রবিবার, ১ এপ্রিল, ২০১৮

Juliet Reynolds : Art, the Hungryalists, and the Beats


Art, the Hungryalists, and the Beats

By Juliet Reynolds
As both movements were predominated by poets and writers, there can be few to argue with the established perception that the Beat Generation and the Hungry Generation were primarily literary in character. While the two movements have tended to invite comparison with the Dadaists, no-one would define either as an ‘art movement’, as Dada so patently was, its literary associations notwithstanding.
Yet a closer look at the history and legacy of the Beats and the Hungryalists reveals beyond doubt that visual art and artists occupied a more pivotal place in their movements than is generally supposed. This seems at first reckoning to be truer of the Beat movement, whose annals contain a riveting art narrative that runs from their very beginnings and has barely come to a stop. Of course, it must be borne in mind that Beatdom is much better documented and appraised than Hungryalism, thanks in the main to the First World-Third World divide.  While the Beats’ counter-culture evolved in the most powerful nation on earth, the Hungryalists’ took shape in an impoverished, underdeveloped country, that too in a single state or region.
Moreover, Hungryalism was politically suppressed in a way and to an extent that Beatdom was not. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Corso, Burroughs and the rest could turn their notoriety to advantage, even if they didn’t desire it.  This would allow their movement to endure and evolve so that it would live on in the collective consciousness and become a cult.
On the other hand, the movement launched in 1961 by Malay Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Samir Roychoudhury and Debi Roy was decimated within a few years due to official hounding as well as internal strife, a good deal of it fomented precisely because of the harassment. The prosecution of Malay and others for obscenity and his subsequent imprisonment was but part of the Bengal administration’s crackdown on Hungryalism. Booked for conspiracy, every member of the group was subjected to ruthless police raids resulting in the confiscation of their intellectual and personal property, including books, writings and letters. The Hungryalist artists – Anil Karanjai, Karunanidhan (Karuna) Mukhopadhyay, and others attached to their studio in Banaras, named the Devil’s Workshop – witnessed the seizure of their art works and all
Anil Karanjai, The Dreamer, 1969
Anil Karanjai, The Dreamer, 1969
records of the movement, never to see their restitution. Fortunately, a body of Anil’s work, created in the immediate post-Hungryalist era, remained in his hands or became part of collections, and because the imagery this encompasses is strongly marked by the ideas and concerns of the movement, it provides the basis for a more comprehensive understanding of Hungryalism. It’s not a cliché to state that images so often speak more eloquently than words.
Just as Anil Karanjai (1940-2001) was the only adherent of the Hungry Generation to dedicate his life to art,
 Portrait of Allen Ginsberg               by Robert LaVigne, c. mid-1950s
Portrait of Allen Ginsberg by Robert LaVigne, c. mid-1950s
there was a sole true Beat painter, Robert LaVigne (1928-2014). As recorded by Allen Ginsberg, LaVigne had helped give birth to the Beat Generation.  The artist’s roomy house in San Francisco was a gathering place for the wild, unclothed ‘bohemians’ of all genders who personified the movement. LaVigne did graphics and poster art for the group, as well as producing his own paintings. Anil and Karuna worked similarly with the Hungryalists.
Ginsberg and LaVigne shared aesthetic concerns. They both focused on themes of decay and death reflecting the angst of the young generation in the Atomic Age which, to quote LaVigne, ‘gave the lie to permanence’.  The question of creating durable art in a world with no future had a paralysing effect on him, a state he might not have come out of had he not discovered Beatdom. ‘The mad, naked poet’, as Ginsberg was known, and ‘the naked, great painter’, as Ginsberg
Girl
Sketch of a Young Girl, Anil Karanjai 1991
described LaVigne, both created telling portraits of friends and intimates, the former searingly in ‘Howl’, the latter more gently in lines and colour.  His oil portrait of the young Ginsberg illustrates this amply.
In contrast to his Beat counterpart, Anil Karanjai came to portraiture quite late in his life. Stylistically, the two artists are at variance but in several of their portraits there is a similar expression of tenderness for the subject. This is much in evidence, for instance, in Anil’s charcoal sketch of Karuna’s young daughter, a girl Anil had known since birth and who had been almost a mascot for the Hungryalist artists.
Portrait of Peter Orlovsky by Robert LaVigne, c. mid-1950s
                Portrait of Peter Orlovsky by Robert LaVigne, c. mid-1950s
Ginsberg’s favourite work by his painter friend LaVigne, also his rival in love, was a huge portrait of the young Peter Orlovsky. Naked with an uncircumcised penis and crop of dark pubic hair, the work is sexually charged but it is also sad and contemplative. Ginsberg wrote that when he first saw the portrait, before ever meeting the subject, he ‘looked in its eyes and was shocked by love’. By the standards of the day, Ginsberg and LaVigne were both pornographers. But unlike the poet, the painter managed to evade prosecution, a remarkable feat given that full-frontal nudity was deemed obscene until the early 1970s and homosexuality was a cognizable offence.
Like Robert LaVigne, Anil Karanjai painted nudes, without legal repercussions.  But, as may be remarked in his romantic canvas ‘Clouds in the Moonlight’ (1970), the Hungryalist was more of a visionary than the Beat painter.
Anil Karanjai, Clouds in the Moonlight, 1970
                                               Anil Karanjai, Clouds in the Moonlight, 1970
The grand poet and co-founder of City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was charged with obscenity for publishing ‘Howl’ and who published the Hungryalists when they were standing trial, was also a painter of considerable accomplishment. Ferlinghetti’s expressionistic imagery – the earliest semi-abstract, the later figurative and often directly political – is very compelling and underlines his deep commitment as an activist.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Against the Chalk Cliffs, 1952-7
             Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Against the Chalk Cliffs, 1952-7
The prosecuted author of ‘Naked Lunch’, William Burroughs, is a further major figure of the Beat Generation to have been a visual artist. But the paintings and sculptures of Burroughs are literal horrors. He was known at times to have painted with his eyes shut in order to explore his psyche, which was considerably deranged, not just by an overload of hard drugs and perverse sexual drives. Some of his canvases are riddled with bullet holes, a reminder to his viewers that he shot his wife to death while playing William Tell, mistaking her head for a highball. Later known as ‘the father of Punk’, Burroughs enjoyed a friendship with the ‘father of Pop Art’, Andy Warhol, himself no stranger to guns, even if as victim rather than shooter. Burroughs was a frequent visitor to Warhol’s New York studio, known as ‘The Factory’.
In their earlier days, the Beats were loosely linked to the Abstract Expressionist painters and although the latter were not quite so flagrant in their unorthodox personal lives, they shocked the media and public in equal measure when it came to their work. They also created in a similar vein, eschewing conventional art forms and expressing themselves spontaneously; to achieve this end, they applied rapid, fluid strokes on outsized
Anil Karanjai, Summer Morning (detail) 1971
Anil Karanjai, Summer Morning (detail) 1971
canvases; this was consistent with ‘the orgasmic flow’ that was a lynchpin of Hungryalism. Abstract expressionist paintings may appear anarchic but, in common with the writings of both the Beats and the Hungryalists, their art was conceptual in construct; in essence, their chaos was planned.
The image of the artist creating in a frenzy of uncontrolled passion is but a cliché, and few painters underlined this more cogently than Anil Karanjai. Even as a neophyte, full of fury and restless energy, he produced painstaking, considered work. If anything, his experience with the Hungryalists, among whom he was one of the
Hieronymus Bosch                                   The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail) late 15th-early 16th century
Hieronymus Bosch The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail) late 15th-early 16th century
youngest, served to heighten these qualities. The only western painter to have influenced him in any way was the Dutch master, Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516). Bosch’s grotesque satirical imagery inspired Anil as he struggled to create his own unique vision of the hierarchical, oppressive society around him. Abstract Expressionism was unknown to Anil until much later on.
The most notorious Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock – ‘Jack the Dripper’ – likewise an ‘action painter’, is one of several artists who finds a place among the writers at The American Museum of Beat Art (AMBA) in California. So too is the supreme Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp, who had coined the term ‘anti-art’ before any of the Beats were born and was, therefore, one of their idols. But the story goes that when Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso met Duchamp in Paris in the late 1950s, they were so inebriated that the former kissed his knees while the latter cut off his tie; by now an elder of the art world, Duchamp was probably not amused. The Beats’ conduct in those days could be so selfishly outrageous that they managed to antagonise many, including Jean Genet, hardly known for model behaviour himself.
It’s doubtful whether the subject of art arose in a meaningful way between Anil Karanjai and Allen Ginsberg when they spent time together in Banaras. The American had his mind on ‘higher things’, namely sadhus, burning ghats, mantras and ganja. Apart from introducing Ginsberg to the harmonium, in the company of the Buddhist, Hindi poet, Nagarjuna, Anil and Karuna taught Ginsberg and Orlovsky the art of chillum-smoking, an almost ritualistic activity, not at all easy to master. Otherwise, Ginsberg appears to have shown little curiosity about the art of the Hungryalists. This did not offend Anil who was then very young, thrilled to have the opportunity to converse in English, a language with which he was not then familiar. Neither Anil nor Karuna would have been overawed by the feted American, but Anil would sometimes quote him later: “America when will you send your eggs to India?”, from the poem America, was a favourite line.
Ginsberg no doubt was not a racist, not at least on a conscious level. But there was an element of white man’s arrogance within him, as there surely was in other Beats. Despite being an anti-establishment movement, it was at some levels a highly elitist one as well. Burroughs, for example, seems to have got away with his wife’s killing because he was a Harvard alumnus and came from a rich family. The background of Ginsberg was not quite so privileged but he rose to superstardom young. No amount of ‘slumming-it’ in India could change that, could knock him from his pedestal; in addition, he must have been treated to a fair share of ‘chamchagiri’ during his travels. Probably the Hungryalists were among the few to exchange ideas with him as equals, and his failure to acknowledge their impact on his poetry and thinking reflects poorly upon him.
Ginsberg, who was evidently quite taken by religion in India, may not have entirely appreciated the Hungryalists’ views on the subject. They denounced god and all forms of belief and worship in the most condemnatory of terms. Anil’s upbringing in Banaras had rendered him particularly irreligious; he’d been challenging temple elders since the age of 12, often defeating them with his superior knowledge of the Hindu scriptures and his sharp tongue. With a scientific bent of mind, he would remain a staunch atheist throughout his life.  Early Buddhism did appeal to him, but he was critical of the Tibetan form of Buddhism, later embraced by Allen Ginsberg. Of course, the Beat poet’s anti-war politics and activism did accord with Anil’s worldview, as it must have with others of the erstwhile Hungry Generation.
As far as the Hungryalists’ politics was concerned, Anil was at one with their ferocious attack on the entrenched establishment, but he rejected their anarchism, their precept that existence is ‘pre-political’ and that all political ideologies should be precluded. He had enrolled in and quit the Communist Party much prior to joining Hungry Generation, but he would thereafter remain committed to the far left. It is a myth he became a Naxalite when Hungryalism fizzled out.
There is truth in the legend that the Hungryalists engaged in sexual anarchy in Banaras and Kathmandu, but compared to the shenanigans of the Beats this was really quite tame. Anil and Karuna did live with seekers and hippies in an international commune, and indeed Karuna was its manager and sometimes head cook. Further, a large part of their subversive activities did involve the consumption of consciousness expanding substances including LSD, magic mushrooms and the like, but their experiments were always undertaken in a controlled environment. This did make a great mark on Anil but because he never consumed substances irresponsibly, the outcome was positive, helping to liberate and enhance his vision as a painter. This hardly constituted ‘drug abuse’ as claimed by some.
Further, the deliberate burning of paintings by their Hungryalist creators is a much exaggerated story, largely based on the aftermath of an exhibition in 1967 at a well-known Kathmandu gallery. The event coincided with a writers’ conference that was attended by Malay and others who had remained loyal to Hungryalism. It was Karuna alone who destroyed his work. Anil enjoyed the spectacle but remained on the side-lines. Such anti-art gestures didn’t fit his philosophy. His iconoclasm was of another kind.
Anil Karanjai, The Competition, 1968
                                                       Anil Karanjai, The Competition, 1968
Yet, whatever his divergences with Hungryalist ideology, Anil shared the movement’s aesthetic concerns. This is most immediately perceptible in his works of the late ’60s such as ‘The Competition’. Painted in 52 straight hours in the Banaras commune, the work is based on a banyan tree, a metaphor for the chaos and struggle of the times. It also reflects the aspiration of the Hungryalists, as well as that of the Beats, to reintegrate humans with the natural world, a world in which obscenity is non-existent and lost innocence is restored.
Although Anil’s work metamorphosed and matured in his post-Hungry Generation decades, his experience with the movement remained in his consciousness. His ideas may have come from many sources, but he never lost sight of that Hungryalist goal. Much of his late work is apparently classical, an expression of realism. His landscapes in particular seem to be the antithesis of his early ‘surreal’ imagery and this tends to confound his viewers. But while it is certainly true that the provocative, rhetorical imagery has vanished, the foundations remain the same. From beginning to end, Anil’s art expresses the drama of the human condition through the moods and forms of nature. And this does accord with Hungryalist poetry. Take, for instance, the lines of Shakti Chattopadhyay:
“Like a football the moon is poised over the hill
Waiting for the late night game and the war cries
At these moments you can visit the forest…”
(Translated by Arunava Sinha)
Anil Karanjai, Moonrise, 1990
                                                                      Anil Karanjai, Moonrise, 1990
The poet conjures up an image very close in mood and feeling to a late work of Anil’s, part of a series of mysterious night landscapes. Binoy Majumdar also approaches the spirit of this image when he says:
“all trees and flowering plants stand on their own
grounds at a distance forever
dreaming of breathtaking union.”
(Translated by Aryanil Mukherjee )
The concept of nature’s creations ‘dreaming of breathtaking union’ is echoed time and again in the life’s work of Anil Karanjai.
So too is the theme of the lonely creator or thinker which he expressed with great range. In a canvas of  1969,  titled ‘The Dreamer’, the thinker is
Anil Karanjai, The Builder (watercolour), 1979
Anil Karanjai, The Builder (watercolour), 1979
shaped by confrontational Hungryalism and LSD, while a work in watercolour presents the theme in a way that parallels a declaration of Malay Roychoudhury: “…for me, the first poet was that Zinjanthropus who lifted a stone millions of years ago and made it into a weapon.” Later, Anil’s solitary poets or philosophers, set in stone, are encircled by nature, their only weapons their knowledge and experience. All these works are executed with mastery. It reflects well on Hungryalism that it is associated with an artist of such calibre and originality.
Anil Karanjai, Solace in Solitude, 2000
                                                 Anil Karanjai, Solace in Solitude, 2000
*All the works by Anil Karanjai accompanying this piece belong to the collection of the writer, with the exception of ‘The Dreamer’, which is in the collection of Anjana Batra, New Delhi; ‘Clouds in the Moonlight’ is part of the collection of The Kumar Gallery, New Delhi and New York.
Bio:
Juliet Reynolds is a critic and writer, specialising in Indian art and socio-cultural issues. Of mixed Irish-English descent, she was born in Ireland and educated in England, France and Italy. A gold medallist from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, she worked for many years as an English and drama teacher with students of diverse ethnicity. Based in New Delhi and Dehradun, she has spent most of her working life in India. Here she has established a reputation as a resolute critic and commentator, and as a bridge between scholars and the lay reader. The publications to which she has contributed include The Spectator, The Insight Guide to India, The India International Centre Quarterly Review, The Pioneer and Biblio. She is the author of In the Eyes of a Rasika: a connoisseur’s view of art and politics, art and science (Srishti/Bluejay, 2003) and Finding Neema, (Hachette, 2013). Her late husband was the Hungryalist artist, Anil Karanjai.
***

Madhubanti Chanda : The Poetic Revolution of the Hungryalists.


“I am ‘Hunger’- Dissent on your Tongue”……The Poetic Revolution of the Hungryalists



Scientists at their research lab were contemplating on their novel project of sending a man to the moon.
"Man on the Moon Project" hungryalist
                             “Man on the Moon Project”
They found their best person in the “common man” who could “survive without water, food, light, air, shelter”.Nothing captured the decadence and depravity of the previous century better than the lethal pen of R.K. Laxman. His caricatures portrayed the essence of a generation suffering vices, vices political in nature and socially-corrosive in its magnitude. The civil unrest embodied it, Bollywood films epitomised it. Indeed, come to think of it, the 60s, 70s and 80s, lurking below the surface of silenced memories is a seething turbulence of political will gone wrong, economic collapse and a “hungry tide” washing over….
sb, hungryalist
                            A picture of destitution; A slum in Kolkata captured in 1961
Born of these “sore times” was the “Hungry Generation”, a clique of avant-garde poets, based in West Bengal yet spreading across the latitude of the entire Nation, to the further corners of Italy, France, Germany, et al. While “Avant-garde” is what they are labelled with, reading about them made me feel they were much more than controversial bards experimenting with the verses. They were the face of the “hungry”; the displaced, the wounded, the tongawalla riding in anguish through the city streets, the low-paid labourer slurring colourful slangs in an urban ghetto, the migrants cramped breathless in the refugee camps, any picture of destitution your mind could conjure. In Hindi, it was translated as “Bhookhi Peedhi”, in Bangla it was called “Kkhudito projonmo”, the name it was originally started with.“I’ll disrupt and destroy
I’ll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art
There isn’t any other way out for poetry except suicide”
Manifesto of the Hungryalist Movemet hungryalist
                                                       Manifesto of the Hungryalist Movemet
……wrote the Hungryalist Malay Choudhury in his most famous poem, “Stark Electric Jesus” a piece of writing that landed him straight inside the prison. The Hungryalist agenda was clear, that it had to be “anti-establishment”. Anything that had to do with the law, the State, with conformity, with order, compliance, the middle-class, the value-structure, were overturned, even if they remotely reeked of the bourgeoisie. But they did not pretend to be the ideologues of Marxism, they were anti-Marxists. Marxists, quite ironically were then holding the reins of power and running the State, they hoped to demolish. Their literary manifesto was made of turbulent goals that featured the essence of “protestor” and “raw commoner’s culture” and thus their verses ran straight into depths of obscenity, scathing the high-brow elites still basking in the glories of the 19th Century Madhusudan and of course Tagore.
The Hungryalists in their initial days, posing with David Garjiya (as could be deciphered from the label written in Bengali) hungryalist
The Hungryalists in their initial days, posing with David Garjiya (as could be deciphered from the label written in Bengali)
They rhymed coitus and dead foetus and wrote in the language spoken by the subaltern Tongawallas. To the middle-class it never was a language but a dialect spoken by their domestic help and that was the language they were immersing in poetry! It was a wild heretical, outrageously obnoxious for some, but for the larger population seething under power-structures, it was their voice.
When Tridib Mitra wrote his poem- "I got thrown out into brain’s chaos from geometric calculations hated civility and sought refuge in machinations of civilization" hungryalist
When Tridib Mitra wrote his poem- “I got thrown out into brain’s chaos from geometric calculations, hated civility and sought refuge in machinations of civilization”
The voice, trampled by societal make-up and hushed by the roaring trams and city-traffic was the Hungryalist instrument and thus many lower-caste writers, who would otherwise have never been allowed into the literary pantheon was given a space. It accorded to them the respectability of a writer, never mind if ushered in a career of death and chaos. But the Hungryalists had a great penchant for turbulence, a pedantic one at that. After stirring disturbance in the literary world, they executed practical jokes by sending masquerades of jokers, drags and caricatures of mythical characters to politicians, erudite writers, bureaucrats and everyone else who was playing party to the oppressive power-structure. Inside the gift was a letter in which would be written, “Please remove your masques”! Their audacity astonished the bourgeois sensibilities, rudely, exasperatingly.
The Beat Generation writings that was influenced by ad collaborated with the Hungryalists. Malay Choudhury in a letter to El Corno said, " I shall be glad, naturally, if you please send your works translated into English so that we can translate them in our languages and introduce you to a large and interested audience down here." hungryalist
The Beat Generation writings that was influenced by ad collaborated with the Hungryalists. Malay Choudhury in a letter to El Corno said, ” I shall be glad, naturally, if you please send your works translated into English so that we can translate them in our languages and introduce you to a large and interested audience down here.”

Yeates wrote……
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,”
Come to think of the 60s and my mind is infiltrated with images of unrest and more unrest. It was in the time thereafter that the Naxal menace sprang off with great ideological underpinnings. The country was filled with a restless tide stretching across the length and breadth, materialising over the multitude of riots and state-sponsored killings. They were most importantly anguish over the dream ushered by independence broken. But the dissonance was everywhere…..
The Nepali edition of the Hungryalist magazine, edited by Samir Roy Choudhury hungryalist
The Nepali edition of the Hungryalist magazine, edited by Samir Roy Choudhury
The 60s was the time of a great social revolution. British prudery was greeted with the sexual revolution that at once drove the sanity of a traditional family out of the vogue. Hippie communities fringed the urban sidewalks and LSD perforated through a generation of people. Indeed “Stark electric Jesus” resonated with so many people across nationalities and identities and thus translated into Spanish, Italian, French and several other languages. Hunger was a primal problem. What’s common to all of them is the utter suffocation engulfing so many people. The dissatisfaction was growing and structures were dismantling in a sea of uncertainty. Whereas the Hippie communes dreamt of building up from the ruins….the Hungryalists were incorrigible mourners spitting venom over dreams lost, the helplessness! And yet…all of them failed to remain sustainable.
Malay Choudhury now, still battling the war of words hungryalist
Malay Choudhury now, still battling the war of words
…..Thus Malay Roy Choudhury was prosecuted for his verses. The Hungryalist poets continued to circulate their stinging verses across streets and colleges. As its popularity spread to other regions too, the State, a Marxist one coerced a crack-down on their project. Many writers were arrested. Some writers deflected and even notified against their fellow Hungryalists. They who started with an unwavering passion lost out on so much. Eventually the movement died……Yet the pen keeps writing and protesting and till today, the literary circle boasts of Malay Choudhury and several other revolutionaries like him who continue to stir the ethers with their pens.
icytales.com

Beat & Hungryalist movements by Goirick Brahmachari & Abhimanyu Kumar


 The Beat and the Hungry generation: When losing became hip

By Goirick Brahmachari & Abhimanyu Kumar
When Cafe Dissensus asked us to edit a special issue on the Beats and the Hungryalists, we were very unsure about the kind of response we might receive.  But, during the next few months, we received a stream of submissions and solicited works from writers, photographers, poets, artists, Beatniks, Hungry generation enthusiasts and academic researchers alike. It was indeed an enriching experience to go through the pieces, to learn about the new areas that have remained unexplored, to acquaint ourselves with some critical questions that require attention within the scope of the Beat and the Hungryalist literature, and to trace the mutual connections and differences between the two schools, their triumphs and follies.
For this special issue on the Beat and the Hungry Generation, in his superb essay, “Spring and Oblivion”, Indran Amirthanayagam revisits Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems through his personal memory of the poet (who was close friends with his father), their interactions, the copy of the book gifted to his father by Allen and Ginsberg’s readings that Indran had attended.
Poet and Beat researcher, Marc Olmsted’s essay investigates Ginsberg’s source and commitment towards Tibetan Buddhism and tries to find how he balanced it with his political views/socialism.
While Marc Goldin (writer and Beat researcher) traces Burroughs and his pals, their days of haze and hallucinations all the way up to Tangier – its magic and influence on their writing, Uttaran Das Gupta’s “Performing the hobo in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road” questions if Kerouac was indeed a hobo and investigates if playing the hobo itself was an art of some sort, scrutinising it through theories of theatre. Titas De Sarkar does a fine critical survey of Hungryalist Manifestoes. Priyabrata Das’s survey of socio-economic, political and cultural condition of Bengal in the 1940s is a fine prelude to the Hungry Generation.
Art critic (and wife of famous Hungryalist painter, Anil Karanjai), Juliet Reynolds’ essay is a comparative study of Art in Hungry Generation and Beat generation, its importance in both these schools (that were predominantly seen as a movement of poets/writers), and how the artists and the writers of both these generations inspired each other. Reynolds’ piece makes an interesting observation on how the image of a young girl became the symbol of inspiration for the Hungry Generation (artists in particular).
In her fascinating essay on the women Beats, poet Pamela Twining (Partner of Beat poet, Andy Clausen) tells us how these women Beats have been over-shadowed by their male counterparts, yet, many of them have inspired a new generation of American girls to grow up differently. It also tells us about their rebelliousness, sexuality, and their contribution towards the feminist consciousness in the 1960s.
Nandini Dhar’s strong feminist critic of Hungry Generation writers and their writing also brings in some necessary and interesting questions to the fore, though we have certain reservations about some of her readings of the Hungry poets.
We also have a beautiful piece by Brinda Bose, who looks at the two decades of collaborations between Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg through poetry, music and films. Sagorika Singha’s review essay analyzes two Beatnik films, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl and Walter Salles’ On the Road.
Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury writes a first-hand account of her visit to the Roychoudhury residence in Kolkata, where she meets and converses with Samir Roychoudhury about Allen Ginsberg and the Hungryalist Movement.
Tanmoy Bhattacharjee interviews Subimal Basak, who talks about his life and times. We also reprint The Sunflower Collective’s Interview with Malay Roychoudhury, the founder of the Hungry Generation and Juliet Reynolds, art critic and wife of the famous Hungryalist painter, Anil Karanjai.
In this issue, we are delighted to include a wonderful photo-essay by well-known photographer, Sally Davies, who documents the East village, places in and around the apartment, where Allen Ginsberg lived until early 1980s. Matthew Bialer’s photo-essay makes time liquid and walks through the Fifth Avenue to remind us of the poem, ‘My Sad Self’ by Allen Gingsberg. Ishan Marvel and Akash Sangma take us through a Baul sojourn, one that inspired the Beats and The Hungryalists alike.
Anuj Gupta, Yatin Dawra and Dhairya Gupta have an audio-visual montage that juxtaposes social commentary with electronica, while paying homage to the work of Beats, especially Ginsberg’s poetry.
And finally some beat inspired poetry by Avner Pariat, Ishan Marvel, and Nellie Edwards to take a pause from the road and smoke a long one.
We would like to point out here that as much as we would have liked to cover other Beats and Hungry Generation writers, due to the nature of submissions and some other reasons, it did not materialise. However, having said that, we believe we have covered some new areas that might give the Beatniks and the Hungry Generation enthusiasts some food for thought. Our other intension was to create a dialogue between the aficionados and researchers of the two schools of literature and art that we dig.
While editing the issue, we realised that the reception of Hungry poetics is a more complex phenomenon.  Their politics of non-conformation, their furious questioning of morality through obscenity (much like the Beats), may not always be comprehended, if seen through the lens of black and white.
We hope you will enjoy reading!
Guest-Editors:
Abhimanyu Kumar is a journalist. His poems and fiction have appeared in several journals. He co-edits The Sunflower Collective. 
Goirick Brahmachari works as a consultant in a research organisation in New Delhi. His first collection of poems, For the love of Pork, was published from Les Editions du Zaporogue, Denmark in January, 2016. He co-edits The Sunflower Collective.

Feminist critique of Hungryalist Movement by Nandini Dhar


Reading Hungryalists as One Who Came After: A Feminist Critique


By Nandini Dhar 
The term ‘Hungry Generation’ came to me in the same way its other temporal counterpart – the Naxalbari rebellion – made its way into my consciousness. As a legend, as lived memories, stories, broken promises, fragments. In other words, as indirect references. There is also the other, seemingly obvious connection. In everyday Bengali middle-class intellectual consciousness, both Naxalbari and Hungryalist poetics have come to be associated with notions of unsullied rebellious spirits, youthful dissent, experimentation with forms, denial of received forms and rejection in general. To put it simply, radicalism. More specifically, myths of radicalism. This is what it means to come after. For those of us who came of age in the Kolkata of late 1980s and early to mid-1990s, life was a series of aftermaths. The aftermath of Naxalbari, the aftermath of Hungryalism, the aftermath of IPTA, the aftermath of the betrayal of electoral left, the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet empire. Aftermaths, by definition, are also the fertile grounds for the births of the myths. Precisely because, the events themselves are gone, over.
And that kind of aftermathness, often lived through myths and the memories of others, brings with it its own challenges. Removed from the headiness that inevitably accompanies events such as Naxalbari or the state-sponsored censure of Hungryalist poetics, these aftermaths demand new evaluations. The aftermath transforms yesterday’s rebel into today’s pitiable icon. The aftermath transforms yesterday’s icon into today’s tired office-goer. The aftermath tears off the mask, the veil, leaving most things naked and open, demanding new analyses and new interpretations.
It is, therefore, not surprising that what provided the Hungryalist poets their critical edge – the unabashed and repetitive writing of middle-class male alienation and rage – becomes the most institutionalized voice of Bengali poetry in the period following 1977. By the time I came to any conscious reading of contemporary Bengali poetry, as an overtly nerdy, overtly politicized, and unapologetically feminist teenager, growing up in a home where neither Naxalbari nor Hungryalism was out of bounds for adult discussion, the Hungryalist alienated voice, often expressed through an unmediated, unreflexive ‘I’, was the normative voice of Bengali poetry. To be a Bengali poet was to write about the inability to find oneself in one’s social environment. To be a Bengali poet was to mourn about the inability to love and be loved, a feeling often expressed through the much fetishized Bengali word ‘oprem.’ To be a Bengali poet was to be lost in a world of default middle-classness. To be a Bengali poet was to reiterate again and again the inability to rebel against one’s middle-classness. A gendered script, expressed most often through a neatly distinguished binary between men and women, masculinity and femininity, would round up this dominant script of alienation through which most Bengali poets have written themselves, and are still writing themselves. There is nothing ‘anti-establishment’ about this voice. In fact, it is so thoroughly entrenched in post-1970s Bengali poetry that it is difficult to find any other mode of expression. A mode of expression that would not make documentation of middle-class alienation its mainstay.

Of Alienation and Alienationism
From the vantage point of hindsight, it is indeed interesting to witness the genesis of this alienation-poetics within Hungryalism, and thus also to historicize it. Here, in these Hungryalist poems, most of them somewhat co-terminous with Naxalbari, alienation is its own political category. Alienation is not a beginning point, alienation is not a means to an end. Rather, alienation is the ‘real’ thing in itself. Consequently, the poems themselves are converted into textual and symbolic spaces wherein this political category is given concrete linguistic form, reiterated again and again. The obsessive repetition of the writing of this alienation becomes a celebration of alienation. And this celebration of alienation becomes a form of rebellion in itself. Think of this poem by Shbho Acharya:Thrice I’ve exchanged glances with a dog with no duties
Noting at the base of every lamppost on the street
A distinctive self-contradiction I advance it can also
Be called retreating there’s no fear of being ambushed
All movements are unrestrained and using the alphabet
Words like ‘love’ and ‘death’ are utilised for sport
Every day on the beach just this instant I have put
A hand prone to criminal acts in my empty pocket
With the other I chuck the featureless chin
Of the world, saying, ‘dance little lady dance’ –
(“The Sound of A Dog With No Duties”, Translated by Arunava Sinha)

A close reading of the poem reveals a strange stasis, the kind of stasis which is constitutive of most alienationist poetics. There are images from the everyday social life we know – the dog, the lamppost on the street, the narrator on the beach, the empty pocket. These are signifiers of a lower middle-class existence, which bring memories of post-Independence disillusionment and social crises into the body of the poem – memories that provided the materialist foundation for much of the radical social and cultural movements of the era, including Naxalbari. But the poem is hardly a mere list of images. There is an attempt at an ideological reading of the time of its origin – “Words like ‘love’ and ‘death’ are utilised for sport.” This line almost crumbles under the pressure of its own moralism. Because it is so invested in a kind of trite, commonsensical moralism, it also misses out on the chance to put any ideological, sociological or imaginative pressure on its language. Although like most literary, cultural or political collectives, the Hungryalists did not speak in a homogenous or monolithic voice, and deeper readings of the movement’s archives would reveal certain internal fractures, if one could make a quick generalization about the dominant tone of the Hungryalist social critique, it is this: Hungryalist poems often predicate themselves on easy moralisms, operating under the guise of ideological and political critique. Because the default effect of the Hungryalist poems is constituted by rage – and youthful rage at that – and poking fun at the more dominant bhadralok moralism, their own moralisms appear as cloaked terrain. In other words, what has often been described as a form of rebellious aesthetics in Hungryalist poetics is based on an extremely weak sociological eye.

Indeed, Acharya’s poem provides its own understanding of rebellion – “A distinctive self-contradiction I advance it can also / Be called retreating there is no fear of being ambushed.” Coupled with the two concluding lines – “With the other I chuck the fearless chin/ Of the world, saying, ‘dance little lady dance’–.” The self-contradiction does not explode under its own pressure. It does not move forward, it does not create any desire for change. If there is any transformation that happens in this poem, it is one of retreat. Almost in the same way, the ‘chucking’ hinted at in the closing lines of the poem, although an assault on existing reality, does not produce anything other than the narrator retreating into his own inwardness – the role of a privileged spectator. Maybe it is even an irony-conscious spectator, one whose being is constituted by a social environment of both the failures of liberalisms and left philosophies. Yet it is a retreat nonetheless, the consciousness of which the poem records in strange ways.

Thus, there is the word ‘ambush’, residing within the poem as a double-sequitur. On the one hand, it operates as a grave reminder of the time of the emergence of the Hungryalist poetics, when incidences of ‘ambush’ – a term that brings into the poem’s body the realities of state violence – had reconstituted the lives of the Bengali middle class to a certain extent. Precisely because of that ambush-ridden everyday, the temporality which Hungryalists share with Naxalbari, the word ‘ambush’ exists in the poem as a reminder of its own fucked-up politics of retreating. A deeper examination of the archives of both movements would show the relationship between Hungryalist poetics and Naxalbari politics to be ambiguous. While this is an issue which demands more in-depth close readings, analyses and reinterpretations of the cultural productions that emerged from both movements, Hungryalist poetics nonetheless brings up an unresolved issue: what are the limits of the category of alienation during times of social and political turbulence? Can alienation ever exist as an autonomous political entity, and what are the responsibilities – social, political and aesthetic – of the alienated?

But I Want More
Yes, I am that reader who is never satisfied by mere alienation. In a way, I take the idea of alienation seriously. Too seriously, almost. Consequently, I see alienation as the beginning point of something bigger, but never an end in itself. As a result, most of the Hungryalist poems appear too status-quoist to me. Too tame. Yes, I repeat: tame and status-quoist. As an individual who has tried to stay involved with activisms of some kind for most of my life, I am politically and emotionally familiar with the terrain that the Hungryalists are marking for themselves. A radical-left student organizer during the mid-1990s – an inconvenient time globally to call oneself leftist – I understand the critique of both the electoral left and the radical left that the Hungryalists are relaying. Yet the critique they present remains the critique of those who have moved away from the messy terrain of everyday organizing of any kind. In other words, Hungryalism remains the aesthetics of the shirkers.

No, I do not expect their poems to change the world. But I do expect their poems to provide me with new ways of seeing the world. This is precisely where the Hungryalists have failed. Hungryalists did not provide me with a language to understand the specter of the privatization of education that faced most of my generation. Hungryalists did not provide me with a language to understand neoliberal economic violence or for that matter the violence of its liberal forebear. Hungryalists did not provide me with a language to understand more deeply the complex histories of oppression and identities in this world. Hungryalists did not provide me with a language to engage more deeply with the multi-faceted realities of human resistance to oppression. Hungryalists did not provide me with a language to understand the global failures of the left.

At most, the Hungryalists provided me with a language to complain. At most, the Hungryalists provided me with a language to document symptoms. At most, the Hungryalists provided me with a language to trivialize everything considered sacred by mainstream society. But that has never been enough for me. I didn’t need any Hungryalist to teach me that poverty is dehumanizing, or that the state is capable of breaking and killing. I didn’t need Hungryalists to figure out the loopholes and contradictions of bhadralok morality.

Yes, I want poems to do more. I want art to do more. I want literature to do more than become a list of gripes and remonstrations. Consequently, the Hungryalists represent to me a profound failure of the Bengali radical imagination, a profound failure of the Bengali middle class to fashion a radical poetics. It is not difficult to understand why the linchpin of the movement, the alienated lyrical ‘I’, alternately angry and sad, stands within the contemporary archives of Bengali literature as a thoroughly appropriated category. After all, we middle class Bongs love us some good alienation. It makes us feel edgy. It makes us feel sensitive, while leaving the central pillars of our structural existence untouched.

But Where Am I?
At the same time, there is something in these poems that would mark them as different from the lyricization of alienation in contemporary Bengali. A certain sense of urgency, a certain breathlessness that is difficult to quantify. A certain sense that this world is a disaster, and nothing but disaster. A certain intuitive understanding that the bhadralok morality, which has dominated the social and creative life of post-independence Bengal, needs to be torn apart. A form of raw rebellion against authoritarianism and social hypocrisy pervades these poems, in their formal experimentation with lines, white spaces, and punctuation. Yes, there are moments when I am moved by them. Yet this emotional appeal never lasts long. My relationship to Hungryalist poetics is one of profound alienation. And that alienation stems from something profoundly simple: my own efforts to find myself within the poems of the Hungry archives.

In other words, I am asking, what place has been accorded to women within the Hungryalist texts. I will begin with a generalization. Women appear in Hungryalist poems as bodies – sexual bodies – and nothing but bodies on which desire is projected. In other words, if my alienation from the Hungryalism was, to a certain extent, prompted by the fact that much of my political and aesthetic quests remained outside of the boundaries of a Hungryalist aesthetics, it is also true that the Hungryalist poets could not really imagine that someone like me might be their implied audience.
Any sign of female sexual agency is vilified, mocked and ultimately turned into a site of male sexual violation. One can’t really say that the Hungryalists write female sexual identity in terms of the virgin-whore dichotomy, because to be a woman with an independent sexual will is to be permanently reduced to the status of a whore within Hungryalist poetics. Like most of its social analysis, this particular way of reading women reeks of bhadralok moralism, cloaked in the language of male alienationist radicalism. What is absent is any political understanding of marriage as a social institution, of patriarchy as a socio-political category, and of sexuality as socio-cultural constructs of masculinity and femininity. Any consciousness other than the sexual kind is automatically denied to women.

Interestingly, there are quite a few poems set within the actual space of red light areas and brothels, in the rooms of the actual sex workers. Characteristically, there is no effort to read and write the myriad intersections between capital, commodified sexuality, semi-feudal economies and patriarchy that produce and keep alive the very institution of sex work. Instead, the brothels and the bodies of the sex workers are turned into spaces where the narrators of the poems can project their own fantasies – sexual and otherwise. In so doing, they attempt to stage their own rebellion against bhadralok sexual morality. In other words, the Hungryalist poetic persona – which is almost always male – enacts its anti-authoritarianism on the bodies of poor women. Yes, there are moments when sex workers are glorified or turned into positive stereotypes. But even then, there is no actual engagement with gender, with class, or with sexual violence beyond a few platitudes.

In this essay, I propose we read the Hungryalists differently than we usually do. For a moment, let’s just forget rebellion. Forget being anti-establishment. Forget youth. Forget alienation. Instead, underline every single reference to women that appear in these poems. Underline every single reference to sexuality in these poems. Keep gender and sexuality at the center. Remove male pain and alienation to the margins. Once you have done that, tell me how lines such as “My uncomfortable gaze shifts from my sister’s breasts/ On the ritual day of sisterly love I wander around whorehouses” (Phalguni Roy) occur? What kind of anti-establishment ideas are these lines propagating?  Yes, there is a de-construction of the ritual of bhai-phota as the socially accepted day of exhibiting ‘sisterly love’. Yes, there is a tacit reference to the sexual politics that lies at the basis of any ritual that seeks to solidify the brother’s protection of the sister. But then? An aggressive male sexuality, uncomfortable and repressed in its essence, but still aggressive. Aggressive in a way that borderlines predation. Again, there is no understanding of the patriarchal nature of the family or the sister’s place in it. Neither there is any understanding of the politics that invariably follows the juxtaposition of the sister’s figure with the whore’s. What overtakes everything else, is the narrator’s own voice, full of self-pity. A more forgiving reading would probably want to read this voice as an exposure of the inefficacy of middle-class male identity, its inherent hypocrisies and sexual dishonesties. Even if I accept that kind of reading, let me state this very, very clearly: I don’t need to read any Phalguni Roy (or any other poet) to know families are not exactly safe spaces for women. That a lot of sexual violence takes place within the family by men we are taught to think of as ‘relatives.’ In the same way, I want poems to do more than alienation, I also demand more than exposure from poems. A mere exposure, then, stands as a marker of artistic and political failure, a symptom of that same failure of radical imagination that plagues Hungryalism as a literary movement.

But, let’s take Malay Raychaudhuri’s much-celebrated poem ‘Stark Electric Jesus’. Let’s concentrate on these lines: ‘dhorshonkale narike bhule giye shilpe phirechhi kotodin’, which has been mysteriously translated into English as “I’ve forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse.” But the Bengali word dhorshon does not translate as mere copulation in English. It translates as rape. Let’s move further into the poem. Let’s read these lines which come almost immediately after: ‘Shubhake hichre uthiye niye jabo kshudhay/ ditei hobe Shubhake’. Again, very mysteriously they have been translated as ‘Draw and elevate Shubha into my hunger/ Shubha will have to be given.’ A more accurate translation would be: ‘I will drag and pull Shubha into my hunger/ Shubha will have to be given.’ It’s important to remember the Bengali phrase ‘uthiye neoya’ can also signify abduction. In other words, the poem’s writing of male pain and alienation, for which hunger provides the central metaphor, also rests upon imagery which is profoundly gendered and sexualized. More importantly, it is one of rape and sexual violence. This legitimization of rape and sexual violence through repetitive articulations of male pain and alienation is not at all anomalous, but is the norm in Hungryalism.

Needless to say, the Hungryalist version of anti-establishment scares me. I am completely unable to identify with any anti-establishment rhetoric predicated upon the imagery of rape. I am not at all ashamed of this inability. To Malay Raychaudhuri and his buddies, to replace ‘Muse’ with ‘labia mejora’ might look like tearing down the establishment. To me, it just looks like patriarchy. I am neither ‘muse’ nor ‘labia mejora.’ When I sit down to write my own poems, I do so with the knowledge that I am treading in places where the Hungryalists have not dared to go. So are many other poets, many of whom are young women. As have many who came before us. Yes, as I am concluding this piece, I’m wiping my ass with a copy of ‘Stark Electric Jesus.’

Postscript: Given the very nature of the archives of the Hungryalist movement, it is almost impossible to write this essay in English. Poetry as a form demands close reading, an attention to language and details, in a way it’s almost impossible to accomplish in translation. Consequently, I have chosen to write in more details only about poems that are available online – in English translations. At the same time, I have tried to bear in mind poems that exist solely in Bengali. Thanks to Goirick Brahmachari for directing me towards the translated archives at The Sunflower Collective. Readers who read Bengali might also benefit from trying to get hold of a copy of one of recent issues of the Bengali little magazine Chandragrohon, devoted to Phalguni Roy. For readers interested in probing further into the gender politics of the poem ‘Stark Electric Jesus’, please read Debaprasad Bandopadhyay’s essay in the first book-fair issue of the little magazine, Aainanagar. I am profoundly grateful to Debaprasad-da for articulating in writing what I and some of my friends have discussed in private for ages. And, in doing so, Debaprasad-da’s essay has contributed immensely to the developments of my own arguments on the gender politics of the Hungryalists.

Bio:
Nandini Dhar
is the author of the chapbook, Lullabies Are Barbed Wire Nations (Two of Cups Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Chattahoochee Review, New South, Rhino and elsewhere. Nandini co-edits two online journals, Elsewhere (www.elsewherelit.org) and Aainanagar (www.aainanagar.com).

Nandini  Dhar was born after the Hungryalist Movement.
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The Bohemian Hungryalists who protested against the Indian Establishment in 1960s

The Bohemian Hungry Generation assemble at Kolkata

 It would be worthwhile to warn readers that the Bohemianism of the  Bengali Hungry Generation poets of India have nothing to do with the French poets or the Beats who were called Bohemian. The Hungry Generation poets, writers and artists were the first anti-establishment and counter-cultural activists in Post-colonial West Bengal, but they all came from very poor families. The artistic and literary pursuits of these Bengali young men did not have the voluntary poverty as an engine for their adventures and wanderer life. They were not vagabonds like those of the European variety.Right from the inception of the movement, they opposed the prevailing power structure, the dominant Bengali ruling class and their customs and institutions, institutional authority.

Abani Dhar was a seaman trainee ( Khalasi ) and sold coal on the streets of Kolkata after his mother told him to leave the seaman's job and return home. He was from a Vaishnava family and his father abandoned him and his mother when he was a boy and left home with a Vaishnavite woman. His father had once come back home to reconcile when Abani Dhar was grown up, but Abani Dhar told him to leave immediately.

Debi Ray lived in a Howrah slum, in a single room with only one toilet for all twenty residents,  and before he entered school worked as an errand boy for a road side tea shop ; his mother collected pumpkin seeds to be dried and sold in the market. It was this hut of Debi Roy which functioned as collection centre of manuscripts to be published in Hungry Generation bulletins. The Hungry Generation did not have an editorial office, headquarter, highcommand or polit bureau to run the show. Each and every member was free to publish his one page bulletin if he was in a position to collect money for publication. However, the main funding was done by the two Roychoudhury brothers, Samir and Malay.

Malay Roychoudhury came from a criminal locality of Patna named Imlitala, where most of the residents belonged to lower castes and were called untouchables at that time; his father had to feed twenty persons of the extended family with his meagre income from photography business. Most of the inhabitants of the Imlitala locality indulged in dacioty, thievery, pick-pocketting, selling illegal items etc. Malay was introduced to palm toddy drinking and pig-meat eating in this locality. 

One of Malay's cousin brothers, Arun Roychoudhury, he came to know when Arun died in his teens, of slow-poisoning, inadvertantly by Arun's foster mother, ie. Malay's aunt, as she wanted to keep control on Arun, was purchased from a prostitute when Arun was few month's old.

Subimal Basak's father had to commit suicide drinking nitric acid as he was in deep debt leaving his widow and children to fend for themselves. Subimal had to do menial work to eke out a living.

Subhash Ghose, Saileshwar Ghose, Basudeb Dasgupta, Pradip Choudhuri, Subo Acharya all came from uprooted refugee families of East Pakistan. They were all first generation literate. Literature was their way of fighting with the unjust inhuman society.

Kolkata or Calcutta of 1960s were not a peaceful place for young poets in their twenties to come together with a purpose. There were political turmoil and refugees from East Pakistan had been arriving constantly in search of peace and shelter. These young boys were very much disturbed and formed a literary and cultural movement which had political overtones.

About thirty poets, writers and artists under the leadership of Malay Roychoudhury accidentally met each other and started a rebellion in post-colonial post-modern Bengali literature. Since they were from lower middle class or refugee background, they were not much bothered about their overnight roof and regular food or for that matter regular bath and change of clothes. However, after the Kolkata Police filed FIR in September 1964 against eleven Hungry Generation members, many left the movement in a huff. 

From the letter of Allen Ginsberg to Abu Sayeed Ayyub, it is now known that Police had interrogated twenty six poets and writers, and ultimately filed a case against only Malay Roychoudhury for his poem "Stark Electric Jesus". Malay was jailed for a month for this poem but the Kolkata High Court exonerated him after a protracted and expensive legal battle. Octavio Paz had met Malay at Patna and Ernesto Cardenal had met him at Mumbai.

From the memoirs of Hungry Generation writers we learn that some of them continued with the same shirt and trousers for months together without changing them as they did not have alternative set of dresses. They visited railway stations, especially Sealdah station, and used the toilets of trains which had just arrived or which was yet to start.

During the night they stayed at a Marwari businessman's office at Kolkata's business district Burrah Bazar, to sleep on the floor mattress which were meant for the outstation customers of the businessman.

For food they had to pool their resources together and eat at the shady stinky restaurants called Pice Hotels, mainly at Shyambazar or at College Street Market where each item was served separately and was quite cheaper.

In the evening they would visit the infamous Country Liquor Den named Khalasitola frequented by seamen and poor labourers. Here they would celebrate the birthday of famous poets like Jibanananda Das or release their newly published collection of poems. They also arranged poetry readings at Howrah railway station, grave of poet Michael Madhusedan Dutt, the Nimtala Ghat of burning corpses etc which in a way was rudimentary stage of Poetry Slam. 

Since cannabis and hashish was not banned in 1960s, and there was a government shop just beside Khalasitola, they would purchase from the shop and walk back singing to wherever they could find their night shelter.

They generally published one-page bulletins due to paucity of funds and distributed them freely at Calcutta College Street Coffee House, Universities, newspaper offices and at College Street corners. Free distribution of their one-page writing was quite novel in Calcutta and senior writers and the press became aware of the presence of the Hungry Generation members. The press started criticizing them, published cartoons and this gave them popularity among readers. After their arrest, the then Police Commissioner of Kolkata Mr. P.K.Sen had commented that, "You people are engaged in serious literary activities or you are selling tooth powder through handbills ?"

Subimal Basak, the novelist of the bohemian group, who could draw sketches, drew explicit sketches with satirical humour undermining the deference shown by the middle class Bengali who were and are called "Bhadralok" towards those who were in power,  and got them xeroxed for distribution. Subimal Basak was the first writer who wrote complete narrative of his experimental  novel "Chhatamatha" in East Bengali dialect, which is now being followed by Bangladeshi writers. Subimal wrote poems as well in Bangladeshi dialect, now being followed by poets of Bangladesh after they became free of Pakistan's Urdu hegemony. Unfortunately, the Bangladeshi literary and religious establishment do not give due credit to Subimal Basak for his pioneering work.

Once in 1964 Subimal Basak and Malay Roychoudhury went to Champahati village in the invitation of a Baul named Ashok Fakir who lived with his wife in a hut. It was raining on that day. Ashok Fakir arranged for opium paste for them and after licking intermittently for a few hours they were quite high. All three of them went to the railway station and Subimal and Malay started dancing in a frenzy on the railway overbridge. The station master told Ashok Fakir to bring the duo down otherwise they could fall of the overbridge on the railway line. Both Subimal and Malay were completely drenched. Champahati at that time was a desolate village. The station master put the duo on a Kolkata train where on arrival both slept on the railway platform of Sealdah station and left in the morning after using the station toilet.

Ashok Fakir, got tagged to an American lady, left his Bengali wife and fled to USA with her. Ashok Fakir established an ashram in USA with his American paramour and had two children from her. Allen Ginsberg makes extensive reference of Ashok Fakir in his India Journals. Ashok Fakir had a plan to tag himself with Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky and get out of India. That did not succeed as Ginsberg was shadowed by the Indian police during his stay in India. Ginsberg left India alone leaving Peter Orlovsky behind.

Anil Karanjai and Karunanidhan Mukhopadhyay, who were painters prepared posters for the Hungry Generation and these were pasted on the staircase of the Calcutta College Street Coffee House and Calcutta University walls.Anil Karanjai also came from a post-partition refugee family of Rangpur in East Pakistan.

They, the Hungry Generation writers, poets and artists, would go out for what they called "happening" to villages and small towns just for enjoying themselves and rejuvenating their writing and drawing  skills. They visited Bishnupur, Kalai in Tripura, Benares, Patna, Chaibasa, Dumka, Daltonganj, Barh, Bakhtiarpur, Rajgir, Murshidabad, Siliguri, Balurghat and enjoyed liquor made of Mahua which was quite strong compared to rice liquor of Khalasitola. They thought that living continuously at Kolkata will spoil them ; they hated the prevailing literary atmosphere of Kolkata which Allen Ginsberg had termed as "bourgeois". 

The Hungry Generation writers had once distributed cheap paper masks wherein they had got printed the slogan "Take off Your Masks", which enraged senior writers who felt insulted. Once they also sent by post marriage invitation card wherein the slogan printed was "Fuck the Bastards of Gangshalik School of Poetry". So enraged were the academicians that Prof Abu Sayeed Ayyub complained to police and wrote a strong letter to Allen Ginsberg about the Hungry Generation poets, writers and artists who by then were being called Hungryalists. 

Once they went to Hindi poet Rajkamal Chaudhary's village Mahishi during the Chhinamasata deity's celebration at the local temple where people were offering buffaloes for slaughter. Poeple were drunk with rice liquor and so were the Hungryalists who had gone there as Rajkamal Chaudhary's guests. The whole night they were in drunk frenzy with buffalo blood splattered all over their body and ate cooked buffalo meat with the villagers. Rajkamal Chaudhary died young because of bohemian excesses. Rajkamal Chaudhary's famous poem "Muktiprasang" has a reference to Malay Roychoudhury. A similar reference of Malay had been made by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in one of his poems.

Another Hungry Generation poet who died of excesses was Falguni Roy, who used be in a stoned state due to over indulgence in cannabis and hash and could publish only one book of poems before his death. Falguni Roy's manuscripts were collected by Subhash Ghosh and Subimal Basak which were added to the first edition of his book "Nashto Atmar Television". Hungry Generation poet Utpalkumar Basu termed the publication of Falguni Roy's collection of poems as end of modernism in Bengali literature.

1n 1965 Tridib Mitra, Malay Roychoudhury and Subimal Basak visited Subo Acharya's house at Bishnupur. They had a great time, as one of them has written in his memoir, smoked pot and after visiting the terracotta temples and conch shell cutting artisans, started walking aimlessly crossing several green paddy fields when they came to the shore of a river. They took out their shirt and pant, held them on their head and crossed the river completely naked, to the surprise of the nearby cultivators. After crossing the river, they sat down beneath a banyan tree and kept on smoking pot till evening, all four of them completely naked. They recited their poems from memory. The cultivators, including women, passed by, but nobody bothered them.

Around the years 1966-1967 Basudeb Dasgupta developed a sort of Henry Miller type life in Kolkata and started visiting hookers known to him and became close to one named Baby at the 5B number house at Sonagachhi. In a letter dated 6 December 1967 to Saileshwar Ghose he laments that Baby has shifted to number 10 hooker den and the 5B house has become desolate without her. He also talks about Abani Dhar who was with him one day and gave a little money to a hooker named Meera. Abani Dhar was a late entrant to the Hungry Generation movement. Before Dhar died, Malay Roychoudhury had arranged publication of his short story collection titled "One Shot" based on his experience of insults that he faced in his life. 

Abani Dhar was a trainee seaman ( khalasi ) and Basudeb Dasgupta encouraged him to write in his own illiterate diction. Basudeb Dasgupta was more attracted to Baby just as Abani Dhar was attracted to Meera. The third hooker in their life was Deepti. They were joined once in a while by Saileshwar Ghose after his wife died. Baby appears now and then in Saileshwar Ghose's poems. Unfortunately Saileshwar Ghose's wife, son-in-law and daughter died one by one and Shaileshwar Ghose also died on the operation table of a Government hospital, though he could have visited a private hospital where there were better facilities. Saileshwar was more interested in constructing his bungalow house than looking after his family members. 

Baby introduced herself to the Hungry Generation poets and writers when in 1965 David Garcia, an American Hippie poet visited Kolkata and wanted to fall in love with a Bengali girl. Since it was not possible to fall in love and make love to her within a week the Hungry Generation poets and writers took David to the famous hooker's den at Kolkata. When Baby saw a foreigner, she became interested and introduced herself, ordered for country liquor for all poets and writers who became drunk after a couple of bottles. David liked her after he slept with her for an hour. Since the poets and writers did not have sufficient money Saileshwar went after David has done his love making. This was the beginning of the affair of the Hungry Generation poets and writers with Baby, Deepti and Meera, three different types of women, different voices, different body structure. 

The bohemian Hungryalists Malay Roychoudhury, Sabimal Basak, Anil Karanjai, Karunanidhan Mukhopadhyay, Kanchan Kumar and Samir Roychoudhury went to Nepal without much money and stayed there for months together. They assembled at Patna residence of malay Roychoudhury, crossed the river Ganges in a boat, and from Sonepur took a train to Raxaul at Nepal border. Tridib Mitra had also arrived, but his girlfriend Alo Mitra, had a doubt about what the poets and writers were going to do at Kathmandu where cannabis, hash and Hippie women are available on call. Alo Mitra took back Tridib Mitra to Kolkata. 

The Hungryalists crossed the border in a rickshaw and took a bus to Kathmandu where Karunanidhan Mukhopadhyay used his contacts with some Hippies he knew at Benares and got a room in a big thatch Palace about hundred yards in length and breadth with hundreds of one room tenements on three floors of the wooden building at an area named Thamel in Kathmandu town.They rented a single room. For bed they were provided hay stacks on which a cotton cover was spread. Kathmandu at that time was flooded with Hippie boys and girls and the building the Hungryalists stayed in were jam packed with them, American, European and even Japanese. Rent was quite cheap. Just one rupee per month per head. When the Nepal Academy of literature came to know about the arrival of the Hungry Generation writers, poets and artists, they deputed the Deputy Secretary Mr. Basu Shasi to arrange for their daily food and sight seeing as well as poetry reading at various towns in Nepal.

Hash was very cheap at Kathmandu at that time. The Hungryalists would go out in the evening in groups or alone, find a temple where old men in a circle were smoking. The Hungryalist would sit beside them as a part of the circle  and get his turn to smoke, get high, and move on, or if stoned, go into the temple and wait till the effect was over. The evening gong of the temples were quite soothing, they have written.

The Hungryalists were sometimes invited for poetry readings at other centres in Nepal where arrangements were made for them to drink strong Nepali country liquor Raksi and buffalo meat cooked with hand by pressing the boneless pieces for a few hours with local masala, or deer meat pickle. Since Malay Roychoudhury's trial had become news in Nepali news papers, he had to recite his poem Stark Electric Jesus almost everywhere they went. The local newspapers published photographs of Subimal Basak, Malay Roychoudhury and Samir Roychoudhury. After the Hungryalists became known to the local poets Samir Roychoudhury collected poems from Nepali poets and brought out an anthology when he returned to India.In November 1964 TIME magazine had published the news of the arrests of Hungryalists with a group photo, which made them known to the Hippies and a few Hippie girls fell for these poets and writers. There was music, hash and love at the Thamel wooden Palace.

Karunanidhan Mukhopadhyay was able to convince the African-American owner of Max Galarie at Kathmandu to hold an exhibition of painting by himself and Anil Karanjai. It was a great success for Anil Karanjai as almost all his paintings were sold. On the last day of the exhibition the unsold paintings were heaped together and set on fire. The Hungryalists, Nepali poets and the Hippies who had gathered started singing and dancing around the fire. A couple of Hippies played guitar and flute. After the fire was extinguished Karunanidhan Mukhopadhyay gathered ashes on his palm and put black dot on everybody's forehead.

Karunanidhan Mukhopadhyay's father had abandoned him and his mother when Karunanidhan was a child and married a Burmese women. His father stayed in Burma whereas Karunanidhan returned to India with his mother and led a life of a street child, earning in whatever way he could to sustain his family. He did not learn painting at any school or academy like Anil Kranjai and learned the craft from Anil Karanjai. Karunanidhan got jobs of drawing book and magazine covers. When the Hippies started to arrive in Benares during the Vietnam war he became their guide in the city as he knew the city like the back of his palm. The Hippies were impressed and gave him expenses. A Hippie woman proposed to Karunanidhan that they select a place, build a hut and live there like Adam and Eve. The lady and Karuna lived like Adam and Eve, completely naked on the other side of Ganges river where nobody lived. Karuna would cross the river in a boat which the lady had hired and make purchases for a fortnight and go back to his lady love. Malay Roychoudhury has written that he was quite embarrassed to find them naked and dirty when Anil Karanjai took him to the couple's hutment. The couple had given up taking bath and combing hair since they settled on the shore. 

Based on his experience at Kathmandu and Benares with cannabis, hash, LSD and Hippie women Malay Roychoudhury has written an experimental fiction titled "Arup Tomar Entokanta" in which explicit sexual encounters are woven into philosophical discourse. The novel had shocked the readers when it appeared for its counter cultural and anti-establishment approach in a sexually path breaking prose. 

In 1964 Subimal Basak and Malay Roychoudhury visited Behrampore in Murshidabad district to get their bulletins and magazines printed at a press known to Samir Roychoudhury. They had to arrange with this press as the Calcutta presses refused to accept their manuscripts due to threats from other groups, especially the "Krittibas" group led by Sunil Gangopadhyay. 

After handing over the manuscripts to the press Subimal Basak wanted to visit  his maternal aunt and maternal grandmother at the village Khagra. They took a night train which was empty at that time, though now it would be impossible to get a seat in any train. The granny treated them well with good food and fish preparations. In the night Subimal Basak and Malay Roychoudhury slept on a bed made for them on the floor with mosquito net. In the morning they found a venomous snake with hood on the roof of the net, They had the bundle of Hungry Generation bulletin with them and with that bundle threw away the snake out of the net roof. Their shouts had attracted Subimal Basak's aunt and granny. They saw the snake slither into a hole beneath a tree. What the granny did was quite surprising. She took a pot of sugar and made a trail thereof from the den of red ants to the tree under which the snake had taken refuge. By afternoon it was found that the ants had almost eaten up the snake which had come out of its hole and was writhing in pain. It was just a depiction of what the Hungry Generation writers were trying to tell the Bengali middle class society, that Cultural snake has to be lured with sweetened morsels of prose and poetry and then destroyed.

Short story writer Basudeb Dasgupta, who got inclined to Marxist shenanigans of the ruling left was later disillusioned and presented his case in his novel "Kheladhula". Malay Roychoudhury had already warned him that most of the leaders of the Communist Party had demanded bifurcation of Bengal on religious basis and when the partition came, they were the first to leave East Pakistan and flee to India leaving the lower "Namahshudra" strata of Bengali society trapped in Fundamentalist nightmare. Basudeb Dasgupta gave up writing thereafter and became a regular to the three hookers named Baby, Deepti and Meera. Pradip Choudhuri once said that Basudeb Dasgupta feels defeated and has become a pervert.

Subo Acharya, was unable to bear the burden of bohemian life. Though he went to Samir Roychoudhury's Dumka house in Bihar for a change, he ultimately sought refuge in religion and became a disciple of Anukul Thakur. He did not publish any poetry collection though he wrote poems for Subhash Ghose's magazine "Khudharto" and Pradip Chopudhuri's "PHoooo."

Pradip Choudhuri had gathered some poets in Tripura and wanted to spread the Hungry Generation movement to the state. However, after Arun Banik, one of the aspirant member was murdered by political goons his efforts petered away and he concentrated on French poetry of the time and visited France, Canada, UK and America for poetry reading and talks at various Universities on Bengali Poetry. Pradip Choudhuri's poem was staged as a ballet in Paris.

Pradip Choudhuri was sent for school and college education, by his father to R.N.Tagore's Visva Bharati University from which he was rusticated because of his explicit poems in which he named a few of his female class mates. He later studied English at Jadavpur University and taught at a private school till retirement. 

In North Bengal Alok Kumar Goswami and Raja Sarkar had started a Hungry Generation magazine named "Concentration Camp". Thie efforts were brought to naught by Shaileswar Ghose who thought that his importance will dwindle because of Goswami and Sarkar. The group got dismantled at the beginning itself. However, another poet named Arunesh Ghosh of the same group attracted the attention of Calcutta Literary Establishment but did not get the requisite importance for having joined the Hungry Generation movement. Arunesh Ghosh had spent most of his younger days in the vicinity of hookers den near his village and the women keep cropping into his poems very often. Arunesh Ghosh died in a pond while taking bath, though he was a good swimmer. It is conjectured that he committed suicide for having been neglected. 

Samir Roychoudhury not only toured the areas of sweet water fishermen, fishnet weavers and boat-makers to understand their life and living but also spent more than a year on fish trawlers in the Arabian sea. His bohemianism has been a completely different story. He lived the life of fishermen during his experience on sea trawlers which gave him insight into the forms of short stories he was going to write later. Ashok Tanti, the critique and novelist, has compared Samir Roychoudhury's contribution to Bengali literature with the famous fiction writer Manik Bandyopadhyay. 

Among all the Hungry Generation writers, poets and artists, it is Malay Roychoudhury, the founder of the movement, who gathered vast experience during his constant tour of entire country for about forty years. He based his novel "Ouras" on his experience in Abujhmarh jungle of Chhattisgarh where life of the Maoists intersect with the life and culture of the tribal people. Malay Roychoudhury toured West Bengal and Bihar and wrote his novel "Naamgandho" on the plight of poor potato growers and the politics of ruling parties and castes in controlling Cold Storage and off-season potato business. He wrote the novel "Nakhadanto" on the plight of jute farmers and the politics of jute mill owners in connivance with the ruling political class and their business interests. Most of the jute mills are being closed one by one so that the land may be used by the builder-promoter lobby. For writing "Nakhadanto"  and "Naamgandho" Malay Roychoudhury did extensive research on the subjects and visited hundreds of farmer families and several party offices in the guise of an Urdu-Hindi speaking reporter ; he had to grow and maintain beards and moustache and named himself  Choudhary Sahib. His post-modern novel "Arup Tomar Entokanta" reflects the anti-establishment  bohemian lifestyle of the Hungry Generation writers, poets and artists of 1960s.

There are heaps of misinformation garbage being spilled out even after so many decades. Take the case of the book "The Blue Hand" written by Deborah Baker on Allen Ginsberg's life in India. Mrs Baker had no need to bring in the Hungry Generation in her book, and even if she did so she should have interviewed the members of the movement who were available at Kolkata. Instead thereof, she contacted Tarapada Roy, a member of pro-establishment "Krittibas" group for information about the Hungry Generation movement. Everyone in Kolkata knew that Tarapada Roy was the nephew of the Deputy Commissioner of Police of Kolkata Detective Department who was in charge of filing cases and issuing arrest warrants against eleven Hungry Generation writers and poets in 1964. Mr Baker has completely distorted history and denigrated the Hungry Generation movement in her book. She talks about Shakti Chattopadhyay being identified by Bonnie Crown of Asia Society for the scholarship for visit to USA, but did not explain how Sunil Gangopadhyay maneuvered everything and went himself in place of Shakti Chaatopadhyay.

The pro-establishment writers are still active against the Hungry Generation movement. In the Durga Puja issue 2016 of "Kabisammelan" poetry magazine, reporter Gautam Ghosh Dastidar has written a lengthy article demeaning the contribution of the movement, on the same lines as the newspapers Ananda Bazar Patrika, Jugantar, Darpan, Jalsa, Amrita, Chaturanga did in the 1960s, despite the facts that Ph D and M Phill dissertations on the movement have been published. A pro-establishment guy named Sabyasachi Sen continually harps against the movement in whichever magazine he is asked to contribute.

( Information for this article collected from publications available at Little Magazine Library and Research Centre, 18 Tamer Lane, Kolkata )