বৃহস্পতিবার, ২৬ জুলাই, ২০১৮

Counter-cultural cult-figures : Bengali literature

The most important counter-cultural activity in post-Independence West Bengal has been the Hungryalist Movement, known also as Hungry Generation spearheaded by the two outsider brothers Samir Roychoudhury and Malay Roy Choudhury, who are today cultural cult-figures among Bengali Intellectuals. 

Anti-Establishment Hungry Generation movement in Bengali literature by Indrajit Bhattacharjee


The Hungryalists – Anti-Establishment Pioneers by Prof Indrajit Bhattacharjee



The Hungry Generation Movement in Bangla literature and painting, also known as Hungryalism, Hungrealism, Hungry Andolon, Sarvagrasa, Khutkatar, Khsudharta, Bhukhi Peedhi, which shook post-colonial Bangla culture with an intensity comparable to the impact of pre-colonial Young Bengal social movement, was the brain-child of Malay Roychoudhury who, after his post-graduation, was working on an essay on ‘the philosophy of history’, when he came across the book The Decline of the West written by Oswald Spengler. Though Malay did not accept the Spenglerian philosophy, he was impressed with the argument that history should not be construed in a linear progression, but flowering of a number of cultural inclinations, each with a characteristic spiritual tone, or conception of the space within which they act. This was a decisive break with the Hegelian concept of history as a process governed by reason.
For 22 year old Malay, who had already conceived of a programme to launch a movement in Bangla literature and painting, Spengler cast a spell in view of the post-colonial and post-partition nightmare that had overtaken Bangla culture, especially when compared to the time and space of 19th century Bangla renaissance. Oswald Spengler’s metaphor was biological. That is, cultures go through a self-contained process of growing, reaching a crescendo, and withering away. This decay may be withstood if the culture feeds on alien diet. A culture is self-creative during ascendancy, but once the rot sets in, the culture, instead of creating from within, starts engulfing and assimilating contributions from outside. Its demand for outside elements becomes insatiable during descend. This process was termed as hunger by Malay when he came across Geoffrey Chaucer’s stunning line ‘In The Sowre Hungry Tyme’. In 1959-1960, post-partition Bangla polity was definitely on the downslide of sour time of putrefaction. Today, when we look at West Bengal, the Hungryalist premonition appears prophetic.

2.
Socio-cultural sarvagrasa, or devouring as a concept, that Malay was trying to put into a contemporary mould, had Indian puranic connotations inasmuch as lord Shiva became sarvagrasi when he drank the poison that up-welled in the aftermath of churning of the seas (samudra manthana) by gods and demons in order to protect the universe. Initially Malay had decided to use the term ‘Sarvagrasi Prajanma’ or the ‘Devouring Generation’. He felt, quite rightly, that such a term would not be authentically acceptable, and may even carry wrong signals. He opted for the words ‘Hungry Generation’.

The word Hunger or ‘Khaoa’ in Bengali is used as a signifier for various activities. For example, one may eat the breeze for a stroll, eat a somersault for a loss, eat money for bribe, eat happiness for a contended life, eat cannabis for incorrect message, eat broomstick for dismissal, eat the head for spoiling, eat fear to get terrorized, and many such images are commonplace with the word ‘Hungry’ in Bangla. Later, when a large number of writers, poets and painters joined the movement, ‘Hungry’ was open to interpretation in a manner that a particular participant preferred. This open-endedness would have been difficult with the words ‘Devouring Generation’. Nevertheless, the appellation had later been banalised by some participants, especially by those who were trying to re-root in India after partition; they glorified poverty in the name of ‘Hungry’ movement.

In the ‘Overviews’ which Malay wrote for Postmodern Bangla Poetry (2001) and Postmodern Bangla Short Stories (2002) both edited by his elder brother Samir (one of the founder member of the movement), he has elaborated upon the cultural, aesthetic, socio-political, literary-historical factors which forced the movement to burst upon the Bangla space in November 1961. I would prefer to draw on his arguments that, like in any other language, Bangla literary modernism had its own contradiction between radical disruption of form and traditionalism of content and ideology, as were exemplified in pre-Hungryalist literatre, inasmuch as Parichay(1931), Kallol (1932) etc periodicals were managed, written, defined and canonized within Kolkatacentric middle class values, and identified themselves with the occidental canons and discourses, whereas Krittibas (1953) and Notun Reeti (1958) adopted a mode of counter-identification by staying within the governing structure of above ideas, with a mix of Soviet discourse in case of some authors. They combined aesthetic self-consciousness and formalist experimentation. The Hungryalists wanted to go beyond the structure of oppositions and sanctioned negations of the discourse through de-identification. Krittibas and Notun Reeti poets and writers had ultimately degenerated into traffickers of immoral discourse which completely destroyed the achievements of 19th century reformers. The Hungryalist movement aspired to locate itself in an essentially adversarial relation to aesthetic realism.

3.
Malay discussed his ideas with his friend Debi Ray, elder brother Samir, and Samir’s friend Shakti Chattopadhyay, and all of them agrred to launch the movement by publishing a weekly bulletin to be funded by Malay, and if required, by Samir. Shakti was requested to take up leadership, a decision later regretted by both Samir and Malay as a socio- aesthetic blunder, a decision for which they were criticized by participants who had subsequently joined the movement. Debi Ray, whose real name is Haradhon Dhara, was to be editor, and his Howrah slum-residence to be used for correspondence. Haradhon Dhara belonged to subaltern caste, and the decision was intentional, as prior to him subaltern authors were not given any space at all. 

However, there were printing problems at the outset as the printing presses at Patna, a Hindi speaking town, did not have sufficient Bangla typefaces. The only press which could have had printed them, refused to entertain. Malay was thus forced to draft the text of the first bulletin in English. The first one-page bulletin, as follows, appeared in November 1961:-
———————————————————————————————————–
WEEKLY MANIFESTO OF THE HUNGRY GENERATION
Editor: Debi Ray Leader: Shakti Chatterjee
Creator: Malay Roychoudhury
Poetry is no more a civilizing maneuver, a replanting of the bamboozled gardens; it is a holocaust, a violent and somnambulistic jazzing of the hymning five, a sowing of the tempestual Hunger.
Poetry is an activity of the narcissistic spirit. Naturally, we have discarded the blankety-blank school of modern poetry, the darling of the press, where poetry does not resurrect itself in an orgasmic flow, but words come out bubbling in an artificial muddle. In the prosed- rhyme of those born-old half-literates, you must fail to find that scream of desperation of a thing wanting to be man, the man wanting to be spirit.
Poetry of the younger generation too has died in the dressing room, as most of the younger prosed -rhyme writers, afraid of the Satanism, the vomitous horror, the self-elected crucifixion of the artist that makes a man a poet, fled away to hide in the hairs.
Poetry from Achintya to Ananda and from Alokeranjan to Indraneel, has been cryptic, short-hand, cautiously glamorous, flattered by own sensitivity like a public school prodigy. Saturated with self-consciousness, poems have begun to appear from the tomb of logic or the bier of unsexed rhetoric.
Published by Haradhon Dhara from 269 Netaji Subhas Road, Howrah, West Bengal, India
  ************************************************************************** The bulletin, which appears quite innocent today, had taken Kolkata by storm, as Debi Ray had arranged to get it distributed in one single day at the intellectual joints, offices of periodicals and college campuses. There was no cultural precedence to this kind of literary behavior for people to relate to. The move had attacked all strata of the Establishment and annoyed anyone who mattered. However, Shakti felt disturbed because of references to the four poets named in the last paragraph. The bulletin was, therefore, reprinted in December 1961 wherein the last paragraph was changed, and an additional paragraph added, as under:- 

Poetry around us these days has been cryptic, shorthand, cautiously glamorous, flattered by own sensitivity like a public-school prodigy. Saturated with self-consciousness, poems have begun to appear from the tomb of logic or the bier of unsexed rhetoric.

Poetry is not the caging of belches within form. It should convey the brutal sound of the breaking values and startling tremors of the rebellious soul of the artist himself, with words stripped of their usual meaning and used contrapuntally. It must invent a new language which would incorporate everything at once, speak to all the senses in one. Poetry should be able to follow music in the power it posses of evoking a state of mind, and to present images not as wrappers but as ravishograms.”

The revised bulletin was again reprinted in 1962. In November 1963 it was printed for a third time under the heading ‘The Hungryalist Manifesto on Poetry’, and names of 25 participants printed on the flip-side. Meanwhile several other manifestoes and bulletins were published and distributed freely, which caused the number of participants to cross 40 in January 1964. Samir had brought in his friends Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Utpalkumar Basu and Binoy Majumdar; Malay had brought in his friends Subimal Basak, Sambhu Rakshit, Tapan Das, Anil Karanjai and Karuna Nidhan Mukhopadhyay; Subimal Basak had brought in his friends Tridib Mitra, Alo Mitra and Falguni Ray; Shakti had brought in Arupratan Basu, Pradip Choudhuri and Basudeb Dasgupta; Debi Ray had brought in Subo Acharya, Subhas Ghosh, Satindra Bhowmik, Haranath Ghose, Nihar Guha, Saileswar Ghosh, Amritatanay Gupta, Ramananda Chattopadhyay, Sunil Mitra, Shankar Sen, Bhanu Chattopadhyay, Ashok Chattopadhyay, Jogesh Panda and Manohar Das. Anil and Karuna, who were painters, brought in painters Subir Chatterjee, Bibhuti Chakrabarty, Arun Datta and Bibhas Das into the fold of the movement. Hungry Generation had become a socio-cultural force to reckon with. 

4.
In view of such a large and unwieldy gathering, and frequent one-page publications, certain events took place which never had happened earlier. Rajkamal Choudhry carried the movement into the domain of Hindi literature; Ameeq Hanfee into Urdu; ‘Pank Ghentey Pataley’ group in Assam; poet Parijat into Nepali literature; and a group in the then East Pakistan comprising of Rafeeq Azad, Abdullah Abu Sayeed, Abdul Mannan Sayad, Asad Choudhury, Shahidur Rahaman, Mustafa Anwar, Faruque Siddiqui, Mahadeb Saha, Shahnur Khan Kaji Rab carried the dynamics to Bangladeshi literature.

The movement gathered a decentering quality, inasmuch as each participant was free to publish a bulletin, which Shakti, Utpal, Binoy, Anil-Karuna and Rajkamal had done, though funded either by Malay or Samir. The handbill-type bulletins were also aesthetically anti-occidental, since they could not be preserved for an immortal space in history. More than 100 bulletins were published in the movement’s life-span between 1961 and 1965, out of which only a dozen or so are traceable.

Excepting for Debi Ray, Tridib and Alo Mitra, who were stationed at Howrah, across Kolkata, most of the participants came from outside the metropolis. They belonged to the periphery. Subimal, like Malay, came from Patna; Samir was Chaibasa-based; The Ghosh brothers, Subhas and Saileswar, were from Balurghat; Shakti was from Jaynagar-Majilpur; all the painters were from Varanasi; Pradip Choudhuri, originally from Tripura, was based at Shantiniketan; Subo Acharya was at Bishnupur and Ramananda Chattopadhyay at Bankura. The Hungryalist movement thus developed spatial qualities instead of time-centric features of earlier post-Tagore literary generations. Hungryalism emerged as a post-colonial counter-discourse. In the first bulletin itself the movement gave a battle cry against ‘modern poetry’, as well as against the ‘tyranny of logic’. Till then the concept of modern and logical progression of the text was considered the ultimate in literary canons.

From 1961 onward as the movement gathered momentum and participants, by 1963 it was on the verge of activating extrication from occidental canons and discourse, which was articulated in a trilingual (Bengali-Hindi-English) cylostyled bulletin by Subimal Basak and Rajkamal Choudhary, as under:-

PREVAILING CANONS
  1. Establishment
  2. Tyranny
  3. Insiders
  4. Elite high-brow culture
  5. Satisfied
  6. Cohesive
  7. Showy
  8. Sex as known
  9. Socialite
  10. Lovers
  11. Ecstasy
  12. Unmoved
  13. Hatred as camouflage
  14. Art films
  15. Art
  16. Sugam sangeet( Tagore songs)
  17. Dream
  18. Tutored language
  19. Redeemed
  20. Framed
  21. Conformist
  22. Indifferent
  23. Mainstream
  24. Curiosity
  25. Endocrine
  26. Conclusions inevitable
  27. Ceremony
  28. Throne
  29. Entertainer
  30. Self-projecting
  31. How am I
  32. Symmetrical
  33. Accountants of prosody
  34. Revising poems
  35. Fantasy’s game
HUNGRYALIST CANONS
    1. Anti-Establishment
    2. Protester
    3. Outsiders
    4. Commoners’ culture
    5. Unsatisfied
    6. Brittle
    7. Raw-bone
    8. Sex as Unknown
    9. Sociable
    10. Mourners
    11. Agony
    12. Turbulent
    13. Real hatred
    14. All films
    15. Life
    16. Any song
    17. Nightmare
    18. Gut language
    19. Unredeemed
    20. Contestetory
    21. Dissident
    22. Struck ethically
    23. Watershed
    24. Anxiousness
    25. Adrenalin
    26. No end to unfolding
    27. Celebration
    28. Abdication
    29. Thought provoker
    30. Self-effacing
    31. How are you
    32. Tattered and decanonised
    33. Extravagance
    34. Continuous revision of life
  • Imagination’s flight
5.
At the peak of the movement, Binoy Majumdar developed schizoid problems. Shakti was pressurized by literary guardians to leave the movement and issue anti-Hungryalist statements. Sandipan Chattopadhyay was lured by a mass circulation periodical with an assurance to publish his novel provided he leave the movement. Sunil Gangopadhyay, in his editorial in Krittibas, castigated the movement. As a result several fence-sitters were caught in an intellectual bind. These writers ultimately devoted themselves to prolific commercial writing. By the middle of 1964 only Utpal, Samir, Malay, Debi, Subimal, Subhas, Saileshwar, Pradip, Karuna, Anil, Tridib, Alo, Falguni, Subo and Ramananda remained in the movement.

The departure of fence sitters proved to be a positive factor. The process hastened the collapse of aesthetic realism, leading to gradual deconstruction and dissolution of high and subaltern cultural distinctions. Hungryalist texts developed subversive and multi-vocal semiotic and semantic features. The mono-centric correctness as demanded by the then ruling academicians were being constantly attacked by the participants. In case of prose writers such as Samir, Falguni, Subhas and Subimal, as well as in the dramas written by Malay, textual reality developed as complexities of heteroglossia.

The academic standards had started dwindling in West Bengal one and half decade after the departure of the Empire, mainly because of the incessant post-partition influx which corroded the Bangla intellectual and social fabric. There were no multi-disciplinary critics comparable to the 19th century stalwarts. The critics themselves were colonial constructs. They were oblivious of the fact that all knowledge is partial, embodied knowledge, produced by particular groups, communities, sects, governments, media, universities, schools, families, localities and persons, for particular purposes, within particular contexts. Their claim to speak on behalf of all Bengalies, restricted plurality and tolerance.

In order to denigrate the Hungryalist movement, the print-media based critics started comparing the Hungryalist movement with Angry Young Men of England and Beat Generation of USA, assuming that texts could be independent of the motherland of the writer. This was compounded by the fact that Allen Ginsberg, who came to India in 1962, had met some Hungryalists at Kolkata, Patna, Varanasi and Chaibasa in 1963. It was Ginsberg whose poetry and religious life was changed completely because of the Hungryalists. Ginsberg could never again write in the form and technique of Howl and Kaddish; his post-India poems developed features of Bangla poetry.

6.
It had become clear by the end of 1963 that three participants, viz. Malay, Debi and Subimal had become key figures of the movement who had picked up certain anti-establishment modules from stories about the activities of ‘Young Bengal’, Vidyasagar and Gandhi. They were being called the Hungry troika and cartoons on them started appearing in dailies such as Basumati, The Statesman and Jugantar.

Tabloids and glossy magazines such as Desh, Chatushparna, Darpan, Amrita, Now, Janata, Link, Anandabazar, Blitz, Naranari, Jalsa etc attempted to sensationalize news about the Hungryalists. The daily Jugantar wrote its main editorial, twice, for them. The daily Searchlight of Patna issued a special supplement on the movement. In other Indian languages periodicals that covered their activities were Dharmayug, Gyanodaya, Dinaman, Saptahik Hindustan, Nayee Dhara, Yugprabhat, Vatayan, Anima, Ingit, Jansatta, Lahar, Asso, Adhikaran, Bharatmail etc.
One evening Subimal was encircled and threatened in front of the College Street Coffee House (Albert Hall) by a literary group comprising of Bimal Raychoudhuri, Shankar Chattopadhyay, Pranabkumar Mukhopadhyay, Parbati Mukhopadhyay, Dipak majumdar, Sharat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Belal Choudhuri, Bijon Ray, Rupendra Basu, Dhiresh Bagchi, Samir Sengupta, Tarapada Ray, Shanti Kumar Ghosh and Shakti Chattopadhyay. Sunil Gangopadhyay, who was in USA on a USAID funded trip, wrote a bizarre letter to Malay, a letter which has since gained special significance in Bangla literary history.
Meanwhile, the under-noted political manifesto created a great turmoil in the Bangla administration:-

Hungry Generation Bulletin No. 15
The Political Manifesto of Hungryalist Movement
  1. To depoliticize the soul of each solitary individual.
  2. To let every individual realize that existence is pre-political.
  3. To let it be noted historically that politics invites the man of the third quality, aesthetically the most lowest substratum of society, at its service.
  4. To make it clear that the conceptions of Elite and that of the Politician differ absolutely after the death of Gandhi.
  5. To declare the belief that all intellectual fakeries called political theory are essentially the founts of fatal and seductive lies erupting out of abominable irresponsibility.
  6. To demarcate the actual position of a politician in a modern society, somewhere between the dead body of a harlot and a donkey’s tail.
  7. To never respect a politician, to whatever species or organism he may belong to.
  8. To never escape from politics, and at the same time, neither let politics escape from the terror of our aesthetic being.
  9. To remodel the basis upon which political creeds are founded. __________________________________________________________________
Today, when we look at Indian politics we are stunned by this prophetic discourse delivered more than 40 years ago. The Hungryalists further confounded the situation by the slogan PLEASE REMOVE YOUR MASK printed on paper-masks of jokers, demons, animals, ghosts, Hindu gods/goddesses etc. and mailed to chief and other ministers, chief and other secretaries, district magistrates, police big bosses, commercial authors, newspaper editors, sundry politicians, that is, anyone who mattered. This action was a piece of sheer genius which has become a part of literary folklore. Another action comparable to actions of 19th century ‘Young Bengal’ was distribution of turmeric-smeared Hindu wedding cards complete with symbols of butterfly and palanquin wherein the ruling school of poetry was vehemently attacked, and the intellectuals indirectly called headless.

7.
Manifestoes appeared regularly on short story, drama, religion, criticism, painting, discourse, obscenity, style, diction etc during the peak of 1963-64. Alongside, magazines edited by Hungryalists started appearing quite frequently. Malay edited Zebra; Tapan Das edited Pratibimba; Subimal edited Pratidwandi; Debi edited Chinho; Tridib & Alo edited Unmarga and Waste Paper; Shambhu edited Blues; Pradip edited Swakal/Phooo. The poems and fictions printed therein drew the attention of print-media writers who charged the authors to be swathed in sexual hunger. Literary and news-magazines whose hegemony was threatened, continued their tirade against the Hungryalists almost everyday.

Written and verbal complaints against the Hungryalists to the Chief Minister and Calcutta Police Commissioner continued pouring in. There were various allegations, including, conspiracy against the Establishment, corrupting the youth, defamation, violation of Press Act, obscenity, disruption of public decency etc. In the beginning of 1964 Kolkata was agog with rumours of an imminent action against Malay, Debi and Subimal, a scenario that even the Dadaists and Surrealists could not have contemplated. A Deputy Commissioner of Police who later became famous for Naxalite encounters was, incidentally, maternal uncle of a Krittibas group poet. Things obviously moved quite fast. Sunil Gangopadhyay had just arrived back from USA.

On September 2nd, 1964 arrest warrants were issued against eleven Hungryalists on charges of conspiracy against the Establishment (Section 120 of Indian Penal Code) and obscenity in literature (Section 292 of Indian Penal Code). Samir, Malay, Subhas, Saileshwar, Debi and Pradip were arrested. Pradip was rusticated from Visva Bharati; Utpal was dismissed from his professor’s job; Malay and Samir were suspended from service; Debi and Subimal were transferred out of Kolkata by their employers. Samir and Malay had to present themselves before a specifically constituted ‘Investigating Board’ which interrogated them for several hours to find out whether they were really involved in any conspiracy.

This phase of the Hungryalist movement is the murkiest period in the history of Bangla literature. Shakti and Sandipan, who had moved out of the movement about a year back, volunteered and recorded testimonies against Malay Shakti on 18 February 1965 and Sandipan on 15 March 1965); Subo, Basudeb and Ramananda fled from Kolkata; Subhas and Saileshwar signed good-conduct bonds (on 2nd September 1964) indicating that they had nothing to do with the Hungry Generation movement, and that they will not associate with the movement in future. However, 40 years later when Hungry Generation movement became a legendary proposition, obviously a salable one, these two brothers were the first to claim that they were the genuine Hungryalists! In view of the weak character of majority of the Hungryalists, who testified against Malay in Court, the movement withered away in May 1965. It was in May 1965 that Malay was charge- sheeted by Establishment police and all others were set free. (Case No. GR 579 of 1965, in the court of Presidency Magistrate, 9th court, Calcutta).

During the short span of 1961-65 the movement had created an indelible impact on Bangla literature. In an interview to Dhurjati Chanda, Malay had stated that Hungryalism was the first and the last iconoclastic venture in Bangla literature which in retrospect now appears to be a socio-political aesthetic triumph, that artistic freedom in which life was put at stake and the rules of which required brazen acts of impudence to be legitimized by manifestoes. In another interview he gave to Anadiranjan Biswas, Malay had said that the Hungryalist defiant ventures were attempts to wrest the power of definition, distinction and evaluation from those who claimed themselves to be authorities of literary discourse. The writers of West Bengal and Bangladesh who were called 50’s poet were writing pale and stale poems till 1959; they changed completely only after the implosion of the Hungryalist movement.

It is a different story that Malay had to go through a 35 month long ordeal of arrest, conviction by lower court ( on 28 December 1965) and ultimately exoneration by High Court of Calcutta. However, the movement did create a world wide stir that had brought Bangla literature in to international limelight again. Both English and Spanish versions of TIME magazine wrote about the movement. Periodicals in Europe, USA, Latin America, Australia and Asia such as City Lights Journal, SanFrancisco Earthquake, Eco, El Corno Emplumado, Kulchur, Klactoveedsedsteen, Burning Water, Intrpid, Salted Feathers, Evergreen Review, Panaroma, Trace, El Rehelite, Imago, Work, Iconolatre, Whe’re, Ramparts, Los Angeles Free Press, My Own Mag, Vincent etc either printed, reprinted or brought out special issues.

In Hindi, Sharad Deora wrote a novel titled College Street Ka Naya Masiha based on the Hungryalists; Phanishwarnath Renu wrote Ram Pathak Key Diary Sey; Dharmaveer Bharati and S.H.Vatsayan Ajneya wrote quite frequently about them in the periodicals they edited; Ashok Shahane, Dilip Chitre and Arun Kolatkar hailed them in Marathi; Umashankar Joshi introduced them to Gujarati readers; Ameeq Hanfee translated and introduced them to Urdu readers. The Bengali intelligentsia had not bargained for this unexpected international exposure. Reputed academicians of the time viz. Sukumar Sen, Asitkumar Bandyopadhyay, Haraprasad Mitra, Bhabatosh Datta, Ujjwalkumar Majumdar, Kshetra Gupta, Saroj Bandyopadhyay, Shashi Bhushan Dasgupta, Sukumari Bhattacharya, Debiprasad Bhattacharya, Bhudeb Choudhury, Tarapada Mukhopadhyay, Chinmohan Sehanabis and others preferred to ignore the movement. Some academicians even persuaded academicians of other languages to ignore the Hungryalist impact. Nevertheless, intellectuals from other countries, such as Octavio Paz and Ernesto Cardenal sought the Hungryalists when they visited India. 

That the Hungryalist movement had shattered the colonial canons and had encircled the centre by a new epistemic periphery, became clear with emergence of powerful post-Hungryalist writers and poets such as Subimal Mishra, Arunesh Ghosh, Prasun Bandyopadhyay, Pradip Das Sharma, Atindriya Pathak, Kamal Chakraborty, Barin Ghoshal, Saswata Sikdar, Anuradha Mahapatra, Ajit Ray, Aloke Biswas, Pranab Pal, Sankarnath Chakraborty, Arun Basu, Sridhar Mukhopadhyay, Dipankar Datta, Debdas Acharya, Biswajit Sen, Achin Dasgupta, Bikash Sarkar, Abani Dhar, Nabarun Bhattacharya, Samiran Ghosh, Nitya Malakar, Manab Chakraborty, Aloke Goswami, Moulinath Biswas, Madhumay Pal, Koushik Chakraborty and a host of other writers. Any literary defiance, Hungryalism being the most potent in post-colonial Bangla literature, embodies the provocation of a literary code into a socio-cultural and political code. The ultra-leftist naxalite political explosion in Bangla polity occurred obviously immediately after the Hungryalist canonical implosion in literature and painting.

8.
Some of today’s critics have opined that the main reason for aesthetic percolation of the spirit of the movement, and its power to withstand the steamroller of Establishment juggernaut, may be found in the range of experience and variety of erudition of the participants who refused to hang around vernacular newspaper offices or the joints of political masters as has been the case with most of the pre-Hungryalist writers, especially of Krittibas and Notun Reeti brands. Those wre also the contributory factors to Hungryalist texts which could gather propensities of hybridity, syncreticity, rhizomatism, heterogeneity, optativeness, disjunctiveness, immanence, irony, logical cracks etc; Hungryalist painting imbued de-layering, de-proportioning, multi-scaling, de-perspectivisation, de-structuring, fragmentariness and such other poly-hued mélanges. Poet Falguni Ray and painter Anil Karanjai have become underground cult figures after their death.

Two manifestoes of the Hungryalist movement which are quoted by critics either to argue for and against their texts are as under:-
THE OBJECT OF HUNGRYALISM (HUNGREALISME)
  1. To never imitate the reality of Aristotle, but to take the un-enameled whoring reality by surprise under the genital of Art.
  2. To let speechlessness burst into speech without breaking the silence.
  3. To let loose a creative furor, in order to undo the done-for world and start afresh from chaos.
  4. To exploit every matrix of senses except that of a writer.
  5. To disclose the belief that world and existence are justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.
  6. To accept all doubts and despairs rather than to be content to live with the sense made by others.
  7. To lash out against the values of the bi-legged career-making animals.
  8. To abjure all meretricious blandishments for the sake of absolute sincerity.
  9. To stop writing and painting beyond the point of self-realization.
MANIFESTO OF THE HUNGRY GENERATION
  1. The merciless exposure of the self in its entirety.
  2. To present in all nakedness all aspects of the self and things before it.
  3. To catch a glimpse of the exploded self at a particular moment.
  4. To challenge every value with a view to accepting or rejecting the same.
  5. To consider everything at the start to be nothing but ‘thing’ with a view to testing whether it is living or lifeless.
  6. Not to take reality as it is but to examine it in all its aspects.
  7. To seek to find out a mode of communication, by abolishing the accepted modes of prose and poetry which would instantly establish communication between the poet and his reader.
  8. To use the same words in poetry as are used in ordinary conversation.
  9. To reveal the sound of the word, used in ordinary conversation, more sharply in the poem.
  10. To break loose the traditional association of words and to coin unconventional and here-to-fore unaccepted combination of words.
  11. To reject traditional forms of poetry, and allow poetry to take its original forms.
  12. To admit without qualification that poetry is the ultimate religion of man.
  13. To transmit dynamically the message of the restless existence and the sense of disgust in a razor-sharp language.
  14. Personal ultimatum.
_____________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
  The reasons why these two manifestoes are referred to by critics while analyzing the movement in the perspective of preceding literary thinkers are that the arguments put forth were completely different from what Buddhadeva Basu, Dipti Tripathi, Abu Sayeed Ayub, Debiprasad Chattopadhyay, Al Mahmood, Shamsur Rahaman, Binoy Ghosh, Nirendranath Chakraborty, Shakha Ghosh etc had been articulating till then. The Hungryalists not only drew upon words, experiences, epithets, incidents, diction hitherto considered taboo by ‘bhadralok’ gentry, but they virtually dismantled the single dimension metropolitan domination of Bangla literature. They introduced grammatically prohibited ‘guruchandali’ in poetry and prose, that is, mixing of words used by Brahmins and Untouchables.

The Hungryalists were disgusted and impatient with the slothful, sluggish pace of change. When the famous ‘troika’ submitted a shoe-box for book review to the newspaper with largest circulation, an action that would have definitely been appreciated by Ramtanu Lahiri, Radhanath Sikdar and Pyarichand Mitra, the anti-Establishment luminaries of 19th century, the Hungryalists were waging war against canonical hegemony, and bombarding modernist boundaries.
 

The Hungryalist authors and painters nativised Bangla discourse. The above two manifestoes aspired to regain the pre-colonial philosophy of atman wherein culture and nature are not considered to be separate spheres. The two manifestoes refused to view culture as the product of traumatic self-extrication from nature. The pre-Hungryalist writers and painters reflexively depended upon the idea of culture as the formation of subjectivity out of the primitive unconsciousness of matter. The Hungryalists, on the contrary, were thrilled with an awareness of value immanent in the relations between the natural and the human as had been exemplified in the fictions Chhatamatha by Subimal Basak, Amar Chabi by Subhas Ghosh, Kather Phul by Falguni Ray, Randhanshala by Basudeb Dasgupta, prose pieces in Malay Roychoudhury’s Bhenno Galpo, and the poems Poper Samadhi by Utpalkumar Basu, Janoar and Aamar Vietnam by Samir Roychoudhury, Choushatti Bhuter Kheya by Pradip Choudhuri and Jakham by Malay Roychoudhury. All of these works are considered exceptional today.

After the movement withered away with the commencement of Malay’s trial, when Subhas, Saileswar, Sandipan and Shakti became police witness and testified against Malay in court, the writers and poets branched out of their own. Like most of the post-partition families, Subhas, Basudeb and Saileshwar joined the governmental leftists, participating in anti-people activities; Subo Acharya became devotedly religious and a disciple of god-man Anukul Thakur of Deoghar; Anil and Karuna joined the naxalite movement; Tridib and Alo gave up writing; Utpal departed for London; Pradip shifted his craft from Bengali to French; Falguni resorted to excessive drug abuse and died; Debi joined the Radical Humanists; Malay and Samir preferred to keep silent for more than a decade.

During the post-naxal period, 10-12 years after Malay’s trial, some literary aspirants in North Bengal and Tripura suddenly started calling themselves Hungryalists, though they were unaware of the manifestoes of the Hungry Generation movement and, obviously, major Hungryalist works were unavailable to them. They simply tried to be different from the commercial mainstream. From among them, names that crop up from time to time, are Arunesh Ghosh, Nitya Malakar, Jibotosh Das, Aloke goswami, Rasaraj Nath, Selim Mallik, Satwik Nandi, Arun Banik, Shankhapallab Aditya, Raja Sarkar, Bikash Sarkar, Samiran Ghosh, Prabir Seal, Subrata Paul, Arun Basu and Pranab Debnath.

With the re-emergence of Malay and Samir in the late 80s things have completely changed. A new generation of critics, academicians and readers has emerged for whom the Hungryalists are legends. Samir gave this observation a proper premise with his periodical Haowa 49. Malay, one may like to say, returned with a vengeance, and his novels, drama, poetry, essays, interviews, drew respectful attention of the earlier generation also who had once denigrated the Hungryalists. With the range of Hungryalist corpus, command over Bangla language, and the depth of knowledge and variety of experience of these authors, whose avant garde discourse and discursive practices had once created literary and social avalanche, they have made history. Researchers are doing their M.Phil. and Ph.D. on them. Several periodicals have published special issues on individual Hungryalist writers and painters. 

(Courtesy: Prof Niraj Bakshi, Editor, Black Rainbow, Indore. 2003)

Malay Roychoudhury and his band of Tigers by Sara Hussain

                                                                      

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. 


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’.” 


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 here and listen to BBC’s podcast about the Hungry Generation here.

বুধবার, ২৫ জুলাই, ২০১৮

Subversion by The Hungryalists : Daniela Capello

This paper will focus on the elaboration of “genre” in the Hungry Generation, a Bengali avant-garde movement that challenged Calcutta literary establishment by means of an obscene and grotesque aesthetics that spanned from poetry to manifesto writing.

Basing on few examples of Hungry literature (i.e. poetry, manifesto and excerpts from Hungry Little Magazines), I argue that the movement subverted traditional notions of genre through unconventional practices of writing and distributing literary material, such as using an obscene language and visuality in poetry, making fun of traditional tropes of Bengali literature and presenting an innovative lay-out of the texts that were circulated. These practices resulted in the formulation of an overall aesthetics of obscenity that encompassed language, form and materials of Hungry literary production. Therefore, the selected pieces of writing will be analyzed as examples of “subverted genres”.


In the context of my ongoing research on this topic, the Hungry Generation tried to negotiate its place in the Indian literary sphere by mediating between the idiom of Calcutta middle-class and the daring language of the international avant-garde. The outcomes of this paper will thus contribute to framing Hungryalism as a move of emancipation from the Bengali high literary sphere, seen as irreducibly urban, “bourgeois” and still imbued with colonial influences.

From "India and its Visual Cultures" by Uwe Skoda


শুক্রবার, ১৩ জুলাই, ২০১৮

A Sour Time of Putrefaction by Nayanima Basu

'A sour time of putrefaction'

Nayanima Basu

The bleak post-Partition era in Bengal gave rise to a new literature of dissent. Malay Roychoudhury helped found the Hungryalist movement, and 50 years on he tells Nayanima Basu about its beginnings and its downfall.

When a civilisation falls, people tend to eat every thing that comes their way,” says a pensive Malay Roychoudhury, sitting in his one-bedroom flat in Kandivli, Mumbai. “Today when I look at West Bengal, the Hungryalist premonition appears prophetic.”

Roychoudhury, now 72, was a dissenter who launched the avant-garde Hungryalist movement in Bengal in November 1961. The movement shook the region and drew sharp criticism from the bhadralok and political class. It also challenged the basic tenets of Bengali literature.
At that time, Kolkata, then called Calcutta, was undergoing change at a blistering pace. Partition had unleashed a catastrophic inflow of displaced people, which was 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.
A section of the youth of that era felt that it could not tolerate these rapid changes. This group felt that the dream of Independence floated by the Indian National Congress leaders had turned into a nightmare. In order to give vent to their anger, a handful of poets and writers launched the so-called Hungryalist movement. They were later known as the Hungry generation.

“In 1959-60, post-Partition Bangla polity was definitely in a sour time of putrefaction,” says Roychoudhury. “Youngsters of my age were very angry. This was the period when intellectuals were being eased out of the sphere of influence, which was by then captured by politicians, most of whom were blind-alley individuals. A post-Partition turmoil had overtaken West Bengal. My mental turmoil was interfering with my intention of writing poetry. Hence, we decided to launch the Hungryalist movement.”

Roychoudhury started the movement with his elder brother, Samir Roychoudhury, and two other poets, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Debi Ray. He coined the term “Hungryalist”, having picked the word “hungry” out of “the sowre hungry tyme”, a phrase by the medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Together, the four Bengali poets published handbills carrying their ideas, manifestos and poems, and distributed them freely through Calcutta’s famous Coffee House as well as through government departments, universities and newspapers .

The movement was funded by the Roychoudhury brothers. It did not have an office, headquarters or politburo, and its members were free to write and publish anything that challenged the state. “There had been no such socio-literary movement prior to the Hungryalists,” says Roychoudhury. “Moreover, we spoke against the concept of modern literature. More writers and painters started joining, and by the time the West Bengal government initiated its crackdown on the movement we had more than 30 participants.”

Roychoudhury was a postgraduate in economics from Patna University. His interest in Bengali literature is owed to his brother Samir, who had moved to Calcutta from the ancestral home in suburban Uttarpara in order to study literature.

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”.

On September 2, 1964, arrest warrants were issued against 11 of the Hungry poets. The charges included obscenity in literature and subversive conspiracy against the state. The main charge against Roychoudhury was that of “obscenity” in his poem “Prachanda Boidyutik Chhutar” (translated as “Stark Electric Jesus”).

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 Roychoudhury. This produced the misconception that the Hungryalists were inspired by the Beat poets.

“Some of them carried the news to Europe and I started getting translated for the little magazines there,” says 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.”

He says the Hungryalists were also displaced by the upsurge of ultra-leftist students and youth that came to be known as the Naxalite movement, though the Naxalites did not venture much into literary activities.

Eventually, with help from his family and writer-friends, Roychoudhury was released. But the movement was already dying. Except in literary circles in West Bengal and Bangladesh, and university Hindi departments (where it is called Bhookhi Peedi, or “Hungry generation”), very few people today are aware of and understand the Hungryalist movement.

“But I do not agree that the movement failed,” he says. “It was snuffed out. It was gradually spreading to other cities when state intervention crippled it. Shakti Chattopadhyay [a fellow poet], our de facto leader, left us in 1963 and joined the forces against us. A few participants who came from refugee families got scared when the press started reporting that government action is imminent. Some were enticed by the newly formed CPI(M) and other Left parties.”


In 1968 Roychoudhury married Shalila, who was once a state-level field hockey player. The next year he won his court case, moved to Lucknow and joined Agricultural Refinance & Development Corporation. The Roychoudhurys now live in surburban Mumbai. He has written over 70 books, all for small publishers — big publishers stay away despite an assured readership of over a thousand, he says. After two heart attacks, angioplasty and arthritis, holding a pen has become difficult, but he types with one finger on a computer.
“I am quite often approached by young poets and writers,” Roychoudhury says, “to guide them so that they may relaunch the Hungryalist movement. I tell them to understand their own space and time and thereafter devise their own platform to express themselves.”

First Published: Sat, December 10 2011. 00:45 IST

মঙ্গলবার, ১০ জুলাই, ২০১৮

Sunil Gangopadhyay sabotaged the Hungryalist Movement

It was Sunil Gangopadhyay who sabotaged the Hungryalist movement of Literature and Culture in West Bengal. When the movement gathered steam at Calcutta in special and India in general, he was in Iowa, USA for learning how to write poems. His friends kept on writing him that the Hungryalists have arrived as a potent force in Calcutta's cultural and literary scene and they are being highlighted in the Bengali and English dailies and periodicals, inasmuch as the daily 'Jugantar' had written editorials on them and cartoons were being published in main Bengali and English newspapers and headlines were appearing in Bengali broadsides against the Hungryalists to provoke the Establishment and the Police.  Several literary periodicals had started writing about the Hungryalists which had never happened earlier in the history of Bengali literature and culture.

Sunil Gangopadhyay, who was associated with the Establishment lobby started writing angry letters to Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Utpalkumar Basu so that they leave the Hungryalist movement immediately. He also wrote a letter threatening Malay Roychoudhury that after he returns from USA he will see to it that the Hungryalist movement is dismantled.

Sunil Gangopadhyay returned from USA and Police filed charges of conspiracy against the State and Obscenity in Malay Roychoudhury's poem Stark Electric Jesus ( Prachando Baidyutik Chhutar ). Eleven Hungryalists were served with arrest warrents and six Hungryalists viz, Samir Roychoudhury, Debi Roy, Malay Roychoudhury, Pradip Choudhuri, Saileswar Ghosh and Subhash Ghosh were arrested. Malay Roychoudhury being the leader of the movement was handcuffed, a rope tied to his waist and he was forced to march from lock up to Court along with several criminals, an event unknown in the history of literature. 

Sunil Gangopadhyay went on to become a powerful literary personality in the Indian Government's Literature Academy and bestowed the highest prizes to Sandipan chattopadhyay, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Utpalkumar Basu for having ditched the Hungryalist movement. These three writers became Police witness against Malay Roychoudhury in the Court Case against Roychoudhury's poem Stark Electric Jesus. Roychoudhury was sentenced for a month for the testimony of these witnesses in the Calcutta Court.

Sunil Gangopadhyay went to the extent of writing an editorial against the Hungryalist movement in 'Krittibas' magazine. It is really a travesty of literary history that 'Krittibas' magazine was funded by Samir Roychoudhury, one of the founding fathers of the Hungryalist movement and a member of The Hungryalist Quartet.

শনিবার, ৭ জুলাই, ২০১৮

The Hungryalist TROIKA

These three active members of Hungryalist movement who created the greatest turmoil ever in Cultural Politics of Calcutta are known as the Hungryalist Troika.
                                 
                               Debi Roy
                              
                        Malay Roychoudhury
                                         
                         Subimal Basak

These Four Founders of The Movement are known as "HUNGRYALIST QUARTET"

                                                             Malay Roychoudhury
                                                                          
                                                            Samir Roychoudhury
                                                                           
                                                            Shakti Chattopadhyay
                                                                          

                                                                  Debi Roy