The Hungryalists

 

The Beats, the Hungryalists, and the Call of the East

February 19, 2020   •   By Akanksha Singh

The Hungryalists

MAITREYEE BHATTACHARJEE CHOWDHURY

WHEN I FIRST MOVED to Mumbai (which I still call Bombay), I learned that Allen Ginsberg had once passed through in the 1960s. The details of how I learned this — who told me, where, when — escaped my memory immediately. The fact that I lived in the neighbourhood where Ginsberg had stayed when he visited was, and still is, worth more than the why.

Ginsberg, I’d soon find out, made two trips to India. The first was in 1962 when he and his partner, Peter Orlovsky, arrived in Bombay by ship. He was fresh off the heels of his 1957 obscenity trial following the success of Howl, and India was the old land for a new story. Unbeknownst to him or Orlovsky, he’d go on to spend a year in India and record his days there in his 1970 Indian Journals.

In November 1961, a few months before Ginsberg arrived in India, though, a group of Bengali poets would found something called “The Hungry Movement”: brothers Malay and Samir Roy Choudhury, Haradhan Dhara (who would later go by “Debi Rai” to avoid casteism), and Shakti Chatterjee. The group would grow larger and change dramatically with time, but the first three co-founders would remain with the Hungryalists, as they called themselves, until the end.

Their name is in reference to Geoffrey Chaucer’s use of “hungry” in “in the sowre hungry tyme” in his translation of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. At the time, India, having become an independent nation just over 20 years prior, was indeed hungry. Independence came at the cost of the Indo-Pakistan War: Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other in the name of religion; Pakistan became an Islamic republic, India a secular one, and what is now Bangladesh would, in 1955, be established as “East Pakistan.”

The change in borders brought an influx of refugees, and as thousands of displaced souls walked in search of their new homes, setting up camps in railway stations and street corners, the people — especially the people of Calcutta, West Bengal — were hungry.

“Counterculture has a penchant for the eccentric,” writes Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury in the introduction to her book, The Hungryalists: The Poets Who Sparked a Revolution. The Hungryalists, like the Beats, were rebellious.

Reader, it is perhaps important to note here that the Beats and Hungryalists did not know of (or care for) each other’s existence until Ginsberg would meet a few of them through his travels in India. It’s tempting to put this down to ignorance on both sides, but the worlds they were each born into were all-consuming. On the one hand, the United States was in the midst of the Cold War, facing off with the Soviets and averting nuclear conflict in Cuba; on the other, Delhi and Peking had their own cold war brewing on account of a border dispute, India’s recognition of Tibet as a sovereign state, and India’s safeguarding of the Dalai Lama.

So just as Ginsberg came east to search for something (a quintessential white man looking for his Eat, Pray, Love moment, I would argue), for he was in search of his “guru,” Malay Roy Choudhury moved east to Calcutta hoping to steal away from the “bad influence” that his father thought Patna was. (And their childhood home in Patna, in the shady neighbourhood of Imlitala, was indeed, “[p]retty early on in life, the place [that] had exposed them to free sex, toddy, ganja, and much more,” as Bhattacharjee Chowdhury points out.) 

In Malay’s case, coming to Calcutta would bring the Hungryalists to life with the publication of their first manifesto — a formal renouncing of the Bengali literati, who were all yet to grow out of the colonial blanket they clung to. The manifesto — printed on a single page to save money and reach as many people as possible — read:

Poetry is no more a civilising manoeuvre, a replanting of the bamboozled gardens; it is a holocaust, a violent and somnambulistic jazzing of the hymning five, a sowing of the tempestuous Hunger. […] [W]e have discarded the blankety-blank school of modern poetry, the darling of the Press […] In the prosed-rhyme of those born-old half-literates, you must fail to find that scream of desperation of a thing wanting to be man, the man wanting to be spirit.

The Hungryalists were just that — wanting to be men, wanting to be spirit. This was a time when the Indo-China border conflict had led to a war that India lost — the elders liked what they could trust and know, and the youngsters wanted to be able to trust and know newer, better things. Bengali literati (and indeed the Bengali upper middle class, in general) praised the fuddy-duddy, the Oxbridge-educated (studying in the United States was still seen as the “lesser” option), and the Tagores and Jibananandas (the former being India’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature in addition to a Bengali poet). The Hungryalists spoke to issues of the man on the streets. They embraced the unembraceable; where the academic and literary aristocracy repudiated work written by lower castes (so much so that your caste decided whether or not you would be published), the Hungryalists accepted these poets and their words. Most importantly, in denouncing religion and promoting sexual expression in art, the Hungryalists were labelled uncouth attention-seekers.

And one could argue they were: they went to great lengths to distribute their pamphlets, reciting evocative verses in railway stations, leaving masks in literati mailboxes with instructions to “please remove your mask,” spoofing wedding invitations with critiques of acclaimed poets, performing “obscene” sketches, and pranking literary magazines with blank submissions. They were desperate to get the word out at whatever cost they saw fit, and it worked.

It worked so well, in fact, that it eventually led to an obscenity trial in 1964. 

¤

Apart from Ginsberg and Orlovsky, Gary Snyder and his wife, Joanne Kyger, were also travelling through India. Kyger documented her trip in a journal, which was first published in 1981 as part of The Japan and India Journals, 1960–1964 before being reprinted in 2016.

In it, she talks (rather amusedly) of how Ginsberg, on his quest to find a guru, would ask the Dalai Lama about drugs and their repetitive hallucinations.

By the time Orlovsky and Ginsberg met the Hungryalists in Calcutta, none of this curiosity — about religion, mysticism, and drug use — had faded.

In The Hungryalists, Samir recalled their first meeting to Malay:

He approached our table, where Sunil, Shakti, Utpal and I sat, with no hesitation whatsoever. There was no awkwardness in talking to people he hadn’t ever met. None of us had seen such sahibs before, with torn clothes, cheap rubber chappals and a jhola. We were quite curious. At that time, we were not aware of how well known a poet he was back in the US. But I remember his eyes — they were kind and curious. He sat there with us, braving the most suspicious of an entire cadre of wary and sceptical Bengalis, shorn of all their niceties — they were the fiercest lot of Bengali poets — but, somehow, he had managed to disarm us all. He made us listen to him and tried to genuinely learn from us whatever it was that he’d wanted to learn, or thought we had to offer.

Ginsberg’s acquaintance with Malay Roy Choudhury was yet to happen, but one can only assume the bond he developed with the elder Roy Choudhury, Samir, was strong enough for Ginsberg and Orlovsky to stay at Roy Choudhury’s parents’ house in Patna (scandalising the women of the Bengali family not through their homosexuality but through Ginsberg’s inability to wrap a towel around himself after bathing).

In Patna, when Malay would eventually take Ginsberg to the Golghar (“round house”), a colonial-era granary, Ginsberg would recite “Sunflower Sutra,” enamoured by the acoustics of the space. Ginsberg would later go on to write about the visit in his journal:

The Prakritic echo of the Golghar
circling round the concrete dome
as I recited the sun flower
hearing my own voice sadly
echo, tired thousand miles.

Later, the Beats and the Hungryalists would travel and stay together on and off while he continued his search for a guru and understood the mechanics of smoking ganja from a chillum like a sadhu.

Trivial though it may seem, ganja was a purposeful choice of drug for the Hungryalists. “Ganja was the poor man’s drug, mostly taken by factory workers and rickshaw pullers who couldn’t afford anything else,” Bhattacharjee Chowdhury writes.

For the poets, it was a double-edged sword […] breaking not only class and caste barriers, but also the intricate hierarchy of who took the drug […] the pundits or propagators of casteism who advocated their genteel opinions about literature.

Yet the fact that it was legal in a country as tightly wound as India — and a path to moksha, release from the endless cycle of reincarnation, according to Hinduism and Buddhism — baffled Ginsberg.

It feels nonsensical to point all this out, but the poets were bonded over this need to escape: Malay from the chaos that sprung from organised religion, and Ginsberg from what he believed to be some version of the endless cycle.

¤

When the Hungryalists were rounded up on an obscenity charge in 1964, Malay was listed as the main accused. The Calcutta Police cuffed Malay in his parents’ home in Patna, and what would become a three-year court case went to trial.

I’ll admit that until this point in the narrative of The Hungryalists, I wasn’t convinced of the Bengalis and the Beats forming any sort of bond. What follows, however, diminished most of my doubts.

Ginsberg would write to Malay upon hearing the news of the arrest. Having been through an obscenity trial himself, Ginsberg’s words meant something to Malay — comfort, advice, success?

In his first letter, Ginsberg would go as far as to say, “As soon as I read about it, I racked my brain what I could do to help, and so today wrote a bunch of letters to the following”: he went on to list several editors of international and local magazines and newspapers, a novelist, and members of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He had made phone calls and met with literary VIPs in New York, his letter went on to say, ending with:

If there is anything you want me to do let me know. […] Write to me and let me know what the situation is[.] […] I suspected jealous ideological Marxists or something. Are you ruined at the bank?? […] Regarding your family. […] If the [Congress for Cultural Freedom] doesn’t cooperate, let me know, we’ll explain to the European office.

He signs this letter off with “Jai Ram, Allen Ginsberg.”

Ginsberg and Malay would continue corresponding while the Communist Party of India (Marxist) came to thwart the “petty bourgeoisie.” Time would feature the poets and their cause. City Lights Journal, Salted Feathers, San Francisco Earthquake, Kulchur, and Los Angeles Free Press would publish the work of Hungryalists and announce their solidarity. 

At home in India, Malay would continue to face ridicule from the upper crust of literary society — the nerve of international press meddling in domestic affairs; don’t they know these youths and their delinquent plans? 

The charges against Malay would eventually be dropped in 1967, and the vastness of India would absorb aspects of their movement into its day-to-day life. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Hungryalists was this — the fact that the battle of caste and class was no longer up for intellectual debate.

Later that year, the Marxists would take to the streets violently, and a few frustrated Hungryalists would join them; the Naxalbari uprising — an armed peasant revolt in 1967 West Bengal — was around the corner.

¤

Of the Beats who visited India, it is indubitably Ginsberg who reflected the impact his time here had on him. Not just in his understanding of the complexities of life, which he’d later attribute to practising  Buddhism, but in his art, too. When he’d revisit India a decade later to see refugees flood in from Bangladesh, liberated from Pakistan, he’d come to write “September on Jessore Road.” Ginsberg would pay tribute to

Millions of souls Nineteenseventyone
homeless on Jessore under gray sun
A million are dead, the millions who can
Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan.

In his last poem, “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias)” — written a week shy of his imminent death on April 5, 1997 — he reminisces one last time:

Nor ever return to Kashi “oldest continuously habited city in the world” bathe in Ganges & sit again at Manikarnika ghat with Peter, visit Lord Jagganath again in Puri, never back to Birbhum take notes tales of Khaki Baba
Or hear music festivals in Madras with Philip
Or return to have Chai with older Sunil & the young coffeeshop poets,
Tie my head on a block in the Chinatown opium den, pass by Moslem Hotel, its rooftop Tinsmith Street Choudui Chowh Nimtallah Burning ground nor smoke ganja on the Hooghly

In The Hungryalists, Bhattacharjee Chowdhury points out that it is perhaps unfair to compare the Beats to the Hungryalists. While both were largely male-dominated, the former would be imbibed in American culture in the decades that followed.

The Hungry Movement lost steam slowly and abruptly, with those associated with it wanting to distance themselves from the violence many thought they fueled. Though its members went on to live successful literary lives, its story seems to have been lost in history until recent years. Some attribute this to the First World-Third World divide; I’d argue it was lost because India sought to emulate the West.

Much like the poets who sought after and fought for the Hungry Movement, India was a young nation, with much to learn about its own intricacies.

Beyond caste and religion, India had and continues to have many dimensions — ethnic groups, tribes, socioeconomic and political classes — there is no end to the chaos.

“The Beats and the Hungryalists were co-travellers in their own ways,” writes Bhattacharjee Chowdhury. The Hungryalists, who traveled through India, East Pakistan, Nepal, and Burma, interacted with local poets, artists, and thinkers much like the Beats had when they moved through India. As they each traveled east, for that short breadth of time, connections — however fleeting — were made, and their roars against the establishment were the key to their respective impacts on the world in which we live today.

Malay would reason,

Post-WWII, the world had seen a rise in possible correlation between nationalism and religion, allied with the suppression of women and government-sponsored oppression of so-called sexual and political deviants, leading to a culture of constant containment foisted upon freethinkers.

It is sad, then, to think of how little has changed. In India, certainly, but globally, too. 

Conventional wisdom tells us that art thrives in uncertain times. War, famine, floods, fires, bloodshed, and blockades. The India I currently live in grows increasingly different from the one I moved to. As people here protest citizenship laws, the lockdown in Kashmir, the detention camps, and attacks on free speech, I find myself looking for answers in the art being created today, wondering where the next Howl, the next Wichita Vortex Sutra, the next Hungry generation is.

¤

Akanksha Singh is a journalist, content writer, and editor based in Mumbai, India.

Daniela Cappello on the death of Sandip Dutta

 Daniela Capello লিখেছেন :

I am so saddened to learn that our friend Sandip Dutta has left us. He was the founder of the Little Magazine Library and Research Centre (1978) in the hidden gali of Tamer Lane nearby College Street, Kolkata. He authored many books and was himself editor of various little magazines in Bengali. How many good memories of hours spent consulting and photographing dusty magazines, pamphlets, leaflets and all about the Hungry Generation that Sandip managed to track and store autonomously and independently over the decades in that small and yet densely packed treasure of literature. Thanks to his effort the LM library became one of the largest, perhaps the only, archive of alternative literature in India. It was thanks to Sandip that I first learned the sense of navigating little archives, of treating fragile documents with care, and especially of creating bonds over time, with caretakers. Sandip was one of them. I am so sorry I couldn't be there earlier to say goodbye. অনেক ধন্যবাদ সন্দীপ দা! আমরা সবাই আপনাকে মিস করবো!

হাংরি আন্দোলন : বাংলাদেশে প্রকাশিত বই

 

THE HUNGRY LUMINARY == MALAY ROYCHOUDHURY

 

THE HUNGRY LUMINARY— MALAY ROY CHOUDHURY (EPISODE 1)

TRANSLATED FROM THE BENGALI BY SRAMAN SIRCAR

 

1

By the time I noticed my sandal was torn, we had barely set foot outside the College Street Coffee House after wrapping up one of our usual intellectual chats that always began at 8 on Saturday evenings. The loop that held my hallux had come off, and while holding it between my middle toes, I had somehow scraped my way onto the street and was wondering if I should simply carry the sandal in my hands after all, since repairing it meant I would then have to walk all the way to Sealdah. I was with Subimal Basak. He immediately quipped that the realists among us would have argued it would have been wiser to leave the torn sandal behind at the Coffee House itself for those lacking such a possession.

Suddenly, a group of six to seven men leaped out of the darkness of the street and surrounded us. I recognized some of the faces in the dim light—they had left the café an hour earlier—and instinctively realized that we could save ourselves only by fighting them together. One of the men ran up to Ismail’s cigarette store beneath the staircase of the Coffee House, picked up the iron rod that had been resting there, and struck at us. Subimal blocked the blow, grabbed the rod with both his hands, and yanked with all his might—the man clad in dhoti and a shirt flew off his feet and smashed into the shuttered bookshop on the pavement. A dog groaned at the commotion in its sleep.

Now armed with the iron rod, Subimal let out a full-throated roar that shattered the silence of the night—Come out, you swines of Suresh Samajpati!—and landed a sickening blow on one of the attackers. Even in the shadows, I could see the sinews on his muscles had flared up like snakes raising their heads to strike. The men decided they had seen enough and all of them fled along Bankim Chatterjee Street and College Street. It was all over within a minute or so. With the rod on our shoulders and both my sandals hanging from it, we marched our way back home.

If Subimal Basak hadn’t been there with me that night, I would have been brutally thrashed for sure. In any case, I wasn’t well-versed in the Japanese techniques of martial arts. Subimal, however, had an appearance that was thoroughly unlike any poet—he was dark and burly with equally black curly hair and lacked all signs of nobility and sophistication. Originally from East Bengal, he would come across as an archetypical tough and obstinate proletariat. Back then he used to work at the Income Tax House in Chowringhee and resided in his paternal uncle’s tiny jewelry store in the Baithakkhana Bazaar near Sealdah. The year was 1963. I had visited Kolkata for about a fortnight and put up in his den.

The jewelry store used to bear a spartan look, was entirely windowless, and lacked even a ceiling fan; the two of us had to sleep on mattresses strewn on the floor. Answering nature’s call every morning meant going all the way to Sealdah station to make use of the trains idling along the platforms. Breakfast consisted of puffed rice and tea in cheap, earthen cups. For baths, we only needed towels and water taps on the adjacent street. The taps were often set so low that we had to crawl on all fours before we could sit under them. After drying ourselves, we would set off from Sealdah and travel through Bowbazaar till we reached Subimal’s office. While he would report to his department, I would venture to the roof of the Income Tax House and take a seat, with my towel serving as a cushion. Falguni Roy, a resident of Baranagar, and Tridib Mitra, who worked in the Writers’ Building at the time, would join us later in the afternoon for poetry sessions under the open sky, along with weed rolled into cheap cigarettes. When we felt hungry, Subimal would take us to his office canteen for lunch.

The nights were spent being a witness to Subimal’s literary experiments with the Bengali prosaic text called Chhaata Maatha. Lying on the mattress with a pillow under his stomach, he would spend hours deconstructing the narrative of the book, only to recompose it in the typical Dhakaiya Kutti style that had been characteristic of the old Bengali dialect once popular in East Bengal. I could never offer any help in this regard since the dialect was not known to me. As Subimal scribbled new words and phrases from his diary onto a piece of paper, the dim light of the lone lamp would cast a shadow of his head on the wall, its oily smell soon wafting all over the store. The idle yawns of old men would occasionally float in from the street outside. Every now and then, Subimal would blurt out, “Hey Malay, there’s someone in my ears again, I can clearly hear them speak!” and then wait for this supposed angel in his ears to offer him a novel word or an interesting turn of phrase, almost jumping in excitement whenever the angel would so oblige. His literary struggles would last late into the night, while I would fall asleep with an arm over my eyes and a dull pain in my calves from all the miles walked in the day.

We had been attacked with an iron rod the other night in retaliation for the masks we had gifted earlier. Subimal Basak, Debi Roy, and I had once chanced upon an enormous stockpile of masks being sold really cheap at wholesale rates in the Bagri Market of Burra Bazaar. We immediately bought two hundred of them—masks that depicted everything from animals, birds, and vermin to jesters, idiots, and monks. We even got a local job press to stamp the following message on them— 

Kindly Take Off Your Masks

Hungry Generation

Over the next few days, we began sending them off by post. Several were also directly placed in the letterboxes of the homes of prominent individuals. We spared no one: poets, authors, politicians, bureaucrats, police officers, professors, journalists, and businessmen were all at the receiving end. Soon afterward, gales of fury and indignation began raging throughout the city. Such a reaction was expected, but the brutal attack was not. The litterateurs of the day who had sent the goons after us are now lost in time, I don’t even come across their names or works anymore. It seems they have been utterly crushed under the weight of the literary establishment and turned into excellent manure for the fields! Back then, however, they were outraged by our masks and had deemed such an act totally unbecoming of poets and writers.

Before the advent of the Hungry Movement within Bengali literature, authors and poets here would go around looking unperturbed and unkempt, proudly flaunting their indifference to all worldly matters. Dressed mainly in a khadi kurta-pajama with a bag on their shoulder, they would judge the world through their languid, half-closed eyes like the typical frail matinee hero of the cinema of yesteryear. Interested only in the elitist Bengali favored in bourgeois circles, they relished ranting about how good they were and how bad was the rest of the world. They were so blindly obsessed with the vocabulary popularised by Rabindranath Tagore that, more often than not, their work read little better than literary fodder for the high-income groups. And when it came to portraying the lives of the lower classes in society, except the writers of the Kallol Movement, everyone else was busy putting vapid, petty bourgeois idealism on paper.

Despite the literary uproar brought in the wake of the Bengal Renaissance of the 19th century, by the beginning of the 1960s, the social duty of authors was entirely limited to merely influencing the tropes and motifs prevalent in the literature of the time, rather than using language to create a better society for posterity. As a result, there was a glaring absence of literary works that could radically alter the very intellectual framework of Bengali society. Literature was deemed to be primarily a so-called fine art that was excessively reliant on Tagore’s vocabulary, and elitist Bengali litterateurs entirely lacked the courage to incorporate the syntax and diction of the marginalized groups into their work. Subimal Basak and Subhash Ghosh, two of the poets actively involved with the Hungry Movement, were actually the first to do so within their own writings. Like the authors of the Kallol Movement, they were able to expand the horizon of literature by focusing on the experiences of the marginalized and interpreting them within the right social context. However, unlike the Kallol writers, the authors of the Hungry Movement themselves came from the lower classes, and naturally, their work evolved into a subaltern shockwave within the Bengali literature of the era. 

2

The Hungry Movement had originally been my brainchild. After the final exam of my MA in Economics at Patna University, there was ample time on my hands. The various threads of Marxist ideology were all tangled up in my mind back then, and I would relish sorting them out, only to entwine them once again. Meanwhile, my diary would keep getting heavier with more and more poems. I would also travel a lot with my friend Tarun Sur; sometimes we would go to Allahabad or take a steamer to Shonpur, a truck to Kolkata, or a bus to Ranchi. My elder brother worked for the Fisheries Department in Chaibasa at the time, and his friends from Kolkata—some of whom were well-known poets of the 1950s—often visited him to enjoy the region’s country liquor. Chaibasa was steeped in the sights and sounds of traditional tribal society, and I would go there too every now and then. Roaming all alone in the forests of the place, I would often explore the different villages of the Santhal tribe, observing the customary bloody cockfights where the birds would have knives tied around their feet. Upon returning to Patna, I would always be scolded by my father for my aimless wanderings.

Mother would fret over me as well since my paternal grandfather had a similarly restless disposition, and he refused to settle down anywhere despite roaming almost the entirety of South Asia all the way from Rangoon to Rawalpindi. He worked as a professional painter during the colonial era creating watercolor portraits of royal women from the various feudal kingdoms of the subcontinent. My father picked up some of his skills and later opened a photography studio in Patna. At the same time, my uncle was also hired as an artist by the Patna Museum. That’s why after the demise of my grandfather, our family put down roots in the city of Patna itself. My paternal grandmother Apurbomoyi, on the other hand, used to reside in our ancestral home in Uttarpara. A highly orthodox Brahmin lady, she would roam all over the home muttering to herself with just a red towel around her otherwise bare body. She spoke Bengali with a thick, colloquial accent, pronouncing words like ‘Brahmin’, ‘Kayastha’, or ‘motorman’ as ‘Bemmo’, ‘Kayet’, or ‘mochorman’ respectively. I was always afraid that she would raise a furor over my habit of eating beef and pork despite being a Hindu, and that’s the reason why I preferred putting up with Subimal in his uncle’s jewelry store in Kolkata.

Then came the year 1961. After the results of the MA final exam were out, my father began coaxing me to apply for higher studies at the Delhi School of Economics. But by then, I had already become captivated by the world of poems. Only twenty-two years old at the time, I was totally obsessed with poetry and Marxism. One day, I suddenly came across an interesting expression by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer that completely turned my world upside down: In the sowre hungry tyme. Hungry time, and that too a sour, hungry time! It made me realize that even in Bengali, the verb ‘eat’ has been subtly used to convey a plethora of meanings—we eat a kiss, as opposed to giving one; we eat a beating, rather than receiving one; if you’re corrupt, you might eat a bribe; you could eat your head off when annoyed, or eat the wind while going for a stroll. The word ‘hungry’ by then had a firm grip on my mind, and I decided to appropriate Chaucer’s hungry time for our own Indian literary traditions.

The elitist poems of Buddhadeb Basu, Amiya Chakrabarty, Bishnu Dey, and Sudhindranath Dutta were all the rage back then. The leftist journals were dominated by Subhash Mukhopadhyay, Dinesh Das, and Birendra Chattopadhyay, while the little magazines were obsessed with Shankha Ghosh, Alokeranjan Dasgupta, Alok Sarkar, and Sunil Gangopadhyay. The intellectual essence of their poems was based entirely on the world of privileged society. Their language was the mollycoddled tongue of the upper classes, with 90% of their vocabulary borrowed from Rabindranath, and they were particularly proud of their ability to dig up the most arcane and complicated words from the dictionary. The upcoming poets of that era were meanwhile mesmerized by their literary hero Buddhadeb Basu, who was known for being the Casanova editor of the Kabita magazine and could often be seen in a nightgown drinking tea with sugar cubes. Teeming with hatred, malice, fury, envy, inebriety, debauchery, and cynicism, their poems amounted to little more than philosophical sacrilege. They also used a host of bookish prosodies just to keep the reader distracted. Being mired in the petty-bourgeois environment, they could not even dream of challenging the reader through their poetic rhythm. Even their translations did not do justice to the work of foreign poets, since they were often marked by their own voice and style in Bengali. And when it came to the eventual poetic quality of their work, it always turned out to be utterly timid and effeminate.  

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The above has been excerpted from the book titled Hungry Kingbadanti: History of a Literary Revolution written by Malay Roy Choudhury, and first published in July 1994. This is the first in the series of writings from the book that will be published eventually on the magazine’s website. Keep a lookout for the upcoming episodes!

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