Abstract:
This essay explores the relationship between the
U.S.-based Beat literary movement and the Hungry Generation literary
movement centered in and around Calcutta, India, in the early 1960s. It
discusses a trip Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky took to India in
1962, where they met writers associated with the Hungry Generation. It
further explains how Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Books
in San Francisco, was inspired to start a new literary magazine, City Lights Journal, by Ginsberg’s letters from India, which included work by Hungry Generation writers. The essay shows how City Lights Journal
packaged the Hungry Generation writers as the Indian wing of the Beat
movement, and focuses in particular on the work of Malay Roy Choudhury,
the founder of the Hungry Generation who had been prosecuted for
obscenity for his poem “Stark Electric Jesus”. The essay emphasizes in
particular the close relationship between aesthetics and politics in
Hungry Generation writing, and suggests that Ginsberg’s own mid-1960s
turn to political activism via the imagination is reminiscent of
strategies employed by Hungry Generation writers.
Keywords:
Beat Generation; Hungry Generation; Hungryalists; Allen Ginsberg; Malay
Roy Choudhury; Beats in India; transnational Beats; international Beat
movement; Beat politics; City Lights Journal; “Stark Electric Jesus”;
“Wichita Vortex Sutra”
In March 1962, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky
arrived in India, where they would live for the next fourteen months.
Students of Beat literature have long noted that during this time they
met up with fellow poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger, and that together
they immersed themselves in the local religious and literary cultures.
Partly because all four writers kept journals of the period that have
since been published, readers have tended to characterize their own
interactions as among the more significant of the trip.1
While there is a wealth of material to be mined in this regard—not the
least of which is their meeting with the Dalai Lama, during which
Ginsberg brought up the consciousness-expanding potential of LSD—other
important connections were forged that tell differing stories about the
international reach of the Beat movement. Indeed, as Ginsberg and
Orlovsky traveled on without Snyder and Kyger, they met a host of
writers, artists, and holy men in Banaras, Calcutta and beyond; as
Orlovsky wrote to their old friend Lucien Carr: “Main thing we do in
Calcutta is meat [sic] Bengale poets by the dozen”.2
One
such Bengali poet who caught Ginsberg’s interest was Malay Roy
Choudhury, also a playwright and essayist who had distinguished himself
by founding a literary movement he called the Hungry Generation or the
Hungryalists, a group of young writers and artists centered in and
around Calcutta who were united in their pugnaciously antiestablishment
attitudes and in their drive to reinvigorate what they took to be the
tired, academic modes of traditional Bengali arts and letters. Late in
1962, in one of his long, detailed letters to Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
owner of City Lights Books and publisher of Howl and Other Poems
(1956), Ginsberg turned particularly rhapsodic about his latest
exploits, and folded in a copy of “The Hungryalist Manifesto on Poetry,”
a broadside by Choudhury filled with audacious pronouncements about
poetry and culture. Ferlinghetti was impressed enough by Ginsberg’s
letter and the suggestive energies of the Hungryalist Manifesto that he
was inspired to start a new little magazine intended to showcase the
contemporary international avant-garde, including the Hungryalists. As
he replied to Ginsberg: “I have just been prodded by your India
descriptions to start another Journal
and publish your description in it, along with anything else you send,
and also publish that beautiful Weekly Manifesto of Hungry Generation of
India which you enclosed in letter.”3 This exchange was the germ of what would become City Lights Journal
(first run: 1963–1966), the magazine that introduced Choudhury and the
Hungry Generation to Western readers, but did so by suggesting their
contributions to international letters were broadly comparable to what
the Beats had achieved in the States.4
The
Hungry Generation’s association with the Beats was a boon insofar as
Ginsberg was already an internationally recognized writer, and ever the
astute marketer, he was able to package the Hungryalists as something
like the Indian wing of a global Beat phenomenon. In those early days,
Choudhury also tended to play up his connection to Ginsberg and the
Beats, at least when describing the Hungry Generation to non-Indian
readers. In 1963, for example, Choudhury wrote a dispatch from India for
El Corno Emplumado, Margaret Randall
and Sergio Mondragon’s bilingual arts journal published out of Mexico
City, and described the situation like this: “We have started a literary
rebellion here calling ourselves HUNGRYALISTS, mainly fighting for a
change, along with some crazy conceptions. Allen Ginsberg, who came to
India and stayed with us for about a year or more (he was in my house
for a few days and wrote some beautiful poems in this very room where I
am now sitting and writing this letter to you), introduced us to his
fellow Beats by reprinting and publishing our Manifestoes and poems etc.
in U.S. journals.”5 Choudhury has in mind Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Journal
(No. 1 [1963]; No. 2 [1964]; No. 3 [1966]), which, thanks to Ginsberg’s
efforts, was the first to print English translations of Hungry
Generation manifestos and poetry, a move that at once announced them to
the West and cemented Beatdom’s international bona fides. Taking the
link between Ginsberg and Choudhury as a starting point, this essay
explores the Beat–Hungryalist connections via City Lights Journal,
which introduced the Hungry Generation to Anglophone audiences by
framing it as an extension of the Beat movement. This framing suggested
the internationalist cast of contemporary Beat writing while
simultaneously conferring hip or underground legitimacy on the
Hungryalists through their supposed association with the Beats. Given
this scope, I will not wade very deeply into the intricacies of Bengali
poetry or the factional rivalries on the local Calcutta literary
scene—which would of course be required to more fully understand the
poetic and aesthetic interventions of the Hungryalists—but will instead
investigate the version of the Hungry Generation presented in English in
City Lights Journal and other venues such as the “Hungry!” issue of Salted Feathers (1967), edited by Dick Bakken (Bakken 1967), and the “Poetry of India” issue of Intrepid (1968), guest edited by Carl Weissner (Weissner 1968a).
There
is a paucity of critical work on the Hungryalists available in English,
but that which does exist tends to cast their importance in terms of
rebellion and iconoclasm.6 In his introduction to the 1968 issue of Intrepid
he guest edited, for example, German writer and Beat associate Carl
Weissner announced that the Hungryalists “have established themselves as
the largest & most remarkable avantgarde element in the country.”7
More recently, Aditya Misra has called the Hungry Generation “the first
avant-garde uprising against modern Bengali poetry which believed in
giving the decaying Indian civilization a mortal blow,” and Bhaswati
Bhattacharya underscores that the movement’s “goal” was “to examine the
extent to which it could subvert the existing literary and social
norms.”8
Reflecting on her interviews with Samir Roy Choudhury, Malay Roy
Choudhury’s elder brother and original Hungryalist, Maitreyee B.
Chowdhury argues that the movement
gave a new vocabulary to Bengali literature, taught new reading habits and made the stench of the road, among other such ‘un-poetic’ things, poetic … the movement became an expression for those frustrated with the culture and ethics of those times … the Hungryalists perhaps spoke for an entire city affected by post-Partition poverty politics. New conversations and a new language became the need of the day—a language that would cast aside elitist aspirations and speak of angst, instead.9
This
critical language of subversion and newness, of anti-civilization
stances and “post-Partition poverty politics,” suggests the degree to
which the Hungry Generation was a literary, social, and political
movement rolled into one, and as such was characterized by uncertain
distinctions between aesthetic interventions and political statements.
As Weissner put it in 1968, “the HG poets, most of them anyway, are as
much political agitators as they are poetic discoverers.”10
In
later years, in fact, Malay Roy Choudhury pinpointed the genesis of the
movement not to the writing or publication of a poem, but to the
manifesto about poetry Ferlinghetti would eventually print in City Lights Journal:
“The Hungry Generation literary movement was launched by me in November
1961 with the publication of a manifesto on poetry in English.”11
According to Choudhury, then, the Hungryalists were “launched” into
public visibility via their manifestos, which were printed on broadsides
and distributed throughout Calcutta and Patna. Indeed, although
Choudhury is widely credited as the founder of the Hungryalists, it was a
pointedly social and communal enterprise, and he accordingly insisted
that it is recognizable as a “generation” or movement because it sprang
not from him alone, but from a coterie of four poets: the Choudhury
brothers, Debi Rai, and Shakti Chattopadhyay. There were many other
writers and artists who came to be associated with the Hungry
Generation, and while I do touch on some in the course of this essay,
I’ll concentrate primarily on Choudhury and others who were most visible
in the States.
In connection with their poetry
and manifestos, the Hungryalists became notorious in Calcutta in the
early 1960s for their public acts of protest. As one later observer
explains, for example, “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.’”12
Such antics became increasingly irritating to municipal authorities,
and tensions came to a head on 2 September 1964, when eleven writers who
had appeared in a Bengali-language book titled Hungry Generation
were arrested and charged with “criminal conspiracy to bring out the
aforesaid obscene publication,” which, the complaint read, would
“corrupt the minds of the common reader.”13
Malay Roy Choudhury, Samir Roy Choudhury, and Debi Rai were among the
eleven arrested; Shakti Chattopadhyay, the fourth original Hungryalist,
had also published in Hungry Generation,
but had managed to avoid arrest by agreeing to testify against Malay
Roy Choudhury at his obscenity trial. Chattopadhyay claimed that despite
his appearance in Hungry Generation,
“I had no relationship with so called Hungry Generation and this book
was not published by me.” He went on to allege that Choudhury’s writing
in particular represented “mental pervertion [sic] and [the] language is
vulgar,” and then “strongly condemned” Choudhury’s contribution to Hungry Generation, a febrile, sexually-explicit poem called “Prachanda Baidyutik Chhutar” or “Stark Electric Jesus.”14
Eventually, the charges against the ten other writers were dropped, but
Choudhury, as reputed founder of the Hungryalists, was forced to stand
trial for obscenity.
The ensuing trial is
broadly analogous to an earlier moment in Beat history, when in 1957
Ferlinghetti and bookseller Shig Murao were charged with obscenity for
distributing Howl and Other Poems.15
Although “Howl” was finally determined to have literary merit, “Stark
Electric Jesus” was found obscene and Choudhury was fined roughly two
months’ salary, fired from his civil service job, and the poem was
banned and extant copies ordered destroyed.16
The immediate, material aftermath of the decision was thus dire for
Choudhury, but as the “Howl” trial did for Ginsberg, the public battle
over “Stark Electric Jesus” propelled him into a new realm of renown
because he came to epitomize the right to free expression in the face of
government censorship. In rendering his verdict, A.K. Mitra, Presidency
Magistrate of the 9th Court of Calcutta, concluded that “Stark Electric
Jesus” was “per se obscene” as “it starts with restless impatience of
sensuous man for a woman obsessed with uncontrollable urge for sexual
intercourse followed by a description of vagina, uterus, clitoris,
seminal fluid, and other parts of the female body and organ, boasting of
the man’s innate impulse and conscious skill as how to enjoy a woman,
blaspheming God and profaning parents accusing them of homosexuality and
masturbation, debasing all that is noble and beautiful in human love
and relationship.”17
Choudhury’s trial became a minor cause célèbre in avant-garde circles
in India, the States, and beyond, and thus stands as perhaps the
landmark moment in the history of the Hungry Generation, even as
Chattopadhyay’s testimony against Choudhury symbolized the dissolution
of the original coterie.18
After
Choudhury’s arrest, he and the Hungryalists became the latest example
of writers and publishers around the world who had been subject to legal
action by backward-looking authorities, and Choudhury received letters
of support from a wide spectrum of fellow writers, from Daisy Aldan
(editor of the poetry magazines Folder and New Folder)
and poet Carol Bergé in New York to Margaret Randall and Octavio Paz in
Mexico City; Paz had in fact met some of the Hungryalists while
visiting Calcutta and been suitably impressed.19
However, while Choudhury’s obscenity trial served as a rallying-point
for sympathetic writers, even prior to this event the Hungry Generation
was being characterized as part of an international avant-garde, thanks
in no small part to Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti’s efforts.
In the first issue of City Lights Journal,
Ferlinghetti’s headnote described it as “a new international annual,”
and he announced in the second that its content “circles the world.”20
However much the journal favored eclecticism under the banner of the
avant-garde, it was also not above framing these international writers
in terms of Ferlinghetti’s favored literary provocateurs, the Beats. The
inaugural issue, for example, began not with Indian writing, but with
Ginsberg’s and Snyder’s writing about traveling through India. The cover
even featured a photograph of Ginsberg somewhere in the “Central
Himalayas,” wrapped in a blanket and staring frankly at the camera, his
hair whipped up in the wind. Readers were presented, in other words,
with the celebrated Beat poet in his newly adopted environment, the
implication being that while he may have been broadening his worldview
through travel, his mere presence also served to confer legitimacy on
the region and its writers.
As he had promised
to Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti printed “fragments of letters from … Allen
Ginsberg In India” in the first issue of his new journal. The excerpts
he selected emphasize the correspondences among what Ginsberg was
witnessing in India and his sense of the American underground: “the
common saddhu scene here is, feels like, just about the same as beat
scene in US—amazing to see the underlying universality of people’s
scenes.”21
Elsewhere Ginsberg describes a moment when “drunken saddhus came
up—just like mill valley [California] scene” (p. 8), and claims that
“all the hip rituals in US involving pot have been developed and
institutionalized here” (p. 8). Thus as he draws attention to what he
takes to be the more exotic aspects of his Indian experience, Ginsberg
also insists on the “universality” of subterraneans the world over. He
even calls saddhus “nothing but a bunch of gentle homeless on-the-road
teaheads” (p. 8), drawing a direct line from Hindu holy men to the most
famous novel of the Beat movement. (Following Ginsberg’s letters is Gary
Snyder’s “A Journey to Rishikesh & Hardwara,” a more conventional
piece of travel writing that describes yoga and meditation in various
ashrams Snyder visited with Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Kyger.22)
It
is only after these depictions of India through the eyes of sympathetic
Westerners does Ferlinghetti present an example of Indian writing, the
manifesto that had inspired him to create a new magazine in the first
place. Previously published in Calcutta as a broadside signed by some 25
poets and “written and translated from Bengali” by Malay Roy Choudhury,
the version in City Lights Journal accentuates the idea of a literary “Generation” by presenting a kind of poetic board of directors:
- Editor: Debi Rai Leader: Shakti Chattopadhyay
- Creator: Malay Roy Choudhury
- Howrah, India23
Framed
as it is by the impressions of India from Ginsberg and Snyder,
including Ginsberg’s mention of hanging out with Shakti Chattopadhyay
“of enclosed manifest” (p. 7), readers of City Lights Journal
could be forgiven for interpreting this manifesto as an Indian
counterpart to well-known Beat manifestos such as Jack Kerouac’s “Belief
& Technique in Modern Prose” or “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,”
both of which originally circulated in the little magazines Black Mountain Review and Evergreen Review,
respectively. The Hungry Generation manifesto announces that
traditional Bengali poetry is “cryptic, short-hand, … flattered by own
sensitivity like a public school prodigy,” and that, by contrast, the
Hungryalists 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 bubbling in an artificial muddle” (p. 24).
According to such a view, something called “the Hungry Generation” is
best clarified in terms of opposition: there is a “blankety-blank school
of modern poetry,” underwritten by the media—and, presumably, the
academy—that is stuck merely regurgitating tradition. In the context of City Lights Journal,
the details of this tradition are less important than the claim that it
is outmoded and “artificial”: what matters is that the Hungryalists
stand opposed to whatever is the
dominant strand in Bengali letters. Indeed, in other versions of the
manifesto, Choudhury insists that Hungry Generation writing seeks to
“convey the brutal sound of breaking values and startling tremors of the
rebellious soul of the artist himself, with words stripped of their
usual meanings and used contrapuntally. It must invent a new language,
which would incorporate everything at once, speak to all senses in one.”24
The shattering of values, the embracing of rebellion, the restless
search for “new language”; these are the features of the Hungry
Generation that would likewise be recognizable to readers of Beat
literature, thus providing a familiar template for seeing Calcutta as
the latest outpost in a worldwide literary movement.
Like
a teaser trailer for coming attractions, the manifesto announces a new
generation of Indian poets but is not accompanied by the work itself,
and readers of City Lights Journal
would have to wait until the next issue (1964) to encounter actual
poetry by these writers, in a special section called “A Few Bengali
Poets.” As in the first issue, these poets are framed by and filtered
through Ginsberg’s perspective insofar as he contributed a prefatory
statement explaining why the Journal’s
readers should care about these Bengali poets. First, he establishes a
familiar binary between staid traditional poetry and the freshness and
immediacy of the selected poets. Reminiscent of the ways Donald Allen’s
influential anthology The New American Poetry
(1960) had positioned the Beats and other writers of the “new poetry”
as sharing “a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic
verse,” Ginsberg sets the Hungryalists against their national and local
traditions.25
As T.S. Eliot came to embody for many Beats the “closed form” of
American academic poetry, Ginsberg figures Rabindranath Tagore,
Calcutta’s Nobel Prize-winning poet and literary giant, as the elder
icon to be smashed: “As a modern literary kelson he seems to be a big
bore; that is to say early XX century academic preoccupations in the
poetic field are so dominated by Tagore festivals, speeches,
recitations, criticisms that his work has become institutional and
apparently of little use … to the young.”26
Against this “academic” Tagore monolith, Ginsberg identifies another
strand of Bengali poetry associated with “‘the modern
spirit’—bitterness, self-doubt, sex, street diction, personal
confession, frankness, Calcutta beggars etc.” (p. 117). Substitute
“American hobos” for “Calcutta beggars” and this list would be a fair
approximation of much Beat poetry, at least in popular conception, and
in Ginsberg’s telling, the first thing one need know about the Hungry
Generation is that its writers attack tradition, that they are
iconoclasts invested in remaking language just as he and his circle had
done in the States. In fact, Ginsberg insists that the Bengali “poems
are interesting in that they do reveal a temper that is international,
i.e., the revolt of the personal. Warsaw Moscow San Francisco Calcutta,
the discovery of feeling” (p. 118).
Inasmuch as Ginsberg is gesturing toward the idea of an international
avant-garde by facilitating the publication of Bengali poets in City Lights Journal,
his particular framing also has a curiously leveling effect, such that
the Hungryalists are elevated mainly via their association with the
Beats, rendered significant as Indian brothers-in-arms in the “revolt of
the personal.”
Ginsberg’s notion of the
“personal” does not merely signal intimate, confessional energies, but
also underscores the importance of community, and the other thing he
wants American readers to know is that the Bengali poets are “excellent
drinking companions” (p. 117). Such a statement is not as flip as it may
seem at first blush because what Ginsberg is really doing is implying
that the Hungryalists can be viewed as part of an ever-expanding network
of poets who comprise a global literary underground. In this regard,
Jimmy Fazzino’s recent work on the “worlding” of Beat literature can
help us understand Ginsberg’s thinking here. Fazzino borrows the concept
of “networks” to describe the “expression[s] of felt solidarity and
mutual understanding” that the American Beats shared with others outside
national bounds, and in fact uses Ginsberg’s attraction to the Hungry
Generation as his book’s opening anecdote.27
Although Fazzino does not pursue the relationship among the Beats and
the Hungryalists beyond noting that both “would be censored … for their
literary licentiousness and antinomian views,” he does claim that the
relationship suggests that India was not for Ginsberg “timeless or
unchanging or utterly exotic … but vital and dynamic” (p. 1). Fazzino’s
work has been a useful corrective to the perception that Ginsberg and
other Beats were facilely orientalist in their thinking, and
demonstrates how the Beats could and did see international writers as
progenitors of a literary avant-garde and fomenters of social and
political dissent in the context of their own local and national
cultures.
For Ginsberg, emphasizing the social
spaces he shared with the Hungryalists served both to advertise his own
fluency with the local literary scene and to render this scene legible
in terms of a diffuse, international Beat sensibility. He notes, for
instance, that the Hungry Generation is a “big gang of friend poets [who
meet] in an upstairs coffee-house across the tramcar-bookstall street
from Calcutta University” (p. 118). These “friend poets” include the
likes of Sunil Ganguly and Shakti Chattopadhyay; Malay Roy Choudhury,
Ginsberg explains, “isn’t there with his friends, he lives in Patna way
up the Ganges” and “sits upstairs in his room and writes manifestos for
the ‘Hungry Generation’” (p. 119). As he did with his own circle of
friends, Ginsberg construes a whole Generation from the social bonds of a
small group, taking care to write himself and Orlovsky into this group,
as when he describes a drinking session with the Hungryalists, during
which they apparently begged Orlovsky to read and reread his irreverant
poem “Morris.”28
Ginsberg in fact insists on his own role in bringing Hungry Generation
poetry to Anglophone audiences: “The poems were translated into funny
english by the poets themselves & I spent a day with a pencil
reversing inversions of syntax & adding in railroad stations” (p.
118). Ginsberg, lodestar of the Beats, presents a Hungry Generation
mediated by his own guiding hand: not only is he a drinking companion,
but their editor, agent, and publisher, and so figures himself as the
embodied link between otherwise far-flung literary movements.
The
poems that Ginsberg rendered into less “funny english” do seem to bear
traces of the Beat sensibility; the particular work collected in City Lights Journal
2 is Sunil Gangopadhyay’s “Age Twenty Eight” and “Interruption”; Sarat
Kumar Mukherjee’s “Toward Darkness” and “The Lion in a Zoo”; Sankar
Chattopadhaya’s “Civilization Through Angry Eyes” and “Hateful
Intimacy”; and Malay Roy Choudhury’s “Drunk Poem” and “Short-Story
Manifesto” (in his preface, Ginsberg explains that Shakti Chattopadhyay,
“perhaps the finest poet” of the Hungryalists, was nevertheless “not
represented here because his poems are such elegant Bengali they’re too
hard to translate”).29
From its title alone, Gangopadhyay’s “Age Twenty Eight” may remind Beat
aficionados of Gregory Corso’s “I am 25”, a poem that announces his
“love a madness” for the famously youthful poets Shelley, Chatterton,
and Rimbaud, declaring: “I HATE OLD POETMEN!”30
Like Corso, Gangopadhyay asserts his love of language, but is by age 28
haunted by “dead friends” and surrounded by “married women,” suggesting
that his coevals have passed into adulthood while he clings to the
youthful idealism of the written word, piercing “a hornet’s nest with my
pen.”31
Insofar as “Age Twenty Eight” rails against those friends who have
chosen convention, retreating to their “new-bought bed sheet” and hiding
“their faces in / domestic dryness” (p. 121), the poem amounts to a
critique of bourgeois domesticity that would seem familiar to those
white, middle-class Americans worried about the creeping conformity of
the long 1950s. In fact, in an essay about the Hungry Generation by Debi
Rai and others, the authors leveled similar observations that could
have been torn from the pages of classic studies of American conformist
culture like William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) or C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite
(1956): “Cultural patterns are crowded by a system of mass production
and mass communication in which we all become like one another, speaking
the same slang, wearing the same clothes, reading the same magazines.
But instead of creating a sense of community, this only creates a crowd
of faceless and anonymous men” (p. 169). Thus the “hidden … faces” of
Gangopadhyay’s domesticated men resonate with the “faceless and
anonymous men” against which the Hungry Generation statement positioned
itself, underscoring that the oppositional structure described above was
instrumental to both the poetry and prose manifestoes of the
movement—or at least to the work chosen for inclusion in City Lights Journal.32
The work by Gangopadhyay and others notwithstanding, it is clear that City Lights Journal
was positioning Choudhury as the preeminent Hungry Generation writer
even prior to the obscenity trial that would later solidify his
countercultural legitimacy. Choudhury’s “Drunk Poem” may be read as a
Hungryalist expression of what Steven Watson sees as a defining feature
of Beat literature: “The artist’s consciousness is expanded through
nonrational means: derangement of the senses, via drugs, dreams,
hallucinatory states, and visions.”33
A note appended to “Drunk Poem” informs readers that it was “scribbled”
after “taking a peg of ‘mamushi,’ … an interesting wine made with the
help of snake venom” (p. 128), and the poem begins by hailing the reader
then immediately deploying unusual word combinations that betoken a
confused sensorium, perhaps akin to what happens in a state of
drunkenness: “Ahoy!/Gymtwist spangles of shockboom music.”34
Choudhury approximates sense derangement with the kinetic energy of
“gymtwist” paired with a visual noun (“spangles”) that is then connected
to the auditory (“shockboom music”). These opening lines introduce
readers to the poem’s basic method, to juxtapose that which is generally
seen as dissimilar; as Choudhury asserted in another manifesto, “The
Aims of the Hungry Generation Poets,” he wanted to “break the
traditional association of words and to coin unconventional and
heretofore unaccepted combinations of words.”35
While “Drunk Poem” begins with the individuated body, it quickly links the body and its senses to larger political concerns:
- Supersonic bombers of totalitarian peace
- hiss inside the adult stew
- and the adults
- Sell their hipholes
- to social sadders
- for rhymeless chunks of Rupee $ £
(p. 126)
The oxymoronic phrase “bombers of totalitarian peace” figures the West as a neoimperial power residing inside
“adults,” rather than vice versa. In other words, rather than depicting
adulthood as mere resignation to bourgeois normality, as in “Age Twenty
Eight,” Choudhury sees existence in the “adult stew” as being infected
by Cold War imperatives that cannot be escaped, signaled in this case by
“supersonic bombers” and elsewhere in the poem by “the deathskirts of
U235” (p. 127), the uranium isotope used in the atomic bomb dropped on
Hiroshima. And as attested by the rapid-fire catalogue of “Rupee $
£,” the autonomy of nation states is compromised by the reach of
capitalism, so the differentiation of national currencies becomes
irrelevant in a world in which even hipness is for sale. In a
purposively disorienting poem, such lines suggest that the true object
of attack is figurations of “civilization,” which Choudhury had declared
treacherous in the opening sentence of “The Hungryalist Manifesto on
Poetry”: “Poetry is no more a civilizing manoeuvre, 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” (p. 24).
“Drunk Poem” does not merely exemplify the speaker’s deranged senses,
then, but does so to derange civilization itself by attacking markers of
cultural, religious, and political authority, from “naked Shiva” to
“bureaucracy” to the “Pax Romana upon the windmill” (pp. 126–27). If the
poem represents an anti-civilizing maneuver, then these and other
examples are stripped of their context and authority such that the only
course of action is to drunkenly and violently tear down anything
smelling of establishment and tradition; the poem concludes:
- Pardon the sinner
- but
- MURDER
- the criminal.
(p. 128)
“Drunk
Poem” is a good representation of the outré, antiestablishment,
anti-civilization pose that the Hungryalists cultivated, a pose that was
codified in the States when they were presented with perhaps the
greatest gift a countercultural movement could be given: withering
coverage in the reliably conservative, middle-of-the-road Time magazine. In November 1964, two months after the obscenity charges were brought, Time
claimed the Hungryalists as an upstart movement overly imitative of the
Beats: “Born in 1962, with an inspirational assist from visiting U.S.
Beatnik Allen Ginsberg, Calcutta’s Hungry Generation is a growing band
of young Bengalis with tigers in their tanks. Somewhat unoriginally they
insist that only in immediate physical pleasure do they find any
meaning in life, and they blame modern society for their emptiness.”36
Unsurprisingly, Time
collapses Ginsberg’s instrumentality in introducing the Hungryalists to
Western readers with his inspiring their very existence, but the mere
act of reporting on the “growing band” as a movement heightened their
visibility in the States. The association with the Beats via Ginsberg
was one that stuck, not merely because of Time,
but also because of statements by Ginsberg, Choudhury, and the Indian
press.
In 1965, American scholar and poet Howard McCord, then at
Washington State University, became interested in the Hungryalists and
traveled to India to meet with Choudhury and others. That same year, he
published an English edition of “Stark Electric Jesus” with the aim of
raising money for Choudhury’s legal expenses, and his Afterword argues
that however supportive Ginsberg was to the Hungryalists, it would be
inaccurate to say he inspired them:
“The Indian press believes to this day that the group’s origins can be
traced to the 1962 Indian visit of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and
Gary and Jeanne [sic] Snyder. But however stimulating the visit of these
American poets … I believe the movement is autochthonous and stems from
the profound dislocation of Indian life.”37
The very fact that McCord felt obliged to claim the Hungryalists as
autochthonous suggests how they had already become entangled with the
Beats by 1965.
The third issue of City Lights Journal
(1966) again enacted such entanglements as its section on Indian poetry
contained a single poem, “Stark Electric Jesus,” flanked by an expanded
version of McCord’s Afterword titled “Note on the Hungry Generation,”
and another seven-page statement by Debi Rai and others simply called
“Hungry Generation.” By City Lights Journal
3, then, the “Few Bengali Poets” of issue two had been congealed into a
“Generation,” so despite the protestations to the contrary, it was
clear that these writers were being advertised in ways broadly
comparable to the Beat Generation. Nevertheless, in his prefatory note,
McCord again insists that the Hungryalists did not materialize as a
group because of Ginsberg’s influence, but he does accede that “[t]here
was little notice of the group in the West until 1963, when City Lights
Journal No. 1 carried news of them.”38
He goes on to characterize the Hungry Generation’s importance in terms
of their on-going refusals to be bullied by the authorities: “In spite
of prosecution and harassment, Malay Roy [Choudhury] has published two
more long poems, ‘Jakham,’ (The Wound), and ‘Aamar Amimangshita Shubha,’
and other members of the Hungry Generation have continued to irritate
the authorities with their work” (p. 160). Thus, while insisting on the
Hungry Generation’s distinction from the Beats, McCord relies on the
Beats’ most visible feature, their rebuke of authority, to argue for
their importance.
McCord’s insistence that the
Hungryalists are best seen in light of their antiestablishment posture
is echoed in the other essay accompanying Choudhury’s poem. Like McCord,
Rai and his co-authors contrast their efforts to what they call “The
Establishment” while taking care to distinguish themselves from the
Beats. The latter can be somewhat tricky as the authors rely on
explicitly hip language to make their case, as when they open by
declaring “Modern Bengali writing” is “a lump of academic bullshit” or
when they claim a younger generation is “digging” Choudhury.39
Fans of “Howl” might hear shades of the memorable phrase “boatload of
sensitive bullshit” or even of Moloch, Ginsberg’s catch-all embodiment
of normative culture, in the Hungryalists’ attack on the “manicured
robot hand of the Establishment” (p. 164).40 Even so, the authors go out of their way to distance themselves from the Beats:
Hunger describes a state of existence from which all unessentials have been stripped, leaving it receptive to everything around it. Hunger is a state of waiting with pain. To be hungry is to be at the bottom of your personality, looking up to be existential in the Kierkegaard, rather than the Jean-Paul Sartre sense. The Hungries can’t afford the luxury of being Beats, ours isn’t an affluent society. The single similarity that a Beat has with a Hungry is in their revolt of the personal. … The nonconformity of the Hungries is irrevocable.(p. 166)
While
this sounds a lot like Ginsberg’s later characterization of Beatness as
“at the bottom of the world, looking up … rejected by society,” the
Hungryalists force City Lights Journal
readers to stretch their notions of dominant culture versus
counterculture beyond the confines of the United States. This move
reminds American readers that the Beats were far more privileged than
their Hungryalist counterparts, a fact indexed by the Beats’ very
mobility.41
Thus although the Hungryalists rely on some of the same terms Ginsberg
and others used to describe the Beats, even borrowing his phrase “revolt
of the personal” from his preface to the Hungryalist work presented in City Lights Journal
1, Rai and his co-authors figure themselves as more downtrodden or
“beat” than the Beats themselves, for “hunger” can never be a mere pose,
but is rather an urgent, all-consuming fact that is therefore
“irrevocable”.
These prose descriptions are
valuable complements to the lone poem included in the issue, Choudhury’s
“Stark Electric Jesus.” The poem was of course notorious by the time it
was printed in City Lights Journal,
but despite the opinion of the 9th Court of Calcutta, it does not read
as particularly obscene, especially by contemporary standards. The poem
is a dynamic paean to lust that, like “Drunk Poem”, figures the body as
something enigmatic that must be investigated. The poem opens with the
speaker’s skin in a “blazing furore” of desire as he declares “I can’t
resist anymore, million glass-panes are breaking in my cortex.”42
This is the “revolt of the personal” identified by Ginsberg and Rai, et
al.
Choudhury is giving himself permission to articulate feelings he
himself does not understand as a route to actuating his embodied
existence. The first stanza concludes: “I do not know what these
happenings are but they are occurring within me,” and the poem takes
readers through a catalogue of the speaker’s sexual desires that might
be achieved were he able to “destroy and shatter” his previous notions
about himself and his body (p. 161). Taken as a statement of Choudhury’s
poetics, “Stark Electric Jesus” insists that just as the lover must
attend even to those bodily impulses he cannot understand, the poet must
find a way to let his body speak through language: “I’ll split all into
pieces for the sake of art / There isn’t any way out for Poetry except
suicide” (p. 163). With this final turn of the poem, Choudhury
analogizes the true lover’s experience of bodily defamiliarization with
the true poet’s need to manifest bodily experience in writing, the very
premise of using the word “hunger” to name his generation. Indeed, in
the poem’s final lines, the speaker says that “Millions of needles are
now running from my blood into Poetry,” into “the hypnotic kingdom of
words” (p. 163), such that his body and his poetry are collapsed into
one organic being. It is this sense of poetry as something embodied that
“Stark Electric Jesus” really argues for, and what has made it a
powerful testament to the poetics of the Hungry Generation. Indeed,
although the Hungry Generation may have lasted only a few years, “Stark
Electric Jesus” has remained one of Choudhury’s better-known poems (for
instance, it inspired a short film in 2014), even as he has gone on to
have a very prolific career writing poetry, drama, and non-fiction in
English and Bengali.43
With
respect to the connections among the Hungryalists and the Beats, I
think that Choudhury’s yoking of the body and poetic utterance offers a
suggestive way to understand the shifts in Ginsberg’s own poetics after
he returned from India. As is well-known, Ginsberg became a prominent
political activist in the 1960s while simultaneously developing a
pointedly embodied poetics; as Tony Triligio has put it, “Ginsberg’s
return to the body is not simply a renewal of sensory experience;
instead, it claims the body as both product and producer of political
experience.”44
While I will sidestep questions of who precisely influenced whom, I do
see Ginsberg’s use of his own body to blur distinctions among poetry and
political activism as roughly analogous to what Choudhury and the
Hungry Generation were doing in India. Ginsberg himself signals some of
these associations even as he does not explicitly name them. For
example, in an interview that appeared in City Lights Journal
2 immediately following Choudhury’s “Drunk Poem” and “Short-Story
Manifesto,” Ginsberg discussed his turn to political activism by linking
it to his experiences in India. Ernie Barry interviewed Ginsberg right
after a demonstration against repressive government leadership in
Vietnam, and when Barry asked: “What other political demonstrations have
you been involved in?” Ginsberg replied: “None. This is the first time
I’ve taken a political stand.”45 When Barry pressed him on this “new policy,” Ginsberg directed him to his protest sign, a poem which read, in part:
- ‘Oh how wounded, how wounded!’ says the guru
- Thine own heart says the swami
- […]
- War is black magic
- Belly flowers to North and South Vietnam
- include everybody
- End the human war
- Name hypnosis and fear is the
- Enemy-Satan go home!
- I accept America and Red China
- To the human race
- Madame Nhu and Mao Tse-Tung
- Are in the same boat of meat
(p. 132)
This
poem is notable for a few reasons, not the least of which is that it
marks Ginsberg’s foray into taking a “political stand.” It also abandons
the distinction between poetry and protest via the moral authority of
the gurus and swamis he met in India. The quoted phrase, “‘Oh how
wounded, how wounded!’,” was in fact important enough to Ginsberg that
he would repeat it in later work, including the dedication to Indian Journals,
which names its source, a “conversation on bamboo platform in Ganges
with Dehorava Baba who spake ‘Oh how wounded, how wounded!’ after I
fought with Peter Orlovsky,” and in what is perhaps his greatest antiwar
poem, “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” in which he again refers to “Dehorhava
Baba who moans Oh how wounded, How wounded.”46
With this poem on a protest sign, then, Ginsberg identifies the origins
of his interest in politics as a conversation with celebrated yogi
Devraha Baba, and the protest-poem is itself the germ of “Wichita Vortex
Sutra”, a long poem in which Ginsberg calls on his own body to declare
the end of the Vietnam War.
“Wichita Vortex
Sutra,” written in 1966 at the height of Ginsberg’s fame as a
poet-protester, is built around the notion that the Vietnam War is
“Black Magic Language,” an idea imported from his very first
poem-protest sign, which announced “War is black magic,” lines written
just five months after he left India. “Wichita Vortex Sutra” develops
this idea:
- The war is language,
- language abused
- for Advertisement,
- language used
- like magic for power on the planet:
- Black Magic language,
- formulas for reality
(p. 119)
This
is a poem that banishes all distinctions between poetry and political
protest, that understands the war as underwritten by the “Black Magic
language” of politicians, military leaders, and the media, all of whom
retreat into euphemism and vagueness in order to defend and justify
actions Ginsberg considers indefensible. In a moment that might seem to
echo the Hungryalists mailing paper masks to politicians and others,
“Wichita Vortex Sutra” asks “Have we seen but paper faces, Life
Magazine?” (p. 118), the implication in both cases being that those
practitioners of “Black Magic Language” are hiding their real selves
behind masks (in his interview with Barry, Ginsberg had observed that
“everyone wants to feel, and wants to feel loved and to love, so there’s
inevitable Hope beneath every grim mask [p. 137]). In “Wichita Vortex
Sutra,” Ginsberg’s answer to the masked mendacity of language abusers is
to collapse poetic utterance and political act so completely that his
own embodied voice is given the incredible power to declare the war’s
end.
As he readies himself for this imaginative
act, Ginsberg again calls on those same swamis and gurus from the
earlier protest-poem:
- I call all Powers of imagination
- to my side in this auto to make Prophecy,
- all Lords
- of human kingdoms to come
- Shambu Bharti Baba naked covered with ash
- Khaki Baba fat-bellied mad with the dogs
- Dehorhava Baba who moans Oh how wounded, How wounded
(p. 127)
This
catalogue continues on for some time, and grows to encompass not only
these compassionate souls he encountered in India but also figures like
Christ, Allah, and Jaweh, so that he will claim to counter “Black Magic
language” by tapping into positive energies of the world’s religions, a
universalist gesture that Choudhury, for one, has linked to their time
together in India. Choudhury has remarked, for instance, that “I can’t
claim that I contributed to [Ginsberg’s] thinking, though, perhaps in
changing the notion that there can not be only one God; there has to be
innumerable gods for innumerable human spreads out in order to be
eclectic, tolerant and resilient.”47
In his 1963 protest poem, as well as in “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” figures
like Dehorhava Baba and Shambu Bharti Baba (whose photograph,
incidentally, appears in Indian Journals)
were routes toward the eclectic tolerance Choudhury describes. It is
only after Ginsberg names these figures that he can muster the “right
magic” to counter the black magicians’ “formulas for reality”:
- I lift my voice aloud,
- make Mantra of American language now,
- I here declare the end of the War!
- […]
- Let the States tremble,
- let the Nation weep,
- let Congress legislate its own delight
- let the President execute his own desire—
- this Act done by my own voice,
- […]
- The War is gone,
- Language emerging on the motel news stand,
- the right magic
- Formula, the language that was known
- in the back mind before, now in the black print
- of daily consciousness
(pp. 127–29)48
These
lines have been subject to a fair amount of critical commentary, but I
would point out that they are premised on a collapse of the realms of
poetry and political action that are reminiscent of the ways the
Hungryalists saw poetry and manifesto as two sides of the same coin.49
Ginsberg insists that the embodied nature of his language—“my voice …
this Act done by my own voice”—can in and of itself effectuate actual
political change. This is a “revolt of the personal” that reverses the
mandates of “civilization” and its proxies to invest superhuman power in
a single individual, Allen Ginsberg the embodied speaker whose
utterance is political intervention.
Just as the Hungryalists marshaled defiant theatricality as they
circulated manifestos and demotic poetry that were political as much as
aesthetic statements, Ginsberg’s theatrical declaration of the war’s end
is politically effective insofar as it rebukes the very terms of the
“Black Magic language” that had led to the Vietnam War in the first
place. This moment in “Wichita Vortex Sutra” is in fact one among many
examples of Ginsberg’s sixties-era poems and protests that fused
aesthetics and politics, the embodied poet and the embodied protester.
He articulated such a fusion in a piece published in the Berkeley Barb
in 1965, in which he couched political protest as “spectacle,” using
the same language of declaration found in “Wichita Vortex Sutra”: “Open
declarations, ‘We aren’t coming out to fight and we simply will not
fight.’ We have come to use imagination.
A spectacle can be made, an unmistakable statement OUTSIDE the war
psychology which is leading nowhere. Such statement would be heard
around the world with relief.”50
Here Ginsberg is recommending strategies for actual political protests,
which, he argues, must exploit “imagination” to be effective; otherwise
put, he urges tactics that would seem nonsensical to the “war
psychology,” but that would paradoxically be effective precisely for the
ways they expose broader cultural and political ideologies that have
become so widespread as to seem reality itself. Ginsberg’s political
intervention is to reset the terms of reality via the imagination.
While
we can finally only remain suggestive as to questions of influence, I
do think it is fair to say that the Beats and the Hungryalists were
mutually generative literary and cultural movements. This is perhaps
most evident in the material history of how the Hungryalists were
circulated and packaged to Anglophone readers as a “generation” not
unlike the Beats. But there is also a deeper argument to be made about
how these movements came to perceive the relationship between poetry and
politics.
I do not think it is incidental that in the Berkeley Barb
piece quoted above, Ginsberg insists that the use of imaginative
spectacle in political protest “would be heard around the world with
relief,” for this underscores his post-India interest in cultivating
political solidarities beyond national borders. When thinking about the
Beat movement, then, readers and critics must be attentive to the
particularities regarding how U.S.-based writers read and interacted
with the work of global writers, and vice versa, which helps us
understand the profusion of texts produced in the context of an
international avant-garde. And as attested by the various connections
among the Beats and the Hungryalists traced throughout this essay, there
is need for further work that acknowledges these continuities while
still attending to the particularities of the writers understood as
associated with these movements.
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- Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Allen Ginsberg (2015, p. 166). (15 November 1962), in I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955–1997, ed. Bill Morgan (San Francisco: City Lights Books).
- City Lights Journal 4 was not published until 1978.
- Malay Roy Choudhury (1964b) to El Corno Emplumado (9 August 1963), El Corno Emplumado 9 (January 1964), p. 153. In later years, Choudhury would reverse these terms by arguing that the Hungryalists had a profound though largely unacknowledged impact on Ginsberg and his work; see Malay Roy Choudhury (2009), “Impact of Hungry Generation (Hungryalist) Literary Movement on Allen Ginsberg,” www.sciy.org/?p=6127.
- To my knowledge, no comprehensive, English-language study of the Hungry Generation exists. In fact, there is a surprising lack of work on the Beats and India in general; even the recent, otherwise thorough Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature, ed. A. Robert Lee (2018), which has chapters on Beat-associated literature from Australia to China, lacks a chapter on India. Deborah Baker’s (2008) A Blue Hand: The Beats in India (New York: Penguin) is the clear exception insofar as it is a lively account of the American Beats in India, but some critics have questioned the book’s accuracy with regard to its brief discussions of the Hungryalists (see pp. 154–59, 177–78, 194–99, 216–20); Maitreyee B. Chowdhury (2016), for example, calls it “a somewhat fictionalized account of Allen’s stay and influences from India” (“Talking Poetry”). See also Café Dissensus 26 (special issue on “The Beat and the Hungry Generation: When Losing Became Hip”), ed. Brahmachari and Kumar (2016), https://cafedissensus.com/2016/06/16/contents-the-beat-and-the-hungry-generation-when-losing-became-hip-issue-26/. In addition to this special issue (only some of which actually deals with Beat–Hungryalist connections), fans of the Hungry Generation do actively post brief essays, interviews, and other material about the movement online, and while I refer to some of these sites in this essay, note that they can be laced with misinformation and are often colored by the idiosyncratic memories or biases of the compilers. Although it is somewhat difficult to locate, the best English language collection of Hungry Generation material—including poetry, manifestos, letters, and legal documents pertaining to the 1964 arrests and subsequent trials—remains the “Hungry!” issue of Salted Feathers 4.1–2 (March 1967). Readers of Bengali may also consult Saileswar Ghosh (1995), Hungry Generation Andoloan [The Hungry Generation Movement] (Kolkata: Pratibhas).
- Carl Weissner (1968b), “introduction,” Intrepid 10 (“Poetry of India” issue) (Weissner 1968b), n.p.
- Aditya Misra (2016), “‘I can but why should I Go?’: The Romance of Opposition in Shakti Chattopadhaya’s Poetry,” South Asian Review 37.2, p. 181; and Bhaswati Bhattacharya (2017), Much Ado Over Coffee: Indian Coffee House Then and Now (New Delhi: Social Science Press), p. 196.
- Maitreyee B. Chowdhury (2016), “Talking Poetry, Ginsberg and the Hungryalists: Samir Roychoudhury, a Retrospective,” Café Dissensus 26 (special issue on “The Beat and the Hungry Generation: When Losing Became Hip” (16 June 2016). https://cafedissensus.com/2016/06/16/talking-poetry-ginsberg-and-the-hungryalists-samir-roychoudhury-a-retrospective/.
- Malay Roy Choudhury (2009), “Impact of the Hungry Generation (Hungryalist) Literary Movement on Allen Ginsberg,” www.sciy.org/?=6127.
- Nayanima Basu (2011), “A Sour Time of Putrefaction,” Business Standard (December 10), https://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/-a-sour-time-of-putrefaction-111121000058_1.html
- The Complaint against the ‘Hungry Generation’ (1967), reprinted in Salted Feathers 4.1–2 (“Hungry!” issue) (March 1967), n.p.
- Malay Roy Choudhury’s Prosecution (1967), reprinted in Salted Feathers 4.1–2 (“Hungry!” issue) (March 1967), n.p.
- See Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression, ed. Morgan and Peters (2006).
- Howard McCord (1966), “Note on the Hungry Generation,” City Lights Journal 3 (1966), p. 159.
- The Verdict Against Malay Roy Choudhury (1967), reprinted in Salted Feathers 4.1–2 (“Hungry!” issue) (March 1967), n.p.
- Malay Roy Choudhury (2015), “The Sunflower Collective Interview with Malay Roy Choudhury” (10 November), malayinterview.wordpress.com/category/hungry-generation.
- The letters to Choudhury from Aldan, Bergé, Randall, and Paz—along with others, a total of 21—are collected in Letters/Letters, ed. Tridib Mitra (1968). Mitra, another Hungryalist writer, explains that the selection is “idiosyncratic,” that he pulled from “thousands of letters dumped in a trunk” and collected “letters from those persons only whom I’ve heard of and am damn fascinated for” (n.p). Mitra and his wife Alo Mitra edited two little magazines associated with the Hungry Generation, Waste Paper (English) and Unmarga (Bengali).
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1963), “City Lights Journal,” City Lights Journal 1 (1963), p. 4; and Ferlinghetti (1964), “City Lights Journal: Number Two,” City Lights Journal 2 (1964), p. 5.
- Allen Ginsberg (1963), “In India,” City Lights Journal 1 (1963), p. 9. The excerpts come from a series of letters Ginsberg had written to Ferlinghetti on 2 November 1962, 15 November 1962, and 10 January 1963.
- “Weekly Manifesto of the Hungry Generation,” City Lights Journal 1 (Choudhury 1963), 24. Note that there are differing methods of transliterating Bengali names into English, and as such writers’ names are spelled variously across venues. I have changed the spelling of names in order to maintain consistency in the context of this essay (for instance, Shakti Chattopadhyay appeared in City Lights Journal as Shakti Chatterjee, and Malay Roy Choudhury as Malay Roy Choudhuri).
- Malay Roy Choudhury (1961), “The Hungryalist Manifesto on Poetry” (Calcutta: H. Dhara, no date), n.p. See also Choudhury (1968a), “The Aims of the Hungry Generation Poets,” Intrepid 10 (“Poetry of India” issue) (Choudhury 1968b), which counts among these aims “abolishing the accepted modes of prose and poetry” (n.p.).
- Donald Allen (1960), “Preface,” in The New American Poetry, ed. Allen (New York: Grove, 1960), p. xi.
- Allen Ginsberg (1964), “A Few Bengali Poets,” City Lights Journal 2 (1964), p. 117. See also Samir Roy Choudhury (1968c), “Tagore,” and Malay Roy Choudhury (1968d), “from Subimal Basak—Victim & Spirit,” both of which discuss Tagore and link him to what Maitreyee B. Chowdhury calls Calcutta’s “post-Partition poverty politics” (both pieces appear in Intrepid 10 [“Poetry of India” issue] [Choudhury 1968e], n.p.).
- Jimmy Fazzino (2016), World Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press), pp. 1, 33. For more on the rich connections among another key Beat writer and transnational poetics, see Hassan Melehy (2016), Kerouac: Language, Poetics, Territory (New York: Bloomsbury).
- See “Morris” in Peter Orlovsky (1978), Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs (San Francisco: City Lights), pp. 61–67.
- Ginsberg (1964), “A Few Bengali Poets,” p. 118. Note that from Malay Roy Choudhury’s perspective, Sunil Gangopadhyay ought not to be associated with the Hungryalists, but rather with the circle around the journal Krittibas, those whom Choudhury calls a “pro Establishment commercial renegade coterie whose machinations had led to the arrest and trial of the Hungryalists.” At the time he was gathering material for inclusion in City Lights Journal 1, such sectarian differences were opaque to Ginsberg, and Choudhury later recalled that “One thing which annoyed me at the time was that Ginsberg was unable to differentiate between the members of avant garde Hungryalist movement and the … commercially inclined pro-Establishment Krittibas group” (Malay Roy Choudhury (2009), “Impact of the Hungry Generation (Hungryalist) Literary Movement on Allen Ginsberg,” www.sciy.org/?=6127).
- Gregory Corso (1992), Gasoline (San Francisco: City Lights; Corso [1958] 1992), p. 42.
- Sunil Gangopadhyay (1964), “Age Twenty Eight,” City Lights Journal 2 (1964), p. 120.
- See also Sankar Chattopadhaya’s “Civilization Through Angry Eyes,” which couches an anti-civilization stance in the concept of hunger: “In all the ravaged scenes, civilization gives birth to art, love / and hunger in a continuous process” (Chattopadhaya 1964, p. 124).
- Steven Watson (1995), The Birth of the Beat Generation (New York: Pantheon), p. 40.
- Malay Roy Choudhury (1964a), “Drunk Poem,” City Lights Journal 2 (1964), pp. 128, 126. Given that in August of 1962 Ginsberg had remarked to Ferlinghetti that he could not title his new manuscript “Tasty Scribbles” because he “used the word scribbles too oft in the book already,” it seems likely that he wrote the note appended to “Drunk Poem” (Ginsberg to Ferlinghetti [27 August 1962], I Greet, p. 157). Note that a very different “Drunk Poem” by Choudhury (1968c) appears in Intrepid 10 (“Poetry of India” special issue) (Choudhury 1968c), n.p.
- Malay Roy Choudhury (1968e), “The Aims of the Hungry Generation Poets,” reprinted in Intrepid 10 (“Poetry of India” issue) (Choudhury 1968e), n.p.
- The Hungry Generation (1964), Time 84.21 (20 November 1964), p. 46.
- Howard McCord (1965), “Afterword,” in Malay Roy Choudhury, Stark Electric Jesus (Pullman, WA: Tribal Press,), n.p. For more on McCord, see http://www.possibilityx.com/hm/bio.htm.
- Debi Rai, et al. “Hungry Generation,” City Lights Journal 3 (Rai et al. 1966), p. 164.
- Allen Ginsberg (1956), Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights), p. 22.
- Allen Ginsberg (1999), “Foreword,” The Beat Book: Writings from the Beat Generation, ed. Anne Waldman (Boston: Shambala, 1999), pp. xiv-xv.
- Malay Roy Choudhury (1966), “Stark Electric Jesus,” City Lights Journal 3 (1966), p. 161.
- See Stark Electric Jesus, dir. Hyash Tanmoy and Mrigankasekhar Ganguly (2014).
- Tony Triligio (2007), Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), p. 67.
- Ernie Barry (1964), “A Conversation with Allen Ginsberg,” City Lights Journal 2 (1964), p.131.
- Note some later work by Hungryalists employs similar language of declaration. For example, Malay Roy Choudhury (1968d) writes: “I declare AC [“Aamaar Chaabi” by Subhash Ghose] the first Bengali experiment to peel off the rusty anti-communicative bourgeois layers of Bengali language” (Choudhury, “On Subhash Ghose’s AAMAAR CHAABI,” Intrepid 10 (“Poetry of India” issue) (Choudhury 1968a), n.p.). Robin Datta’s (1968) poem “An Indictment” excoriates “America seeking peace with Starfighters & Napalms through/masskilling in the Mekong Delta” and includes the line “I Declare The End of God” (Intrepid 10, n.p.).
- See, for example, Triligio; Amy Hungerford (2010), Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press); and Alex Houen (2009), “‘Back! Back! Back! Central Mind-Machine Pentagon…’: Allen Ginsberg and the Vietnam War,” Cultural Politics 4.3, pp. 351–73.
- Allen Ginsberg (2000), “Demonstration or Spectacle as Example, As Communication; or How to Make a March/Spectacle,” in Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–1995, edited by Bill Morgan (New York: Perennial), p. 10.
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