রবিবার, ৪ নভেম্বর, ২০১৮

The Hungryalists by Ankan Kazi

The Hungryalists by Ankan Kazi




Sanchayan Ghosh’s installation featured a tablet bearing lines from a poem by Malay Roychoudhury.
COURTESY EXPERIMENTER GALLERY
In Labour Reconciled, an installation for an exhibition that ran earlier this year at Kolkata’s Experimenter Gallery, the artist Sanchayan Ghosh brought together different elements of labour practices around the intellectual project of envisioning a possible utopia.


Many counterculture figures from the West, such as the American hippie poet David Garcia, sought out the Hungryalists during the 1960s.
  
At the centre of the room was a large mortar slab, the sort made by the roof makers of Birbhum district in West Bengal. It was surrounded by pictures of those roof makers, the first edition of a Bengali literary journal and two editions of the journal Labour Law. By putting on headphones that hung from a wall, one could hear the songs of the mostly Dalit women who used to practise this occupation—which disappeared during the 1980s—songs that have often entered poetic traditions largely curated by male poets. The mortar slab bore a looming tablet, as if out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, on which were displayed lines from “Jokhom”—Wound—a poem by Malay Roychoudhury:
Chadowaye agun lagiy
Tar neeche shuye aakasher udonto neel dekhchhi ekhon
Dukkho koshter shunani multobi rekhe

Ami amar shomosto shondehoke jera kore nichhi
Having set the canopy ablaze
I lie watching the blue sky fly away above me.
Having adjourned the hearing of my sorrow
I interrogate every doubt I have ever had.
This stark vision, of a possible future in perpetual retreat and its dependence on creative destruction by a beleaguered modern subject, is integral to understanding the angry millenarianism of the Hungry Generation, a literary movement that captured the cultural imagination of West Bengal in the early 1960s. Along with the poets Samir Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Debi Roy, Malay Roychoudhury was a founder of the “Hungryalist” movement, which frequently found itself in opposition to literary and legal establishments of West Bengal, which in turn combined to denounce and persecute its members, eventually disbanding the group itself. Nevertheless, its influence was diffused into Bengali, as well as Hindi, literature. The Hungry Generation is frequently cited as an example of the impact an underground literary culture—largely confined to the dedicated readers of alternative “little magazines”—can have on an entire body of a vernacular literature.




The Hungryalists sought to popularise their work by publishing a number of manifestos and literary magazines
 
Self-doubt and hope often coexisted in the work of the Hungryalists, even if no compromise with the status quo was brooked. Unlike the sanitised everyday experiences in the work of modernists such as Jibanananda Das and Buddhadeva Bose, social transgression—aberrant sexual practices, excessive alcohol and drug abuse, converging Hindu religious rituals with sexual taboos—was frequently posed by them as an end in itself for literary expression. A conception of authenticity was strongly enforced through the rhetorical use of condescension and righteous anger.

“Poetry is an activity of the narcissistic spirit,” the Hungryalists wrote in their first manifesto, published in November 1961. “Naturally, we have discarded the blanketyblank 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.”

The Hungry Generation published over a hundred manifestos in the five years of its existence as a literary movement. Its membership grew to over forty poets and artists, who brought out new journals and literary magazines. In 1964, however, the West Bengal government issued arrest warrants against 11 members on charges of conspiracy and obscenity. Many former members, including Shakti Chattopadhyay, came forward to denounce the Hungryalists and testify against Malay Roychoudhury during his obscenity trial. As a result, the movement withered away.

There have been many attempts in later years to rehabilitate the Hungry Generation. Such efforts were largely confined to literary conferences and occasional academic intervention converging around figures such as Malay Roychoudhury or the painter Anil Karanjai, whose dreamlike, sexualised landscapes are significant within the Hungryalist tradition.

The most prominent depiction of a Hungryalist figure in Bengali popular culture was seen in Srijit Mukherji’s 2011 film Baishe Srabon, in which the arthouse director Goutam Ghose plays a disgruntled, transgressive poet surviving in the margins of Kolkata. A more academic revival was attempted by Hungry Sahitya Andolan: Tatwa, Tathya, Itihas—The Hungry Literary Movement: Theory, Texts, History—a 2015 anthology featuring the defining voices of the movement and their most prominent critics. It serves to both cement the canon of Hungryalist literature and frame its intervention in its historical context.

Much like Ghosh’s installation, both projects are sympathetic to this movement, but their engagement in this revivalist project reveals several tensions at the heart of Hungryalism that do not find easy resolution. Examining these allows us to look more closely at the politics of its revival.
Ghosh’s use of the music of the Dalit women of Birbhum sets up the first problem that the installation tries to signal and overcome: deeply gendered ideas and texts, which form the movement’s core tenets of emancipation and frequently slide into unrestrained misogyny. Masculinity was seen by the Hungryalists as an endangered intellectual and material resource.

In Baishe Srabon, the figure of attenuated masculinity is split between the dissolute, dark hero of the film—an ex-cop called Prabir, played by Prosenjit Chatterjee—and his shadowy double, Ghose’s aspiring Hungryalist poet Nibaron, who may also be a serial killer. Caught between these two men is the figure of a younger, more acceptable man. Parambrata Chatterjee plays Pakrashi, a police officer who fails to solve a series of grisly murders, whose marginalised victims include beggars and sex workers.

Pakrashi is threatened by a posse of cops who cannot believe that someone who looks like him could be a police officer. He angrily challenges the stereotype of the action-hero cop by wondering if he must resemble a meat shop in order to be taken seriously. In contrast with this well-turned-out bhadralok, Prabir is a haunting presence in the police department. Previously forced to retire due to his frequent use of enhanced interrogation, he is brought back in to complement Pakrashi’s textbook approach with his unorthodox, and often illegal, tactics.

Ranged against this uneasy combination of older and emergent masculine forms is the lonely figure of Nibaron, an unpublished poet who revels in prurient imagery and frequently refers to the obscenity trials of the Hungryalists. While Prabir lives in a decrepit mansion, Nibaron is destitute and hovers on the verge of madness because of the cruel promises of recognition and fame of a shadowy presence rather unsubtly named Rabindranath.

As the thriller advances its dreary plot twists, working out the conflict over masculinity assumes greater importance. The depiction of Prabir’s arbitrarily violent masculinity is shown to contribute towards an understanding of the Bengali male psyche in turbulence. In the final twist, Prabir’s fantasy of authority is shown to be a façade. He simply relies on manipulating stereotypes about the dangers of transgressive poetry to the social fabric. His death at the end of the film is portrayed as tragic—it is too politically incorrect, the film implies, to let him live and appear victorious, but his dubious sacrifice is too essential for the survival of the status quo to not be mourned. The Hungry Generation, meanwhile, is left to fend for itself, its legacy left open for misinterpretation by a more innocent generation that either cannot find a coherent political vision of transformation behind its social transgression, or is simply too well-adjusted to care.

Pranabkumar Chattopadhyay’s anthology frames the history of the Hungry Generation in more complicated terms than Mukherji’s film. Instead of painting them as self-generating rebels, its historical essays try to place the Hungryalists in relation to older economic, political and literary establishments. Samir Roychoudhury—Malay’s brother—begins his contribution with a brief history of Jawaharlal Nehru’s first two five-year plans. The second plan, which emphasised industrial development, resulted in steel plants coming up in non-metropolitan regional peripheries. They took on cultural and social significance as their populations grew through labour migration.

The central significance of places such as Patna—where the Roychoudhury brothers came of age and founded the movement—Munger, Daltonganj, Dhanbad, Purnea, Chaibasa and even those as far-flung as Varanasi and Tripura is highlighted. The Hungryalists freely assimilated dialects, literary representations, local communities and political histories from these regions in their texts as they struggled to accommodate the unique and rarely depicted experience of destitute Bengali lives in these interstitial regions. Samir writes about growing up in working-class neighbourhoods, being subjected to class condescension and exclusion from established literary and academic institutions.
It is a bit unfortunate, though, that he feels the need to challenge this condescension by claiming that their group knew more about Tagore and the Ramcharitmanas than their class tormentors. The claim is in ironic contrast with the work of Satinath Bhaduri, who inhabited the same region and wrote the famous Dhorai Charita Manas, a subversive retelling of Tulsidas’s epic set among the oppressed-caste weaver community of Bihar and written in their spoken dialects. Similar local influences include the Hindi writers Phanishwarnath Renu and Ramdhari Singh Dinkar. These experiments with rejecting or reformulating caste were influential, if unresolved, ones for the Hungryalists, who were almost uniformly drawn from the dominant castes.

When Samir turns to the question of reception, a lone critical voice is marshalled—that of Dipti Tripathi, who pointed out a certain tendency for prolixity and lack of reason among the Hungryalists. He takes this criticism, oddly enough, to be a prudish reaction to his sexually charged work. He is also happy to admit that they did not care much about linear narratives or the “artificial” rigours of plot and narrative.

Both Samir and Pranabkumar Chattopadhyay remain ambivalent about a more precise definition of the ideological aims of the Hungry Generation. This means that they are unable to separate Hungryalist works from some of their modernist antics, such as sending shoeboxes and paper masks to critics for review. They also emphasise a continuity with the anti-establishment poets published in Krittibas, a major literary journal of the time that fostered a metropolitan and modernist poetic aesthetic. Edited by the poet Sunil Gangopadhyay, Krittibas foundered during the early 1960s, but was eventually revived as a respectable cultural commodity for middle-class Bengalis.
The anthology’s emphasis on the importance of these peripheral zones to the development of a radical modernism is an important intervention in the safe imaginary of a literary habitation, one that is often defined by regional power struggles for uniformity—Bengali for West Bengal, Odia for Odisha, Hindi or Maithili for Bihar—and ignores large swathes of working-class migration across these borders. The Hungry Generation challenged readers to transform their relationship with their own “standardised” languages.

This is also true of the mixed-up lyrics sung by the roof-beating women in Ghosh’s installation. The singers from the Bauri community used a dialect that ignores the standard vocabulary of high literary Bengali. In a tradition where dominant-caste male taste determines both established language and acceptable anti-establishment discourse, practices that do not belong to this niche are allowed to simply disappear. Ghosh’s installation tries to advocate for a more reconciliatory gender politics by understanding the reception of literary labour as a deeply gendered process in Bengali culture.
Such mixing and mismatching, creating impurities out of linguistic collisions, is arguably a greater social and literary transgression than the puerile sexual images, filtered through notions of caste purity, in Malay Roychoudhury’s famous poem “Stark Electric Jesus”:
Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream
Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm
Would I have been like this if I had different parents?

                                                           Ankan Kazi

শুক্রবার, ২ নভেম্বর, ২০১৮

The Hungryalists by Dr Indrajeet Bhattacharjee

The Anti-Establishment Pioneers of Bengal
Dr 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:-
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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
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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.”
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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
  35. 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:-
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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:-
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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.
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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.
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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)