‘The Hungryalists – The Poets who Sparked a Revolution’
Uma Chattopadhyay
Uma Chattopadhyay
THE HUNGRYALISTS – The Poets who Sparked a Revolution |
History | Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury |
Penguin, Dec 2018 | ISBN 978-0-670-09085-3 | pp 187 |
599
History | Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury |
Penguin, Dec 2018 | ISBN 978-0-670-09085-3 | pp 187 |
599
Rebuilding the journey of the Hungryalists
Looking back retrospectively on the early years of the sixties in the last century, the Bengalis today have fading impressions about the social as well as political turbulences of the time. We still have many unresolved questions about the phenomenon called the Hungry Generation that occurred around the same time. The Bengali poets at the helm of the Hungryalist movement came up with a perceptible reaction against what they considered exploitative, hierarchy-based and lopsided social systems they had found themselves thrust into. More than 50 years have gone since the dissolution of the Hungry Generation movement; sporadic efforts of reviewing its different angles continue.
In her book The Hungryalists: The Poets who Sparked a Revolution, Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury, a Bangalore-based poet and a writer, has made a comprehensive survey of the movement that combined the intensity of a ‘kabita andolan’ and the urge of bringing about a wider social change for a more realistic perspective of the contemporary situations. Generally, the Hungryalists discarded the ‘standards’ pre-set by the political and educational institutions and challenged the ideas of the colonial canons, only to return to the essentially stark instinct of expressing one’s desires.
One interesting aspect of the book is that the author here has drawn together the manifold complex strands of events that contributed both singly and concurrently to the genesis of Hungryalism, in a bid to re-discover the phenomenon from the perspective of the modern reader. Materials from the archived Hungryalist bulletins, manifestoes and clippings, along with personal interviews with the concerned poets still available, and an extensive research have formed the basis of this empirical study. The author does not only track the Hungryalists’ movement ‘chronologically and geographically’ (two words she has herself used in the ‘Introduction’). She tries to grasp their social thoughts and philosophies (inspired much from Stephen Spengler’s theory of non-centrality of culture), and touch the true emotions that constantly worked behind as motivation. It may be easier to just chronicle the progress of a revolution, but it is never easy to capture the strong emotive issues that prompted the revolution out of a seemingly ‘acceptable’ situation.
This is evident that different contemporary issues – menace of the Indo-Chinese conflict (1962), the political strategies of the incumbent Government adversely affecting the life of people, the pressing questions of dealing immigration and poverty, people’s shaken political beliefs and so on – prompted the Hungryalists’ anti-establishment stance and their complete disregard for the status quo. Then, sooner or later, other factors contributed. The movement that started as early as November 1961in Patna in the residence of the poet Malay Roychoudhury and his brother Samir Roychoudhury and raged till 1965, took on an added impetus as the representative American Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg came across the Hungryalists in Kolkata during his India tour (1963). The Beat and the Hungry mutually influenced each other as they both were subversive in their approach towards life and poetry, and they considered the existing demarcation between the crude and the decent as a social construct. Their choice of a bohemian existence, their preference for overtly sensual imageries, expressions and tabooed subjects in poetry introduced a new sub-culture.
The poets at the helm of the movement, the two Roychoudhury brothers, Binoy Mazumdar and Shakti Chattopadhyay, working together with Debi Roy, Utpal Kumar Basu, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Basudeb Dasgupata, Falguni Roy, Subhash Ghosh, Anil Karanjai, Saileshwar Ghosh, Subho Acharya and some other writers and artists, received both fervent support and scathing criticism from the fellow poets and thinkers. Shakti Chattopadhyay, a passionate participant of the early years, would later distance himself from the Hungryalist associations. Generally, position of the Krittibas poets including Sunil Gangopadhyay was understandably dubious, as they could not quite accept the Hungryalists’ insistence on profanity as instrumental in bringing about any radical social changes. Besides, the Hungryalists’ extreme ideas about intoxication and poetry or their adulation for Michael Madhusudan Dutta to be the only Bengali poetic icon raised many skeptical eyebrows. Nonchalantly enough, they would hold poetry-reading sessions in small local taverns or places like the cemetery of Dutta and send shoe-boxes and paper masks to critics for review. Their deliberate social transgressions and the modernist antics were left open to misinterpretations in their own time and they still are. The conformist denounced their approach as preposterous and ostentatious, their life and poetry ‘nihilistic’.
Maitreyee has unraveled the twisted threads knitted together and has not yet tried to wrap up –interpretation is ours. She makes it analytically clear that the Hungryalist movement began from a fierce political urge to break the pre-conceived creeds, caste, class and gender barriers, and it continued fervently with a growing participation of more and more poets from inside and outside Bengal. It soon ensured international attention and poets like Octavio Paz and David McCord extended support. Evidently, the Hungryalists’ persistent use of dialects culled from different subaltern and/or marginalized communities and their unhesitant use of ‘coarse’ expressions explained their attempts of building new post-colonial poetic idioms. However, a section of the contemporary literati including Abu Sayeed Ayub never found artistic sensibilities in Hungryalism. Consequently, the movement that had promised to bring about a counter-culture petered out in a span of four-five years, much like the Naxalbari andolan of the late sixties (in some sense its social successor).
Selected portions from the Hungryalist bulletins, manifestoes and lines from the poems aptly feature on the pages, making it easier for the reader today to construe the Hungryalists’ intentions, their life and frenzy, their love and predicament. Thanks to the author for incorporating a full English translation of Malay Roychoudhury’s poem ‘Prachanda Baidyutik Chhutar’, for this is one poem that may alone represent the Hungryalist literary culture, however strong condemnation it faced in its time. If we keep aside its assumed ‘profanity’, the poem voices self-doubts, righteous anger and a fiercely passionate urge to break the stereotypes in its core.
The author has sensitively worked out the atmosphere that the Hungryalist movement generated in its trail: conflicting values, arguments and counter-arguments, visions and denials, support and withdrawal marked the literary scene of the time. Ultimately, the incumbent West Bengal Government issued arrest warrant (1965) for eleven of the Hungryalist poets in charge of ‘obscenity’ in their works. Trials followed and Malay had a short-term imprisonment for his poem ‘Stark Electric Jesus’. The movement dissolved in a background of dwindling support, divide among friends and the poets’ cluelessness; the emotional fervour paled.
Whether or not the Hungry Generation turned out to be an avant-garde cultural movement of wide influence, capable of breaking through the existing institutionalized ideals, is a question of value-judgment, and this author is objective throughout. And the idea of ‘profanity’ in itself is subjected to changes with time and social ethos of the community in question.
The non-linear narration of the historical account has taken on a fine flavour of fiction in the book.
The occasional letters of Tara adds to it a curious epistolary quality, while her travels across the far-away hills give a mystique air. With profundity and precision, Maitreyee has rebuilt the whole journey of the Hungryalists, with their myths and truths, love and angst, visions and vicissitudes, and has made one thing pre-eminently clear – the journey was arduous.
Looking back retrospectively on the early years of the sixties in the last century, the Bengalis today have fading impressions about the social as well as political turbulences of the time. We still have many unresolved questions about the phenomenon called the Hungry Generation that occurred around the same time. The Bengali poets at the helm of the Hungryalist movement came up with a perceptible reaction against what they considered exploitative, hierarchy-based and lopsided social systems they had found themselves thrust into. More than 50 years have gone since the dissolution of the Hungry Generation movement; sporadic efforts of reviewing its different angles continue.
In her book The Hungryalists: The Poets who Sparked a Revolution, Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury, a Bangalore-based poet and a writer, has made a comprehensive survey of the movement that combined the intensity of a ‘kabita andolan’ and the urge of bringing about a wider social change for a more realistic perspective of the contemporary situations. Generally, the Hungryalists discarded the ‘standards’ pre-set by the political and educational institutions and challenged the ideas of the colonial canons, only to return to the essentially stark instinct of expressing one’s desires.
One interesting aspect of the book is that the author here has drawn together the manifold complex strands of events that contributed both singly and concurrently to the genesis of Hungryalism, in a bid to re-discover the phenomenon from the perspective of the modern reader. Materials from the archived Hungryalist bulletins, manifestoes and clippings, along with personal interviews with the concerned poets still available, and an extensive research have formed the basis of this empirical study. The author does not only track the Hungryalists’ movement ‘chronologically and geographically’ (two words she has herself used in the ‘Introduction’). She tries to grasp their social thoughts and philosophies (inspired much from Stephen Spengler’s theory of non-centrality of culture), and touch the true emotions that constantly worked behind as motivation. It may be easier to just chronicle the progress of a revolution, but it is never easy to capture the strong emotive issues that prompted the revolution out of a seemingly ‘acceptable’ situation.
This is evident that different contemporary issues – menace of the Indo-Chinese conflict (1962), the political strategies of the incumbent Government adversely affecting the life of people, the pressing questions of dealing immigration and poverty, people’s shaken political beliefs and so on – prompted the Hungryalists’ anti-establishment stance and their complete disregard for the status quo. Then, sooner or later, other factors contributed. The movement that started as early as November 1961in Patna in the residence of the poet Malay Roychoudhury and his brother Samir Roychoudhury and raged till 1965, took on an added impetus as the representative American Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg came across the Hungryalists in Kolkata during his India tour (1963). The Beat and the Hungry mutually influenced each other as they both were subversive in their approach towards life and poetry, and they considered the existing demarcation between the crude and the decent as a social construct. Their choice of a bohemian existence, their preference for overtly sensual imageries, expressions and tabooed subjects in poetry introduced a new sub-culture.
The poets at the helm of the movement, the two Roychoudhury brothers, Binoy Mazumdar and Shakti Chattopadhyay, working together with Debi Roy, Utpal Kumar Basu, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Basudeb Dasgupata, Falguni Roy, Subhash Ghosh, Anil Karanjai, Saileshwar Ghosh, Subho Acharya and some other writers and artists, received both fervent support and scathing criticism from the fellow poets and thinkers. Shakti Chattopadhyay, a passionate participant of the early years, would later distance himself from the Hungryalist associations. Generally, position of the Krittibas poets including Sunil Gangopadhyay was understandably dubious, as they could not quite accept the Hungryalists’ insistence on profanity as instrumental in bringing about any radical social changes. Besides, the Hungryalists’ extreme ideas about intoxication and poetry or their adulation for Michael Madhusudan Dutta to be the only Bengali poetic icon raised many skeptical eyebrows. Nonchalantly enough, they would hold poetry-reading sessions in small local taverns or places like the cemetery of Dutta and send shoe-boxes and paper masks to critics for review. Their deliberate social transgressions and the modernist antics were left open to misinterpretations in their own time and they still are. The conformist denounced their approach as preposterous and ostentatious, their life and poetry ‘nihilistic’.
Maitreyee has unraveled the twisted threads knitted together and has not yet tried to wrap up –interpretation is ours. She makes it analytically clear that the Hungryalist movement began from a fierce political urge to break the pre-conceived creeds, caste, class and gender barriers, and it continued fervently with a growing participation of more and more poets from inside and outside Bengal. It soon ensured international attention and poets like Octavio Paz and David McCord extended support. Evidently, the Hungryalists’ persistent use of dialects culled from different subaltern and/or marginalized communities and their unhesitant use of ‘coarse’ expressions explained their attempts of building new post-colonial poetic idioms. However, a section of the contemporary literati including Abu Sayeed Ayub never found artistic sensibilities in Hungryalism. Consequently, the movement that had promised to bring about a counter-culture petered out in a span of four-five years, much like the Naxalbari andolan of the late sixties (in some sense its social successor).
Selected portions from the Hungryalist bulletins, manifestoes and lines from the poems aptly feature on the pages, making it easier for the reader today to construe the Hungryalists’ intentions, their life and frenzy, their love and predicament. Thanks to the author for incorporating a full English translation of Malay Roychoudhury’s poem ‘Prachanda Baidyutik Chhutar’, for this is one poem that may alone represent the Hungryalist literary culture, however strong condemnation it faced in its time. If we keep aside its assumed ‘profanity’, the poem voices self-doubts, righteous anger and a fiercely passionate urge to break the stereotypes in its core.
The author has sensitively worked out the atmosphere that the Hungryalist movement generated in its trail: conflicting values, arguments and counter-arguments, visions and denials, support and withdrawal marked the literary scene of the time. Ultimately, the incumbent West Bengal Government issued arrest warrant (1965) for eleven of the Hungryalist poets in charge of ‘obscenity’ in their works. Trials followed and Malay had a short-term imprisonment for his poem ‘Stark Electric Jesus’. The movement dissolved in a background of dwindling support, divide among friends and the poets’ cluelessness; the emotional fervour paled.
Whether or not the Hungry Generation turned out to be an avant-garde cultural movement of wide influence, capable of breaking through the existing institutionalized ideals, is a question of value-judgment, and this author is objective throughout. And the idea of ‘profanity’ in itself is subjected to changes with time and social ethos of the community in question.
The non-linear narration of the historical account has taken on a fine flavour of fiction in the book.
The occasional letters of Tara adds to it a curious epistolary quality, while her travels across the far-away hills give a mystique air. With profundity and precision, Maitreyee has rebuilt the whole journey of the Hungryalists, with their myths and truths, love and angst, visions and vicissitudes, and has made one thing pre-eminently clear – the journey was arduous.
♣♣♣END♣♣♣
Issue 87 (Sep-Oct 2019)
