32 The Hungry Generation and Poetics

Rindon Kundu

Contents

Objectives of the chapter
Introduction to the History of Bengali Poetry from 1920-1950
Modernity and Adhunikata
History of the Hungry Generation
Objectives and Impact of the Hungryalist Movement:
Summary

1. Objectives of the chapter :

This module starts with a history of the Hungry Generation, a literary movement in the Bengali language in general and then moves towards the issue of the Hungry Generation Poetics – what does this particular phase in Bengali literature symbolize in terms of impact on the Bengali literature and evolution of the Bengali language and will try to problematize the whole issue. The following unit will concentrate on the socio political history of the contemporary time in Bengal and different perspectives pertaining to it. The last section will attempt to show the paradigm shifts at the outdated model of looking literature and art according to a city-centric, western educated, bourgeois sense of taste.

2. Introduction to the History of Bengali Poetry from 1920-1950

Before starting discussion about the Hungryalist poetry, we have to understand the background of Bengali poetry during and after-independence in general. The time between the ends of nineteenth century to the first three decades of the twentieth century is significant because it is the time when Bengali poetry or literature as a whole was dominated by Rabindranath Tagore and it is also a time when a young group of writers, full of revolutionary zeal, has started writing challenging this towering figure. Literary historians have called this era as Kallol epoch which is named after a magazine titled “Kallol Patrika”. The editors of this literary magazine were Dineshranjan Das, Gokulchandra Nag and Suniti Devi. But before the magazine started, Dineshranjan Das and Gokulchandra Nag formed ‘Four Arts Club’ and asked Suniti Devi to advise in organizing the club. The main agenda of the club was to usher a new modernity (adhunikata) which will emancipate the Bengali literature from Rabindra tradition. Soon this club and the magazine became the home for many young artist and litterateur like, Manindralal basu, Kantichandra Ghosh, Sudhir Kumar Chowdhury, painter and sculptor Atul Sur, Jamini Roy, Dhirendranath Gangyopadhyay, Debiprasad Roychowdhury, poet Uma Dasgupta, editor Nagendranath Gangopadhyay etc. There were also other magazines which shaped the contemporary time like, Kalikalam, Progoti, Dhupchhaya etc. where the young poets and intellectuals got the freedom to write and thus spread their thoughts about modernity which changed the perspectives of Bengali literature.

After the termination of the Kallol era, Bengali literature has entered into the ‘interwar period’ of thirties and forties. A few young poets have appeared into the scene and changed the face of the Bengali literature of that period – Jibanannada Das, Buddhadev Bose,

Bishnu De, Sudhindranath Datta, Amiya Chakrabarty, Hemchandra Bagchi, Ajit Das, Samar Sen and Subhash Mukhopadhyay. The poetry of the 30s and 40s was highly influenced by western modern poets like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Hilda Doolittle etc. The atrocious time between the First World War and Second World War, Einstein’s Relativity Theory, modern philosophy of Bergson, Kierkegaard, Heidegger etc. writings of Kafka, Mann, Proust, Joyce, Hemingway, Gide all have influences on the poetry of this time. Like in any other language, Bangla literary modernism too, had its own contradiction between radical disruption of form and traditionalism of content and ideology, which were exhibited on the pages of such periodicals bulletins as Kalikalam (1926), Parichoi (1931), Chhotogolpo Notun Reeti (1958), Hungry Andolon (1961), Shastravirodhi (1966), mouthpiece Ei Dashok and Neem Sahitya (1967).

3. Modernity and Adhunikata:

The immediate Independence, according to Tapadhir Bhattacharya in his Adhunikota: Parbo Theke Parbantor (1995), had left this Inter war period of ‘Deductive modernity’i in a state of oblivion and if ‘Deductive Modernity’ referred to the first phase of Modernity then, as argued by Tapadhir Bhattacharya, ‘Decadent Modernity’ can be referred to the second phase of the Modernism. In the wake of the new millennium linguist Prabal Dasgupta came up with the term Adhunantik meaning ‘beyond now’ or ‘beyond modern’. It confined itself to “after transgression, heterogeneity, eclecticism, multilinearity and plurality”, discarding closure and boundaries.”ii Adhunantika was constructed out of two Bengali words: Adhuna, meaning new, current, present times, contemporary, modern etc. and Antika, meaning closure, adjacent, end, extreme, beyond etc. so together the term Adhunantika refers to ‘beyond contemporary’. The contemporary condition of early 60s in West Bengal was in urgent need for a term to define the current trends.

4. History of the Hungry Generation

Ahead of starting our pilgrimage to the history of the Hungry Generation in Bengali literature, let us first understand the root of the term named, Hungryalism. According to Wikitionary, the term ‘Hungryalism’ was derived from a phrase by the medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucers “the sowre hungry tyme” out from a line written by him, “When it was in the sowre hungry tyme, ther was establissed or cryed grievous and unplitable coempcioun, that me sayen wel it schulde gretly tormenten and endamagen al the province of Campayne, I took stryf ayens the provost of the pretorie for commune profit.”iv Thus it is clear from the above mentioned line that the name Hungryalist movement was taken from the phrase ‘Hungry’ and linked to the contemporary condition of Bengal in the early sixties. The famous Hungry Generation Movement broke out in Calcutta during the early 1960s and took the fire to other parts of the country as well. Hungryalist Movement was an Indian literary movement in Bengali language that focussed primarily on poetry and was launched by a group of young Bengali poets spearheaded by the famous Hungryalist quartet, i.e. Malay Roychoudhury, his elder brother Samir Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay, and Debi Roy (aka Haradhon Dhara) which shook the roots of the Bengali literary and cultural establishment. The primary aim of this movement was “to confront and disturb the prospective reader’s preconceived colonial canons”. According to Pradip Choudhuri, a leading philosopher and poet of the generation, their counter-discourse was the first voice of post-colonial freedom of pen and brush. Besides the famous quartet, Utpalkumar Basu, Binoy Majumdar, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Basudeb Dasgupta, Falguni Roy, Pradip Choudhury, Subhash Ghosh, Saileshwar Ghosh, Tridib Mitra, Alo Mitra, Arunesh Ghosh, Ramananda Chattopadhyay, Anil Karanjai, Karunanidhan Mukhopadhyay, Subo Acharya, etc. were among the leading writers and artists who joined the movement.v The philosophical background of the movement was based on Oswald Spengler’s idea of Non Linear Time in a particular culture – an ailing culture feeds on cultural elements brought from outside. The theoretical basis for the movement was borrowed from Oswald Spengler’s book The Decline of the West, a two volume work that had influenced Malay greatly in his youth days. According to Spengler, the history of a culture does not move in a linear progression but develops into a number of cultural preferences, each with its own typical spiritual tendency, or idea of space within which they operate (Spengler 4). This whole theory was sounded revolutionary because it broke away completely from the traditional Hegelian concept of history being a process governed by Reason. Spengler uses the metaphor of biology as he says that this is an organic process and so it is impossible to predict towards which direction it would grow.

According to Malay Roychoudhury, who spearheaded the Hungryalist movement, “for Bangla postmodernist poetry the world was an object of willed action, raw material in their poems, guided and given form by the poet’s design. Meaning and designs had become one. The world itself had no meaning for them. They imposed sense and purpose. Their tools were symbols and images. It was a process in which nature became de-animated and the poet naturalized.” Malay Roychoudhury further writes,

For the Adhunantik poet, the Otherness is unbound. He is two headed with two codes. He can neither follow the canons of antiquity’s Kavya (Poetry), nor submit himself to the homogeneity of the logical unilinear (Ekaraikhik) close-ended narrative. He makes every effort to escape out of the literary hegemony and cultural contamination of Grand Thoery. In his quantum duality or Dwairajya or double-code, he is continuously reinventing his Avagati or episteme, as against the concept of Pragati or progress. He is Avagata of his Varnasamkar or hybridized, linguistic dislocation, which is a matter or literary pride, thrill, joy and ecstacy for him, as well as Baidhataa or legitimization of his Abhijnataa or experience.

This movement in arts and literature in West Bengal, India, during the period 1961-1965, is basically claiming that India was in the grip of sarvagrasi, meaning that its culture fed on all the morsels available to it from all over the world. Prof 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 his essay titled “Poetry of Chaos and Death” that though “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 & Jeanne Snyder. But however stimulating the visit of these American poets, however inspired by such writers as Artaud, Genet, Michaux, Burroughs, Miller, and Celine, I believe the Movement is autochthonous and stems from the profound dislocations of Indian life.”

The Hungrryalist Movement smashed the decadent mainstream Bengali literature around the year 1961 and it continued to 1965. We will start the historical voyage of the aforesaid movement by quoting the Time Magazine dated November 20, 1964.

A thousand years ago, India was the land of Vātsyāyana’s Kāma Sūtra, the classic volume that so thoroughly detailed the art of love that its translators still usually leave several key words in Sanskrit. Last week, in a land that has become so straitly laced that its movie heroines must burst into song rather than be kissed, five scruffy young poets were hauled into Calcutta’s dreary Bankshall Court for publishing works that would have melted even Vātsyāyana’s pen. The Hungry Generation had arrived. 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. On cheaply printed paper, they pour forth a torrent of starkly explicit erotic writings, most of them based on their own exploits (“In the Taj Mahal with My Sister”) or on dreams. “My theme is me,” says Hungry Poet Shaileshwar Ghose, 26, a schoolteacher. “I say what I feel. I feel frustration, hunger for love, hunger for food.

The first bulletin however, was published in English since Bengali typefaces were hard to find in the Hindi speaking township of Patna and the only printer with the required typefaces refused to publish it. This first bulletin goes:

Poetry is no more a civilizing maneuver, 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. […]Naturally, we have discarded the blanket-blank school of modern poetry, the darling of the press, where poetry does not resurrect itself in an orgasmic flow, but words come out bubbling in an artificial muddle. […] Saturated with self-consciousness, poems have begun to appear from the tomb of logic or the bier of unsexed rhetoric.

From the essay titled. “No Hungry Generations Tread Thee Down”? — Exploring the Poetics of Alterity” by Sanchari Bhattacharya we came to know Debi Roy was responsible for the strategically disbursement of the pamphlets and bulletins at the intellectual spaces. The bulletin was reprinted with slight revisions in 1962 and then again in November 1963 under the heading “The Hungryalist Manifesto on Poetry”. By then, the movement had gathered quite a few members whose names were printed on the flipside of the reprinted pamphlet. Meanwhile many other bulletins and manifestoes were constantly being issued and distributed freely by the Hungryalists which caused the number of members to cross forty, by January 1964. Samir had introduced his friends Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Utpalkumar Basu and Binoy Majumdar; Malay had brought in his friends Subimal Basak, Sambhu Rakshit, Tapan Das, Anil Karanjai and Karunanidhan Mukhopadhyay; Subimal Basak had brought in his friends Tridib Mitra, AloMitra and Falguni Ray; Shakti had brought in Arupratan Basu, Pradip Choudhuri and Basudeb Dasgupta; Debi Ray had brought in Subo Acharya, Subhas Ghosh, Satindra Bhowmik, Haranath Ghose, Nihar Guha, Saileswar Ghosh, Amritatanay Gupta, Ramananda Chattopadhyay, Sunil Mitra, Shankar Sen, Bhanu Chattopadhyay, Ashok Chattopadhyay, Jogesh Panda and Manohar Das. The painters Anil and Karuna, brought in painters like Subir Chatterjee, Bibhuti Chakrabarty, Arun Datta and Bibhas Das into the fold of the movement. Before long, the Hungry Generation had become a socio-cultural force to deal with. Many contemporary critics were of the idea that Hungryalism was deeply influenced by Dadaism.

According to Malay Roychoudhury, who spearheaded the Hungryalist movement…for Bangla postmodernist poetry the world was an object of willed action, raw material in their poems, guided and given form by the poet’s design. Meaning and designs had become one. The world itself had no meaning for them. They imposed sense and purpose. Their tools were symbols and images. It was a process in which nature became de-animated and the poet naturalized. Malay Roychoudhury further writes,

Howard McCord 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.”

From the nineteenth century if we carefully analyze the literary experiments happened in Bengali as well as in other Indian languages, we will see that primarily they are heavily influenced by the western experimentations and thereby replicating the colonial aesthetics. Secondly, all the leading literary magazines like Parichay (1931), Kallol (1932), Krittibas (1953) are the embodiment of Calcutta centric middle class babu culture. The Hungryalists have tried to go beyond this colonial structure of conflicts and completely negated that discourse through de-identification, not re-identifications. The length of the Hungryalist pamphlets is of one page and they were published form Patna by Malay Roychoudhury. The Hungryalists published their precise, solidified commentary and notes on various issues ranging from poetry, short story, drama to economics, religion, society, politics, obscenity and even life and distributed them all across Calcutta – in the College Street Coffee House, many magazine and newspaper offices, in colleges, especially in the Bengali departments and libraries etc. Since a large body of writing was printed on handbills and leaflets, the Hungryalists were unable to preserve and archive much of their work which leads to some difficulty in carrying on extensive and detailed research on the movement. But it no doubt fulfilled their immediate objective – that of being noticed by both common people and those in power. Professor Howard McCord clearly states about the Hungryalist poetry, “These are sincere and harmless poems, and aside from a little local colour, could have been written in Leeds or Philadelphia. The denatured cosmopolitanism that infects the poetry of the West prevails in India as well, and few of the poems carry any sense of place, or the sound of a man speaking, or the rasping smell of cow-dung fires”.

In between 1963 to 1965, the Hungryalists had also started publishing a few magazines, e.g., Protidwondwi edited by Subimal Basak, Unmargo edited by Tridib Mitra, Jebra edited by Malay Roychoudhury, Chinho edited by Debi Ray, Phoo edited by Pradip Choudhury, Eshona edited by Satindra Bhowmick and the only English language magazine of the movement, The Waste Paper, edited by Alo Mitra.

Sunil Gangopadhyay, in his editorial in Krittibas, castigated the movement:

We don’t know whether the Hungry Generation movement is good or bad. We have nothing to comment about its future. However, none of the leaflets circulated by them had shown any remarkable literary merit— ordinary writings aspiring to be different. Funnily enough, some are even juvenile. Other than that, the non-literary associations that the movement seems to have developed are indeed disgusting. We really couldn’t imagine that a few youths would attempt to create literature in Pidgin English even after 1960. But if the movement can give rise to a different kind of literature, we’ll definitely welcome it. (“Hungry Bulletin O Patrika Theke”) [1961 – 1965].

Hungryalists became famous as a radically anti establishment force and Malay Roychoudhury is the leading figure amongst them, 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. We can see this kind of anarchical move in other Hungryalists. They would deliver paper masks of animals, monsters and gods to ministers, critics, publishers and other powerful people with the slogan ‘please remove your mask’. They would critique poets on wedding cards and make obscene sketches on papers and posters and distribute them for free. They would send shoeboxes for book review or blank paper in the name of short stories to well known commercial newspaper offices. They violently attacked the administration and media. They would often go to Benaras or Kathmandu and engage in sexual anarchy and drug abuse along with hippies. They would exhibit Hungryalist paintings and at the end of the exhibition, set fire to all of them. It was their firm belief that it was only through such brutality that the colonial hangover which the decadent Bengali culture had absorbed, could be shaken out of the Bengali socio-literary arena. Naturally, these meetings, exhibitions and promotion of such literature among the masses led to a socio-literary unrest which alarmed the government.

Finally, the administration intervened. On 2nd September 1964, an arrest warrant was issued against eleven Hungryalists namely Samir Roychoudhury, Malay Roychoudhury, Debi Ray, Subhash Ghosh, Saileshwar Ghosh, Pradip Choudhury, Utpal Kumar Basu, Ramananda Chattopadhyay, Basudeb Dasgupta, Subo Acharya and Subimal Basak under IPC sections 120b and 292. Articles were seized from Samir and Malay’s ancestral home in Patna on 4th September. Consequently, a charge sheet against Malay was submitted at the Bankshal court by Calcutta Police on 3rd May 1965. The charge sheet goes:

In August 1964 a printed booklet entitled Hungry Generation published by Samir Roychoudhury was found in circulation at Kolkata. The poetry captioned Prachanda Boidyutik Chhutar (Stark Electric Jesus) by Malay Roychoudhury was found obscene and the Director of Public Prosecution, West Bengal being consulted, observed that the book was actionable under Section 292 of Indian Penal Code, and suggested prosecution of Malay Roychoudhury, who is on criminal bail till today the 3rd May 1965, may be prosecuted against under Section 292 IPC. (Hungry Generation)

5. Objectives and Impact of Hungryalist Movement:

He bitterly condemns western aesthetic movements like art of art’s sake, art for technique’s sake, art for form’s sake, art for symbol’s sake etc. and the imitators of such movements in the Bengali bourgeois scholastic circle. Vision can be attained only through the mediation of the ‘native idiom’ and it is this native idiom that serves as the language of real poetry, the language of resistance. In the Hungryalist Manifesto, the objectives of the Movement have been clearly stated:

To never emulate the reality of Aristotle, but to take the un-enameled whoring reality by shock under the genital of Art.
To let speechlessness burst into communication without breaking the silence.
To let free a creative ruckus, in order to unknot the knotted world and start afresh from chaos.
To exploit every matrix of senses except that of a writer.
To disclose the belief that world and existence are justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.
To accept all doubts and despairs rather than to be content to live with the sense made by others.
To lash out against the values of the bi-legged career making animals.
To abjure all meretricious blandishments for the sake of absolute sincerity.
To stop writing and painting beyond the point of self-realization.

Prevailing Canons

1. Establishment 2. Tyranny 3. Insiders 4. Elite high-brow culture 5. Satisfied 6. C ohesive 7. Showy 8. Sex as known 9. Socialite 10. Lovers 11. Ecstasy 12. Unmoved 13. Hatred as camouflage 14. Art films 15. Art 16. Sugam Sangeet (Tagore songs) 17. Dream 18. Tutored language 19. Redeemed 20. Framed 21. Conformist 22. Indifferent 23. Mainstream 24. Curiosity 25. Endocrine 26. Conclusions inevitable 27. Ceremony 28. Throne 29. Entertainer 30. Self-projecting 31. How am I 32. Symmetrical 33. Accountants of prosody 34. Revising poems 35. Fantasy’s game.

Hungryalist Canons

1. Anti-Establishment 2. Protester 3. Outsiders 4. Commoners’ culture 5. Unsatisfied 6. Brittle 7. Raw-bone 8. Sex as unknown 9. Sociable 10. Mourners 11. Agony 12. Turbulent 13. Real hatred 14. All films 15. Life 16. Any song 17. Nightmare 18. Gut language 19. Unredeemed 20. Contestatory 21. Dissident 22. Struck ethically 23. Watershed 24. Anxiousness 25. Adrenalin 26. No end to unfolding 27. Celebration 28. Abdication 29. Thought provoking 30. Self-effacing 31. How are you 32. Tattered and decanonized 33. Extravagance 34. Continuation revision of life 35. Imagination’s flight (Hungry Generation).

6. Summary :

So from this module we have learnt about the Hungryalist Generation of Bengal who according to philosopher Pradip Choudhuri, was the first voice of post-colonial freedom of pen and brush. We will end this module with the words by Malay Roychoudhury when he was asked about the comeback of the Hungryalist movement in present time, “I am quite often approached by young poets and writers, to guide them so that they may relaunch the Hungryalist movement. I tell them to understand their own space and time and thereafter devise their own platform to express themselves.”

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