The Rebel Poets Of 1960’s Bengal

There is a certain kind of magnetic attraction that literary figures of the past hold over young struggling writers of today. We often look to their work, their lives and lifestyles for inspiration, adopting their methods and styles into our own experimentations with finding our own writer’s voice. We look to the past movements and revolutions that have created the literary landscape of today. Nothing seems to pull a writer in more than the Beat generation in 1950’s America. Young, scruffy anti-establishment writers living life on their own terms and rejecting dominant societal rules has a kind of attraction that makes you fantasize about travelling across cities with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, with the sun shining on your face – there’s definitely someone playing the harmonica – living the ideal hippie writer’s life you’ve imagined through romanticised notion of the Beats.

But once you wake up to the reality of adulthood and working, these images slowly start to change. Depending on the kind of writer you want to be you still strive to change the world with your words, create worlds of wonder, magic and whimsy, or even trigger entire revolutions. While we may all not end up being these ideal selves we’re created in our minds, there was a literary movement in India itself, our own Beat generation, in a way, that changed the way Bengali literature was received, read and written in the 1960’s.

The Hungryalist Movement was founded by what is referred to as the Hungryalist quartet by Dr Uttam Das in his dissertation ‘Hungry Shruti and Shastravirodhi Andolan’ – Malay Roychoudhury and his elder brother Samir Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Debi Roy, alias of Haradhon Dhara. These mavericks of the avant-garde shook an unsuspecting Calcutta’s (as it was named at the time) literary and cultural world and became a real force to reckon with. Members grew in number as more and more poets and writers came into the folds of this new generation of writers, resulting in one of the most historically and culturally significant trials of the Indian literary world.

The Hungryalist movement picked its name from Geoffrey Chaucer’s phrase “the sowre hungry tyme”. “When a civilisation falls, people tend to eat every thing that comes their way,” said Malay Roychoudhury in an interview with Nayanima Basu. “Today when I look at West Bengal, the Hungryalist premonition appears prophetic.”

The 1960s was host to a generation of disaffected youth in post-partition Bengal. They voiced their anger and sense of displacement by creating literature that challenged the pre-existing colonial perspectives and traditional readings of Bangla writings to make reader’s question how Indian literature is perceived and received. As Prof. S Mudgal explains, “The central theme of the movement was Oswald Spengler’s idea of History, that an ailing culture feeds on cultural elements brought from outside. These writers felt that Bengali culture had reached its zenith and was now living on alien food.”

The Hungry generation was more than just a group of angry young men. At the time, Bengali literature was, for lack of a better word, limited and inaccessible for most people. The Hungryalists wanted more – they wanted a new language, a new literary space that was open, accessible and representative of all Bengalis, not just limited to an elite few. “Their entire position was extremely iconoclastic. To break whatever was held sacrosanct till then, including the way n which they wrote poetry and the way in which they lived their lives,” said Ipshita Chanda, professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, to the BBC. Their frustration was shared with not just other poets, she explains, but with an entire generation of over-educated people who felt they had no future.

The Hungryalist quartet grew in number and was soon joined over the years with writings by renowned Bengali voices such as Subimal Basak, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Saileswar Ghose, Basudeb Dasgupta, Tridib Mitra, Subhas Ghose, Falguni Ray and Arunesh Ghose, to name a few. These were young writers who came from humble backgrounds and meagre means, and the political and social climate of the time only made their voices louder.

This was a difficult time in the region’s history. Thousands were displaced and forced to migrate following partition, with no money and no place to go – no place they belonged to. There was rampant poverty, food shortages and homelessness, but this immediate reality would never find its way into the writings and literature of the time – into the living rooms of the elite who lived sheltered lives in the comfort of their homes. The Hungryalists were very aware of this reality, and carried these people’s stories, their histories through words into the limelight in their pamphlets/bulletins.

The movement broke all conventions of writing – they were different in form, in content and rhythm from the traditional, ‘elitist’ works that dominated the literary sphere. These used language that was polite, cultured and ‘civilised’ and the Hungryalist’s disruption came into this space with a sense of pure anarchy. While they viewed Tagore’s language as ‘vegetarian’, their’s focused on being streetwise and colloquial, for the people, raw and relatable – the “language of life” that was viewed by the rest as vulgar and obscene.

As Malay Roychoudhury explained, they identified themselves as a part of the post-colonial period that disconnected itself from colonial canons. They published their work through single-sheet pamphlets that they would then distribute in coffee houses, colleges, and offices. While their anti-establishment antics may have carved for them a special place in the heart of Allen Ginsberg, who the Roychoudhurys met during his trip to India in the 60s, it definitely wasn’t for everyone, especially dominant Bengali society. Criticising society meant a harsh critique of politics and those in power. As Nayanima Basu writes, “The administration’s ire towards the Hungryalists reached its peak when the poets started a campaign to personally deliver paper masks of jokers, monsters, gods, cartoon characters and animals to Bengali politicians, bureaucrats, newspaper editors and other powerful people. The slogan was, ‘Please remove your mask’.”

Arrest warrants for eleven of the movement’s poets were issued, and Malay Roychoudhury, viewed as the face and leader of this bunch of troublemakers, was arrested on September 2, 1964. His poem ‘Prachanda Boidyutik Chhutar’ (translated as ‘Stark Electric Jesus’) didn’t sit well with the good Bengali people of civilised society, and he was charged with conspiracy against the state and literary obscenity. The trial went on for 35 months, he explains, during which he spent a month in jail. While many of the Hungry poets slowly began to break away from the movement during this time – many lost their jobs, faced regular police raids and some ventured into different fields altogether – Malay Roychoudhury received tremendous support from other friends and family, even from writers and poets abroad who read of the news in a Time magazine editorial, such as Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal, and Allen Ginsberg, who even wrote a letter in his support.

The charges were subsequently dropped by the High Court of Calcutta, but in the mean time the Hungry generation seemed to have dwindled to a handful of people. “Some of them carried the news to Europe and I started getting translated for the little magazines there,” said Malay Roychoudhury. “My poems were read at New York’s St Mark’s Church to raise funds to help me. It would have been impossible to fight the case up to the High Court without this help. I was poor, all my friends who were part of the movement deserted me, I lost my job with the Reserve Bank of India during the case, my grandmother died hearing the news of my imprisonment, and thus, I stopped writing.” But the spirit of the movement still lives on in the hearts and works of the Roychoudhurys and many other writers of the time, even if they separated themselves from the group.

The Hungryalists left an indelible impact on not just Bengali literature, but that of India. The Hungry generation are remembered as literary heroes, however romanticised our notions may be. These were writers that were hungry for a new voice and found themselves in a storm of politics and bold, brave words that stood as a declaration for a change, one that they themselves put into motion.

Read Nayanima Basu’s interview with Malay Roychoudhury here and listen to BBC’s podcast about the Hungry Generation here.