainty. Whereas the Hippie communes dreamt of building up from the ruins….the Hungryalists were incorrigible mourners spitting venom over dreams lost, the helplessness! And yet…all of them failed to remain sustainable.

Malay Choudhury now, still battling the war of words

…..Thus Malay Roy Choudhury was prosecuted for his verses. The Hungryalist poets continued to circulate their stinging verses across streets and colleges. As its popularity spread to other regions too, the State, a Marxist one coerced a crack-down on their project. Many writers were arrested. Some writers deflected and even notified against their fellow Hungryalists. They who started with an unwavering passion lost out on so much. Eventually the movement died……Yet the pen keeps writing and protesting and till today, the literary circle boasts of Malay Choudhury and several other revolutionaries like him who continue to stir the ethers with their pens.