Daniela Cappello
My Journey Through the Hungry Generation
Following our Sunday talk with ‘the legend’ of Hungry Generation Malay Raychaudhuri, I felt the need to tidy up my thoughts on my ‘object of research’ and to look retrospectively at my journey through the countercultural movement of 1960s West Bengal known as Hungryalism. I find myself now at the very end of a long path, after years of searching, collecting, reading and (struggling) to understand what those ‘tropical Kerouacs and gangetic Ginsbergs’, as Jyotirmoy Datta named them, had to say about life, sex, and India in the age of decolonization. That is where the urge of putting pieces together comes from. What have I found in the Hungries? How did I get there? My oral defense will soon take place: so please! Let me share a few memories with all of you few readers of this piece, as a means to exorcise all tensions and frustrations of this hard and precarious moment in our history.
My interest for Bengali language and literature started quite early in my undergrad studies. At that time, I joined classes of Hindi, Sanskrit and Indian religions and philosophies, with great enthusiasm to learn all ‘truths’ about India, this exotic country of our disenchanted imaginations. When I reached Calcutta (my first ever Indian experience) for a project of translation I fell in love with the city and its people, started to learn Bengali quite informally, through self-learning, a few courses, as well as through direct contact and dialogue with friends, students and professors in my Bengali circle. That was my magical start of the ‘oriental’ journey, with continuous ups and downs along the way.
Later the Hungries would come and punch me on the face to let me get a snort of Calcutta’s dirty underbelly. It was the end of an old way of looking at ‘the exotic other’: the dream of an authentic, local and vernacular India had ended, as I turned my eyes to a world of transgression, multilingualism, ambiguity and contradiction as they were captured in India’s literary cultures following the fall of British colonial rule.
My Hungry pull
What struck me at first about the Hungry Generation movement were two things. The first was the curiosity for their sentence for obscenity in 1964: how provocative and shocking have these poets been to a middle-class reader of that epoque? I was curious to see to what extent their poetry could be defined ‘ashlil’ (obscene) and what was that obscenity about. The second was the ‘silence’ on this movement that existed in academia, in literary histories as well as in the public sphere. Issues of freedom of expression, obscenity and censorship were coming up quite strongly after 2010 and especially with the rise of the BJP and return of ideologies of hindutva in the public sphere. If many people were positively surprised and even amused by my choice, reactions from some of them were certainly ones of perplexity and, to a certain extent, of hostility towards my choice of ‘returning voice’ to transgressive actors of the Bengali middle-class. Why would a young Italian lady want to know about these wild obscene authors who spoke of sexuality in their poetry, something rather un-lyrical, instead of reading Tagore and Saratchandra or studying any other (less problematic) icon of the Bengali canon? Now I can totally see their point.
I later discovered the many interesting – yet contrasting – sides of this literary counterculture in the Bengali language and why were they perceived as problematic and controversial to mainstream literary culture. Their poetics of desecration, of irony and parodic mocking coexisted with other shades of these men’s behaviour: the sexually depraved, hyper-masculine and the misogynist.
Travel and Encounter
Long before my encounter with the Hungries, my research had been oriented to exploring literature in the vernaculars and looking into questions of translation and reception of literary texts across the globe. After I got my masters, I came up with the idea of working on “little archives” and “cheap” literary materials in South Asia: those repositories of ‘ephemeral’ material and ‘fragmented’ knowledge that lies uncatalogued and scattered over a number of libraries throughout the globe. I was struck – and certainly disoriented! – when I found a great number of their letters, manifestoes, leaflets and magazines disseminated through small archives from West Bengal to the United States.
Chaotic and fragmentary were also my personal encounters with the living legends of that 1960s ‘hunger’. As were my interviews too, of which I tried to keep track with inexpert recordings done with an ordinary smartphone – including the noises from Calcutta’s roads on the background. How I wish I could go back with better equipment, a well-organized planner and smart questions! But no matter how messy and unorganized my materials were, my hosts were always helpful and available to satisfy my thirst for questions. I cherished my long Sundays of mishti and chaat (and chats) with Samir and wife Bela Raychaudhuri in Bansdroni; the visits, photo shoots and talks with Malay and Shalila di in Mumbai; my meeting with Debi Roy in Howrah, Pradip Chaudhuri in Calcutta, Shakti Chattopadhyay’s daughter Titi Ray at a Coffee Day in Park Street; the poet and Bukowski translator Subhankar Das and his friends in Qasbah; the Hungry painter Anil Karanjai’s wife Juliet Reynold in Delhi and many others. And that virtual space of poetic ‘elsewhere’ where I daily met with Phalguni Roy, his irony as well as anguish. Nurturing these different relationships over time has meant a lot for me and for my research. Meeting them and their entourages has given me a more concrete sense of the ‘person’ behind the writer and the Hungryalist, and it helped me to get things into perspective.
Perhaps at that time I did not know why I was so determinate to explore these enfants térribles of Bengali poetry, these performers of a violent and predatory masculinity, especially as a non-Bengali woman. But looking retrospectively I can say that the perplexity and hostility of some people was already revealing certain traits that I found more intriguing in this avantgarde movement. And that was their perception as dirty, immoral, shocking, perverted, disgusting and therefore dangerous individuals for middle and highbrow readers; their sexual ambiguity and linguistic ‘in-betweenness’; their marginalization and even denunciation in mainstream discussions on literature even inside Bengal. It was precisely my ‘disfunctional’ positioning – young woman hailing from a southern city in Europe, speaking to a northern European academic audience and to elderly Bengali poets – vis-à-vis those who once were rebellious naughty boys that made this ‘clash’ of perspectives all the way more enriching and intriguing.
In the end, after years of spotting and collecting, reading, translating and often misunderstanding; coming back to the same poems months later, re-translating and re-interpreting, I realized that my exploration was not a linear procession of ‘comprehension’, of positive validation of my findings, at all. By contrast, one of the triggers was the impossibility of understanding, the aporia of ‘translation’, of putting into words, feelings that have always lied at the heart of the anthropological experience.
About the author
Daniela Cappello is a doctoral candidate at Heidelberg University. She has recently submitted her thesis on the poetry of the Hungry Generation, exploring issues of sexuality, masculinity, and transgression in their Bengali writings. She has edited a Bengali translation of Gramsci’s 25th Prison Notebook and authored articles on translation and comics. Among many other things, she loves hula hoop dance, playing guitar, and writing unfinished stories.
