"In My City" -- Poem by Hungryalist poet Arunesh Ghosh

It’s my city
Poem by Hungryalist poet Arunesh Ghosh
(Translated by Firoz Mahmud Ahsan Shuvo)

This city’s got 1 whorehouse
And 1 hermit
1 band of ganja-addicts hang out
Beside the only 1 public urinal
1 creaky, decrepit cinema hall
And 1 intellectual
The babes in bikinis in the poster
The police station opposite the liquor shop
And in the evening he opens up Heidegger
Beside that 4-storied office
Are the illegal Nepalese distillery and the brothel
1 ex-rebel dwells in this city
One who went to prison just for once
And 1 thief, 1 pickpocket, and 1 murderer
Who hate each other for the same reason
1 dwarf comes out of 1 big house
Down from the roof of the jailhouse is sighted the brothel’s
cookery
3 lads climbed its wall and took to their heels
Shot by the police, lies fawned on the ground
1 boy
From whose throat, like that of a beast’s, comes out
a comprehensible groan
The liquor-shop owner gets into a tiff with the police superintendent
Over the latter’s not paying for the liquor
The squabble between the hooker and her client
Between the rickshaw puller and the clerk
Between the elderly mother and her young daughter
Between the beggar and the Providence
Between the constable and the old Nepalese female distiller
Between the milkman and the stale woman
Ceases once it starts
It’s my city, I wander around this city
I jut out my hand and buy Charminar
from
1 betel-leaf store emerging from the mirror
The girl from the Hindi film steps out of the poster
I’ve tasted the shreds of paper from her genitalia
At noon I don’t have a handkerchief in my pocket
Nor even a match-box
My father didn’t have a handkerchief, nor did his father
But my mother had ’em and her mother, too
That is, the handkerchief civilization derives
from
None but women
While sitting on a bench in a liquor shop at noon, 
I feel like laughing
In which century does the bosom of the rag,
Crammed to prevent the flow during the period, swell into
a rose?
1 madcap from the summit of the city flies his
loincloth
1 syphilis patient with a flag in the grip is well ahead of the procession
1 robot thinks himself to be the future
ruler
1 jerk lies asleep at the time of the awakening of the entire city
1 female professor’s pussy sprouts uneducated
black grasses
and 1 crazy poet squats and starts
peeing
In the small hours of the winter 
– amid the dreamlessness of the middle class
The girls at the brothel
Burst out into a roar of laughter having seen me
I go for a stroll at noon
1 old woman has had me read the letter of her
bastard son
1 middle-aged woman has had me fuck her
11 year-old daughter who is still not in the business
1 leader has made me do the grocery shopping
for his household
Every single day 1 train
Departs from this city to even a bigger one
Its black smoke hovers across the whole city

Arunesh Ghosh, one of the stalwarts of Hungryalist movement, was a poet based in Cooch Behar, West Bengal, India. He committed suicide by drowning.
                                              

                                           Arunesh Ghosh
Firoz Mahmud Ahsan Shuvo is a translator and writer; he teaches English Literature at Khulna University.
                                        

Attempts to distort history of Hungry Generation movement by illiterate persons.

Saileswar Ghose, who became Trinamul Party's fellow traveller seated here beside a powerful Minister

Malay Roychoudhury, the creator of Hungryalist Movement in Bengali literature by Sreemanti Sengupta

                                                                      

                                                          Sreemanti Sengupta

 

This is a special post for me. Firstly, it’s sort of a comeback – I was suffering a wordless hiatus and a long depressive bout, when I decided that the best to break it was to put my hands on the keyboard and go tap-tapping. Secondly, this post is dedicated to a disturbing poet, one who I dare not fathom. Whatever, I put down here goes farthest to what I gauge of Malay Roy Choudhury,  Bangla poet, scholar, main propagator of the Hungryalist Movement in Bengal in the mid-sixties. He, along with companion poets, erupted in the sixties Bengal with an angry plea for change in face of a decadent society.

I quote below from Wikipedia,
“ The Hungry generation literary Movement was initially spearheaded by Roy Choudhury, Samir Roychoudhury (his elder brother), Shakti Chattopadhyay, and Haradhon Dhara (alias Debi Roy). Thirty more poets and artists subsequently joined them, the best-known being Binoy Majumdar, Utpal Kumar Basu, Falguni Roy, Subimal Basak, Tridib Mitra, Rabindra Guha, and Anil Karanjai.

Roy Choudhury is to the “Hungryalist Movement” as Stéphane Mallarmé was to Symbolism, Ezra Pound to Imagism, André Breton to Surrealism, and Allen Ginsberg to the Beats. The movement is now known in English as Hungryalism or the “Hungry generation“, its name being derived from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “In the sowre hungry tyme”; the philosophy was based on Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West”. The movement’s bulletins were published both in Bengali and infrequently in English as well as Hindi Language by Roy Choudhury since November 1961. 

The movement, however, petered out in 1965. Thereafter Roy Choudhury ventured out, apart from poetry, into fiction, drama, and essays on social and cultural issues that Bengali people have been suffering from.

Howard McCord, formerly English teacher at the Washington State University and later professor of English language and literature at Bowling Green University, who met Roy Choudhury during a visit to Calcutta, has succinctly traced Malay’s emergence in these words in Ferlinghetti-edited City Lights Journal 3: “Malay Roy Choudhury, a Bengali poet, has been a central figure in the Hungry Generation’s attack on the Indian cultural establishment since the movement began in the early 1960s”. He wrote, “acid, destructive, morbid, nihilistic, outrageous, mad, hallucinatory, shrill–these characterize the terrifying and cleansing visions” of Malay Roy Choudhury that “Indian literature must endure if it is to be vital again”.
That should give you a fair idea, atleast much fairer than I would give you on his life and times, firstly, because I believe in the immediacy of feeling to write something that would attack the reader’s sensibilities, and secondly, because I believe my immediate interaction with him in the cyber world is of utmost relevance to this post.

I was fortunate to meet Malay Roy Choudhury or ‘Malay Da’ as I like calling him through Facebook. This incident has somewhat mellowed my acidic rejection of ‘social-networking’. My initial contact with Malay Da’s work was through a learned source, a year or two back, which I can characterize as one of the turning points of my life as yet. One that pushed me off the brink of a cliff of reason into the abyss of somewhat frenzied knowledge where am still trying to get my hand hooked to a creeper and terminate a dangerous free fall.

The first body of work that I got acquainted with is the translation of ‘Prachanda Boidyutik Chuttor’, or ‘Stark Electric Jesus’ on the net. I quote the lines that made me blush and where I covered my eyes and felt heat steadily climbing up to the roots of my hair,

“Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterous
Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace
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?
Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm?
Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father?
Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha?
Oh, answer, let somebody answer these
Shubha, ah, Shubha
Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen
Come back on the green mattress again
As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of magnet’s brilliance
I remember the letter of the final decesion of 1956
The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time
Fine rib-smashing roots were descending into your bosom
Stupid relationship inflted in the bypass of senseless neglect”

I hadn’t read anything like this before. The first thing that I did was to look around and see whether The Orthodox of my family was peering down on her haunches on my screen. My eyes screwed up in little dilated balls as a graphic brain converted the lines in voluptuous images. What is this man writing? He’s raving mad!” and then for several hours afterwards, I tried to come to terms with the fact that I had been scandalized, raped by a few lines. I wasn’t alone. Malay Da had suffered court trial and punished for being ‘obscene’, in a historic trial where some of the best names in Bangla poetry spoke against him.

After a week of hot, sleepless afternoons, I kept returning to this poem, like an adolescent who’s just discovered the secrets of the body. The firs animal instinct to touch the opposite sex, to plunder a body, to grow insane in wild desire. The power of his language had paralyzed me, forever.
And then, I met him on Facebook, and a strange fear gripped me. Frankly, I am dead scared of such people. There is a community of artists who’re too real in their artistry. This class that charts names like, Allen Ginsberg, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain and many others are Art Extremists, a term I’ve coined for them. They exert an irresistible attraction towards the opposite sex, who’re drawn to the edgy and dangerous involvement they have with their art and times. Pablo Picasso is often compared to the Minataur, the half man-half monster. Like the Minataur he demanded women to be ‘sacrificed’ to him, a view that is corroborated in his tumultuous personal life, that left behind a trail of agonized wives, mistresses and children. Malay Da told me of a woman who was 20 years his junior and who had threatened him with suicide if he didn’t marry her. She kept her promise and drank toilet-acid.

I entered the Malay Da’s cyber territory stealthily, careful to remain a shadowy admrer and not get myself dangerously embroiled in insanity. I’ve not been quite successful. I asked him the ithing question at last: What is the role of the explicit use of sex in his poetry?
His answer was surprising in a daring nonchalance:
“It procreates the poems from my intercourse with the tantalizing body of language.”
Again, I grappled with wordlessness. I went to his sites (all enlisted in the ‘Blogs with Jobs’ tab) where people had rejected his poetry as “obscene rants”. Again Malay Da had asked them,
What exactly is the non-obscene?

Is placing good-sounding, pleasing/romantic visions in a few lines called poetry?
You better practice reading. It’s an art.
He reminded me of Kamala Das, the only other poet who has had a similar effect on me. She too, crossed shackles of Acceptance to write her voice. For these people, Poetry is an extension of Living. It is, or so I think, as normal as bitching about your friend, grumbling about your boss, brushing your teeth or urinating. These are people who cannot bear to cover up the unpleasant for the sake of earning popularity or admiration. They are dangerous, the character Ammu out of Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, a insane edge, a reckless energy, like a brother and sister making love, crossing the Love Laws.

I am reading Malay Da’s Chotoloker Chotobela (The Childhood of an Indescent Man) on his childhood. It is a lucid account of his poignant childhood, warm in recollections, rigid in opinions, surprising in honesty and chilling in sarcasm. Malay Da grew up in a seedy corner of pre-independent India in Patna, Bihar. He describes the world seen through the boy Malay and changes narrative to the now, author, wizened, roughened, merciless in honesty. His family, from the Sabarna Chodhury line was typical in their false prejudices of forgotten riches, striving to bob up their heads above intolerable poverty. He speaks of poverty, his first sighting of a nude woman from the window, a pair of mute and deaf  Muslim tailor brothers who stitched clothes for the entire family, the absurd and tedious bathroom rituals, the keen adolescent absorbing visitors touching genitals of Greek statues at the Patna Museum where his eldest uncle was the Keeper. Anything, Nothing and Everything you would expect from a book that starts with the poet’s 15 year old cousin getting caught red handed when he was seeing off a prostitute at the door, at the death of the night.

Malay Roy Choudhury is disturbing to say the least. Sometimes, I am repulsed, almost nauseated by the images he draws with his pen. I am forced sometimes to believe that his poetry is almost fradaulent, a meaningless rant, negative and sensationalist. And then I come back to calm evenings when everything falls into place – the time, the anger, the mistrust in the human situation.

I feel angry and frustrated when I talk to this man, now a septuagenarian living as a retired government officer with his wife in Mumbai. How dare he be so startingly honest? What gives him the audacious liscence to be irresponsibly independent? When ask him these questions, I can almost see his silent laughter in his reply:

“ Have you thought of as to who can be the person in your life whom you hate and love at the same time ? I am like a sinister animal who enjoys being attacked ! Have you noticed that the alpha male always uses it’s head butt to defeat it’s opponent ? Bison, Jiraffe, Lion, elephant, Rhino, Croc, any animal with power. I survive like those animals who are at the head of a Pride. Like the lion, I am a loner. I utilize my head. For writing, go on writing whatever you want. The reader is irrelevant. It is the LANGUAGE with which you are in love.”
And just like that, he’s decided to call his recent category of poems, ‘Alpha Male Poetry’. Just Like That. This man is irritatingly simple. There is no gestation between his heart and hand. Somebody has lapsed the lightyears between his feeling and his pain. We, the ‘rational’ ones can only but gape at such insolence. We can call it frenzied rants, we can rile and write pages on controversy, put him behind lock and key, stop people from researching on his work, but we are powerless in claiming their pens, their angst, their pain, them.

I once asked him, does he behave like an ordinary family man? Does he go to the bazaar, sip on strong milk tea? Etcetera. He answered me matter-of-factly. His wife takes care of marketing. And he has liquor tea. And being a family man is better than living on the edge.

I cannot forgive him for evading my deeper concern, Is he for real?
“Read your page on Picasso. Great. Why don’t you write a page on me, now that you have read my books in original. Write freely. don’t worry about my reactions. I am Gandar-chamra*  writer. You have good command over your thoughts. So go ahead. Give me a ‘piece of your mind’.” 

Gandar-chamra*  – Bangla proverb meaning ’ as hard as the skin of a Rhinocerous’ or ‘one who is thick skinned/unaffected by criticism.

This is my small-something to you, Malay Roychoudhury. 
 Long Live Obscenity.
                                             

                                         Sreemanti Sengupta
                                                 

                                     Sreemanti Sengupta

Malay Roychoudhury, the creator of Hungry Generation movement

Malay Roy Choudhury (born 29 October 1939) is a Bengali poet, playwright, short story writer, essayist and novelist who founded the Hungryalist movement in November 1961 with the publication of a Hungryalist bulletin on poetry from his Patna residence.

Early life and education

Roy Choudhury was born in Patna, Bihar, India, into the Sabarna Roy Choudhury clan, which owned the villages that became Kolkata. However hee grew up in Patna’s notorious Imlitala ghetto, which was mainly inhabited by Dalit Hindus and destitute Shia Muslims. His was the only Bengali family. His father, Ranjit (1909–1991) was a photographer in Patna; his mother, Amita (1916–1982), was from a progressive family of the 19th-century Bengali renaissance. His grandfather, Laksminarayan Roy Choudhury, was a mobile photographer mainly in cities which are now in Pakistan, who had been trained by Rudyard Kipling’s father, the curator of the Lahore Museum.
At the age of three, Roy Choudhury was admitted to a local Catholic school, and later, he was sent to the Oriental Seminary. The school was administered by the Brahmo Samaj movement, a monotheistic religion founded in 1830 in Kolkata by Ram Mohun Roy, who aimed to purify Hinduism and recover the simple worship of the Vedas. There, Roy Choudhury met student-cum-librarian Namita Chakraborty, who introduced him to Sanskrit and Bengali classics. All religious activities were banned at the school, and Roy Choudhury has said that his childhood experience made him instinctively secular.
Roy Choudhury has proficiency in English, Hindi, Bhojpuri and Maithili, apart from his mother tongue Bengali. He was influenced, though, by the Shia Muslim neighbors who recited Ghalib and Faiz in the Imlitala locality. At the same time his father had two workers Shivnandan Kahar and Ramkhelawan Singh Dabar at his photographic shop at Patna ; these two persons introduced Roy Choudhury to Ramcharitmanasa written by Tulasidasa as well as saint poets Rahim, Dadu and Kabir
Roy Choudhury did his Masters in Humanities. He later studied Rural Development which gave him a job to visit almost entire India for the upliftment of farmers, weavers, fishermen, artisans, craftsmen, potters, cobblers, landless labourers, jute farmers, potato growers and various under-caste Indians.

Hungryalist movement

Manifesto of Hungryalism.

The Hungryalist movement was initially led by Roy Choudhury; his brother, Samir Roychoudhury; Shakti Chattopadhyay; and Haradhon Dhara, known as Debi Roy. Thirty more poets and artists subsequently joined them, the best-known being Rajkamal Chaudhary, Binoy Majumdar, Utpal Kumar Basu, Falguni Roy, Subimal Basak, Tridib Mitra, Rabindra Guha, and Anil Karanjai. The movement’s English name was derived from Geoffrey Chaucer’s line “in the sowre hungry tyme”, and its philosophy was based on Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West”.
Hungryalism petered out in 1965, when the West Bengal government issued arrest warrants for eleven Hungryalists, including Roy Choudhury and his brother. Some members, such as Subhash Ghosh and Saileshwar Ghosh, testified against Roy Choudhury in Kolkata’s Bankshall Court. He was jailed for a month for his poem Stark Electric Jesus by Kolkata Bankshal Court in 1966. However he was exonerated by the Kolkata High Court in 1967. From the letters of Sunil Gangopadhyay written to Sandipan Chattopadhyay during 1964 published recently it is known that Sunil Gangopadhyay felt that Hungry generation literary movement was a threat to his Krittibas group of poets of 1950s.

Roy Choudhury went on to write poetry, fiction, plays, short stories and essays on Bengali social and cultural issues. He has written more than seventy books till date.
Howard McCord, a professor of English at Washington State University and Bowling Green University who met Roy Choudhury during a visit to Kolkata, wrote in City Lights Journal Number Three: “Malay Roy Choudhury, a Bengali poet, has been a central figure in the Hungry Generation’s attack on the Indian cultural establishment since the movement began in the early 1960s. … Acid, destructive, morbid, nihilistic, outrageous, mad, hallucinatory, shrill—these characterize the terrifying and cleansing visions” that “Indian literature must endure if it is to be vital again.”
Both the Bangla Academy and Northwestern University have archives of Roy Choudhury’s Hungryalist publications.
Roy Choudhury wrote three drama during the Hungryalism movement: Illot, Napungpung and Hibakusha, considered to be a mash up of the Theater of the Absurd and Transhumanism.

Poetry and translations

Malay in September 2009

With his 1963 poem “Prachanda Baidyutik Chhutar” (“Stark Electric Jesus”), which prompted the government’s actions against the Hungryalists, Roy Choudhury introduced Confessional poetry to Bengali literature. The poem defied traditional forms (e.g., sonnet, villanelle, minnesang, pastourelle, canzone, etc.), as well as Bengali meters (e.g., matrabritto and aksharbritto). His poem “Jakham” is better known and has been translated into multiple languages.
His best-known poetry collections are Medhar Batanukul Ghungur, Naamgandho, and Illot, and a complete collection of his poems was published in 2005. He has written about 60 books since he launched the Hungryalist movement in November 1961.
Roy Choudhury has also translated into Bengali works by William Blake (“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”), Arthur Rimbaud (“A Season in Hell”), Tristan Tzara (Dada manifestos and poems), Andre Breton’s Surrealism manifesto and poems, Jean Cocteau (“Crucifixion”), Blaise Cendrars (“Trans-Siberian Express”), and Allen Ginsberg (“Howl” and “Kaddish”). He has also translated Paul Celan’s famous poem “Death Fugue”.
Roy Choudhury has written extensively on the life and works of Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, James Joyce, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Arthur Rimbaud, Osip Mandelstam, Marcel Proust and Anna Akhmatova
He was given the Sahitya Academy award, the Indian government’s highest honor in the field, in 2003 for translating Dharamvir Bharati’s Suraj Ka Satwan Ghora. However, he declined to accept this award and others.

Adhunantika phase

In 1995, Roy Choudhury’s writings, both poetry and fiction, took a dramatic turn. A linguist, Probal Dasgupta, dubbed this the Adhunantika Phase (Bengali: অধুনান্তিক পর্ব), a portmanteau of two Bengali words: adhuna, meaning “new”, “current”, “contemporary”, or “modern”, and antika, meaning “closure”, “end”, “extreme”, or “beyond”. His poetry collections from this phase are Chitkar Samagra, Chhatrakhan, Ja Lagbey Bolben, Atmadhangser Sahasrabda, Postmodern Ahlader Kobita, and Kounaper Luchimangso. His novels from the period include Namgandho, Jalanjali, Nakhadanta, Ei Adham Oi Adham, and Arup Tomar Entokanta.
During this phase Roy Choudhury wrote several poetic drama which were mash up of Postmodernism and Transhumanism
After Roy Choudhury shifted to Mumbai from Calcutta he has ventured into Magic realism and written novels such as Labiyar Makdi, Chashomranger Locha, Thek Shuturmurg, Jungle Romio, Necropurush and Naromangshokadhoker Halnagad.
In 2014 Roy Choudhury wrote his autobiography in his distinct style titled Rahuketu.

Personal life

Malay with his wife, Shalila, in The Hague in 2007.

Roy Choudhury lives in Mumbai with his wife, Shalila, who was a field hockey player from Nagpur. Their daughter, Anushree Prashant, lives in Dubai with her husband and two daughters; his son Jitendra lives in Riyadh with his wife Sudipta.

In popular culture

A 2014 film based on Roy Choudhury’s poem Stark Electric Jesus was directed by Mrigankasekhar Ganguly and Hyash Tanmoy. It was an official selection at 20 international film festivals in 15 countries. The film won “Best Video Art” in Poland, “Most Promising Video Artist” in Spain, and “Best Fantasy Film” in Serbia.^[2][3][4]
Srijit Mukherji directed a film in 2011 titled Baaishey Shrabon, in which Roy Choudhury was portrayed by Gautam Ghosh.

Sources and references

• Malay Roy Choudhury Compendium, edited by A.M. Murshid. Avishkar Prakashani, Kolkata, India (2002).
• Hungryalist Interviews of Malay Roy Choudhury, edited by Ajit Ray. Mahadiganta Publishers, Kolkata (1999).
• Postmodern Interviews of Malay Roychoudhury, edited by Arabinda Pradhan. Graffiti Publishers, Kolkata (2004).
• Van Tulsi Ki Gandh, by Phanishwarnath Renu. Rajkamal Prakashan, Delhi, India (1984).
• Hungry Shruti & Shastravirodhi Andolon, by Uttam Das. Mahadiganta Publishers, Kolkata (1986).
• Shater Dashaker Kabita, by Mahmud Kamal. Shilpataru Prakashani, Dhaka, Bangladesh (1991).
• Hungry-Adhunantik Malay, edited by Ratan Biswas. Ahabkal Publications, Kolkata (2002).
• Salted Feathers, edited by Dick Bakken. Portland, Oregon (1967).
• Intrepid, edited by Carl Weissner. Buffalo, New York (1968).
• English Letters to Malay, edited by Tridib Mitra. Hungry Books, Howrah, India (1968).
• Bangla Letters to Malay, edited by Alo Mitra. Hungry Books, Howrah (1969).
• SWAPNA (Malay Roy Choudhury Special Issue, 15th Year, #1), edited by Bishnu Dey. Nabin Chandra College, Assam (2008).
• Sambhar: Malay Roy Choudhury Interview, by Amitava Deb. Sambhar Publications, Silchar, Assam, India (2008).
• Savarna Barta: Hungryalist Movement and Sabarna Roy Choudhury Clan, by Sonali Mukherjee. Tarkeshwar College, Kolkata (2008).
• Bodh: Malay Roy Choudhury’s Poetry, by Uttam Chakraborty. Rupnarayanpur, West Bengal, India (2008).
• Stark Electric Jesus, with foreword by Howard McCord. Tribal Press (1965).

Selected works

English
Stark Electric Jesus, with introduction by Howard McCord, Tribal Press, Washington DC, 1965.
Autobiography, CAAS #14 and 215, Gale Research Inc., Ohio, 1980.
Selected Poems, with introduction by P. Lal, Writers Workshop, Kolkata, 1989.
Hattali (long poem), Mahadiganta Publishers, Kolkata, 1989.
Overview: Postmodern Bangla Poetry (non-fiction), Haowa 49 Publishers, Kolkata, 2001.
Overview: Postmodern Bangla Short Stories (non-fiction), Haowa 49 Publishers, Kolkata, 2001.
Bengali
Shoytaner Mukh (Collected Poems), Krittibas Prakashani, Kolkata, 1963.
Hungry Andoloner Kavyadarshan (Hungryalist Manifesto), Debi Ray, Howrah, 1965.
Jakham (long poem), Zebra Publications, Kolkata, 1966.
Kabita Sankalan (collection of Hungryalist poems), Mahadiganta Publishers, Kolkata, 1986.
Chitkarsamagra (postmodern poems), Kabita Pakshik, Kolkata, 1995.
Chhatrakhan (postmodern poems), Kabitirtha Publishers, Kolkata, 1995.
Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish (translation), Kabitirtha Publishers, Kolkata, 1995.
Ja Lagbey Bolben (postmodern poems), Kaurab Prakashani, Jamshedpur, 1996.
Tristan Tzara’s Poems (translation), Kalimati Publishers, Jamshedpur, 1996.
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (translation), Kabita Pakshik, Kolkata, 1996.
Jean Cocteau’s Cricifixion (translation), Kabita Pakshik, Kolkata, 1996.
Blaise Cendrar’s Trans-Siberian Express (translation), Amritalok Prakashani, Midnapur, 1997.
A (deconstruction of 23 poems), Kabita Pakshik, Kolkata, 1998.
Autobiography of Paul Gauguin (translation), Graffiti Publishers, Kolkata, 1999.
Jean Arthur Rimbaud (critique), Kabitirtha Publishers, Kolkata, 1999.
Life of Allen Ginsberg (non-fiction), Kabitirtha Prakashani, Kolkata, 2000.
Atmadhangsher Sahasrabda (collected poems), Graffiti Publishers, Kolkata, 2000.
Bhennogalpo (collection of postmodern short stories), Dibaratrir Kavya, Kolkata, 1996.
Dubjaley Jetuku Prashwas (novel), Haowa 49 Publishers, 1994.
Jalanjali (novel), Raktakarabi Publishers, Kolkata, 1996.
Naamgandho (novel), Sahana Publishers, Dhaka, 1999.
Natoksamagra (collection of plays), Kabitirtha Prakashani, Kolkata, 1998.
Hungry Kimvadanti (Hungryalist memoir), Dey Books, Kolkata, 1994.
Postmodernism (non-fiction), Haowa#49 Publishers, Kolkata, 1995.
Adhunikatar Biruddhey Kathavatra (non-fiction), Kabita Pakshik, Kolkata, 1999.
Hungryalist Interviews (edited by Ajit Ray), Mahadiganta Publishers, Kolkata, 1999.
Postmodern Kalkhando O Bangalir Patan (non-fiction), Khanan Publishers, Nagpur, 2000.
Ei Adham Oi Adham (novel), Kabitirtha Publishers, Kolkata, 2001.
Nakhadanta (postmodern novel), Haowa 49 Publishers, Kolkata, 2001.
Poems: 2004-1961 (collection of poems), Avishkar Prakashani, Kolkata, 2005.

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Analysis of Malay Roychoudhury's novella ARUP TOMAR ENTOKANTA by Tanumay Goswami

Malay Roychoudhury’s novella ‘Arup Tomar Entokanta’ : The relational orientation between body and mind 

Author : Tanumay Goswami

 

Every writer has a unique way of the looking at the world, and this is the civilization’s centre of gravity, is a cluster of ideas which define the goal of human existence, the ways to reach this goal, the errors to be avoided and the obstacles to be expected on the way. This view interprets central human experiences and answers perennial questions on what is good and what is wrong/ evil, what is real and what is unreal, what is the essential nature of men and women and the world they live in. It is now generally assumed that people are basically selfish, and that fellow feeling is either a weakness or a luxury, or merely a more sophisticated form of selfishness. In this picture kindness becomes something we are nostalgic about, a longing for something that we fear may not really exist.   

Aesthetically, Psychoanalysis is an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other. What Freud called defences are the ways we protect ourselves from our desires, which are also our relations with others. Indeed the history of Psychoanalysis after Freud reflects many of the dilemmas we have about kindness (it would be an interesting exercise to read ‘sexuality’ as Freud’s word for ‘fellow feeling’). Are we, Freud’s followers wondered, committed to our desires and then gratification, or to other peoples ? And what, if anything, could such a distinction mean ? Do we crave (sensuous) satisfaction as so-called drive theorists say, or do we crave intimacy and relationships ? Do we want good company or good sex, if we have to choose ? If kindness, in its anti-sentimental sense, is at the heart of human desiring, then these become merely false choices, the wrong way of talking about what goes on between people. Sex becomes one of the more obscure, least articulated forms. It is kind not to overprotect other people from oneself, especially from one’s sexuality.

Our psyches and the social world are inestricably linked. Whether we consider the social world is composed of dyadic relationslips, or the nuclear or extended family, or the larger community, we know that the psyche is formed by internalization of the external world, while the external world is always perceived through the lens of the internal world, the psyche. As a dyadic practice, psychoanalysis naturally focuses on the vicissitudes of dyadic relationships both in the external world and as represented internally. 

An enigma, hackneyed, an author par excellence, cliché, one who speaks the last word on sexuality, an empty boast. He is the ultimate, the pioneer of a genre, hitherto not fathomed by any Bengali litterateur, what with his slang, his colloquial dialects, his candid confessions of his eccentricities and HIS never say die attitude on the face of odds, which would have dictated anyone to hang up his boots. He is essentially a diaspora and he loves it that way. He has qualms on joining in the milieu of the so called mainstream sheep following the financially rewarding balderdash of literature. 

In this novella, author trying to emphasis on the eroticization of kindness in the psychoanalytic account. Rousseau, as we have seen located the psychological birth of kindness in the outset of puberty. It is sexual maturation that opens the fictional Emile to the feeling and sufferings of others, ‘bring[ing] to his heart the first compassion it has ever experienced.’ Rousseau intimated, and Freud showed so clearly, ambivalence is key to human sexuality, and if there is one thing that exposes this ambivalence, tests human kindness, it is the experience of human jealousy. The ambivalence exposed so vividly by sexual jealousy- that where we love we always hate,- has something important to tell us about the complexity of our emotional lives. We are always tempted to simplify our emotional lives in order to diminish the constant conflict we are in, in sexual jealousy we can no longer keep our conflicts hidden. We hate intensely where we once loved, our dependence on the person we need. Sexual jealousy- the ambivalence that explodes out of it, invites us to ask our questions the other way round. Why are we ever unkind ? And one answer would be to secure, in so far as it is possible, our emotional (psychic) survival. In a lecture on sexual jealousy delivered in Paris in 1929, Ernest Jones argued that what we call love is very often simply the way we manage stronger than love was old hat, atleast in psychoanalytic circles.

In this story, we observes relational orientation is also congruent between body and mind. In the Indian view, there is no essential difference between body and mind. The body is merely the gross form of matter, just as the mind is a more subtle form of the same matter. Both are different forms of the same body- mind matter- sharira. The emotions that have come to be differently viewed because of the Indian emphasis on connection. As cultural psychologists have pointed out, such emotions as sympathy and feelings of interpersonal communion. Eros not in its narrowing meaning of sex but in its wider connotation of a loving ‘connectedness’ (where the sexual embrace is only the most intimate of all connections), then the relational cast to the Indian mind makes Indians more ‘erotic’ than many other peoples of the world. The relational orientation, however, also easily slips into conformity and conventional behaviour, making many Indians psychologically old even when young. In a post modern accentuation of ‘fluid identities’ and a transitional attitude toward relationships, of ‘moving on’, contemporary westernman (and the modern upper class Indian) may well embody what the Jungians call puer aeternus-  the eternal youth, ever in pursuit of his dreams, full of vitality, but nourishing only to himself while those around him.

Let us again emphasize that the relational orientation, the context sensitivity and the lesser sexual differentiation that go into the formation of the Indian mind. They are continents of an Indian’s psyche. Our sexual desire is far more selective than our kindness- our preconditions for excitement are much narrower than our preconditions for sympathy. The mental representation of our cultural heritage, it remains in constant conversation with the universal and individual aspects of our mind throughout life.

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Tanumay Goswami
                                                                          

Nilanjan Maitra on Debi Roy

Debi Roy ( August 4, 1940 ) is one of the founding fathers of the Hungry generation movement in Bengali literature. He is also the first modern Dalit poet in Bengali. He was born in a very poor family and worked as an errand boy in tea stalls of Calcutta when his parents lived in a slum in Howrah. He funded his own education and became a graduate of Calcutta University. He started writing from his childhood. Debi Roy met Malay Roy Choudhury in an office of a literary periodical in 1960 and the two of them, after discussions with Shakti Chattopadhyay and Samir Roychoudhury launched the now famous Hungryalist movement in November 1961. His Howrah slum-room was the editorial office from where the Hungryalist Bulletins and Hungryalist Manifestoes were published. Along with ten other Hungryalists, Debi Roy was also arrested in 1964 on charges of obscenity in poetry though the trial court exonerated him.

Debi Roy with his parents

He developed a new kind of sentences in his poems which have now come to be known as logical breaks as well as image jumping. Subsequent Bengali poets have followed the method into the next century. As a result he is considered one of the first Postmodern Bengali poet.

                                          

                          Debi Roy