Debi Roy, the Dalit poet of Hungryalist movement.

Debi Roy, the Bengali Dalit poet and Hungryalist movement by D. Chatterjee

The Importance of being Debi Roy, or Bengali Under-caste Articulation in the Sixties

Introduction: Caste and the Hungry Generation
The Bengali Dalit literary movement in post-independent India officially flagged off with the inauguration of the Bangla Dalit Lekhak Parishad (Bengali Dalit Writer’s Association, hereby BDLP) under the leadership of Nakul Mullik in 1987 following the model of Maharastra. The BDLP marked the culmination of the scattered spurt of small scale Dalit magazines that were brought out from all corners of West Bengal since the late 1960s and 1970s. The movement it initiated paved the way for the formation of Chaturtha Dunia (The Fourth World) in 1992, shortly after the tragic suicide of Chuti Kotal, a tribal research scholar, in 1991. (Byapari 2007: 4118) Chaturtha Duniya went on to become the defining enterprise of Bengali Dalit cultural activities. Under its aegis, studies have been carried to traces the intellectual history of Dalit thought and expression in Bengal after independence. Jatin Bala’s noteworthy history of Dalit Literature in Bengali also acknowledges the inception of the BDLP as the starting point of Bengali Dalit literary activities and sheds light on the works that proceeded. There is completely no mention of any Dalit literary activity before 1987. But, having turned back to the 1960s, an important phase in the post-partition life of Bengal, one might be provoked to pick up a series crucial points of enquiry. Did the Dalits not write then? Was there no under-caste writer operating at that period? What did they write on? How did they grapple with the question of caste identity and articulation? Why are the texts produced by them not included in the Dalit cannon that Bala has constructed in his record? My paper attempts to fill up these gaps by looking at the figure of an under-caste writer belonging to this period. To materialize such a project, it is necessary to look at the major literary movements that characterized such a period. At the other end of the Krittibas phenomenon that flourished under the command of Sunil Gangopadhyay and his associates and became a part of the mainstream, stood the Hungry Generation poets, avant-garde in their approach, immersed in the quest of writing and performing poetics in a strikingly different manner. The paper, limited in its scope and capacity, delves into the morphology of the Hungryalist movement, rather than attending Krittibas for the way in which it was gradually co-opted by the Brahminical establishment.

The Hungryalist Movement, more commonly known as the Hungry Generation, was influenced by Oswald Spenglar’s Decline of the West and aimed to transform the poetics of Bengali literature and culture by confronting and intentionally disturbing the aesthetic sensibility of both the society and the reader. Being a radical attempt to shatter the upper caste middle class hegemony of the Bengali literati by recreating and redefining the poetic idiom, the movement began in Patna, 1961 and subsequently spread to Varanasi, Allahabad, Kathmandu, and Delhi, with Calcutta being the main hub of activities. The language of articulation was mostly Bengali and occasionally English though the movement drew participation from the Hindi literati as well. The Hungryalists subsequently claimed their fame in 1964 with the arrest of some of their members on charges of profanity. The Time magazine covered the sensation of the movement in the same year. In an interview given to The Sunflower Collective, Malay Roychoudhury, the creator of the Hungryalist movement, claims,
We were the first to bring lower and backward class writers and poets in literature. Prior to us, there was not a single poet to be seen on the pages of poetry magazines. (M Roychoudhury: 2016 web, emphasis mine)

While such a claim is true in the sense that the Hungryalist movement did draw participation from poets and writers of under-caste origin, it needs to be put under the scanner to deconstruct how much of the corpus produced by these writers can qualify as what has been defined as “Dalit literature.” The absence of Dalit consciousness in Roychoudhury’s claim is evident in the language he uses; “lower and backward class” do not necessarily mean outcaste in spite of underpinning a discourse of societal oppression. But, to observe how the issue of caste is dodged and dealt with in the movement, one needs to place it in the larger constellation of caste and identity in Bengal of the sixties.
The creators of the movement, the Roychoudhury brothers, Malay and Samir, were born and brought up in an affluent Bengali household in Patna. Unlike Bengal, which saw the invisiblization of caste in the public sphere and the gradual hegemonization of the quintessential Bhadralok after the partition, caste played a pivotal role in the social and electoral politics of Bihar. Imlitola, the locality in which they lived, was predominantly inhabited by lower castes. Samir Roychoudhury, in a memoir on the Hungryalist movement, explains how the vivid presence of caste identities affected the spirit of the movement:

Close to our neighbourhood, in Rajendranagar, lived two Hindi writers, Phaniswar Renu and Ramdhari Singh Dinkar. These two suffixed their names with two new titles, Renu and Dinkar. The former did away with his lower caste surname while the latter added a liberal twist to his upper caste identity. In both these cases, the intention to defy the conventions of a stratified society can be observed. A metathesis of caste, I would remark. (S Roychoudhury 2015: 16)

Pierre Bourdieu understands literature not only as a response against its time and society but also in terms of the literary field it belongs to: “To speak of field is to recall that literary works are produced in a particular social universe endowed with particular institutions and obeying specific laws.” (2013: 90) The Hungryalists scandalized their literary field by being consciously preoccupied with what the society considered low, impure, and vulgar, by subscribing to forbidden joys, by upholding the freedom of individualism against sordid all-engulfing time. Therefore, when the idea of launching a literary movement that would challenge the hierarchies and conventions of the Bengali literati was conceived, the Roychoudhury brothers decided to have an under-caste as the editor of their mouthpiece. Malay Roychoudhury corresponded with Haradhon Dhara (who, like Renu would later change his name), an impoverished, but educated daily wage earner belonging to the Mahishya caste, and met him later at a mutual friend’s house in Kolkata. My paper attempts to single out Haradhon Dhara (hereafter, Debi Roy) from the pantheon of the Hungry Generation poets and probe into the quagmire of identity politics of Bengal at that time to comprehend how he negotiates caste in his corpus. It would be crucial to mention that in spite of several studies conducted on Roy and the Hungry Generation, none have been premised on the poet’s caste identity in order to read his poetry along the lines of Dalit criticism.

Of Betrayals and Bitterness: Debi Roy and the Hungry Generation
Born in 1938 to a lower class household residing in a slum in Howrah, Haradhon Dhara had to change his name to Debi Roy to write and survive in the Brahminical arena of Bengali literature. Being a title conferred by the Muslim rulers, ‘Roy’ as a surname does not indicate any particular caste and enables one with the necessary ambiguity. Debi Roy clarifies:

There wasn’t any other way apart from adopting that name. No way whatsoever. There was so much of Brahminism around me, so much of humiliation. When they cannot topple you over in any other way, they seek resort in caste. This is just a way of suppressing you. Some of my own friends can be accused of that crime. Some very close friends who used to frequent my slum once upon a time. But they were the ones to humiliate me first. They still do it though their powers have ceased to exist.
(Roy: 2016 web)

As in this interview, Roy confesses that he has been a perpetual victim of caste discrimination. In another interview, when asked about the things that he hates, Roy blasts that out of all things, he despises casteism (jaater name bajjati) and betrayal the most. (Roy 2013: 14) While such resentment comes out of a life that has constantly been on the receiving end of caste humiliation, back-stabbing by his own ‘friends’ was another source of a source of depression and disgust. Beginning his career as a writer in the sixties—more than two and a half decades before Dalit writing in Bengal emerged in its organized form, and almost ten years before the Dalit Panthers rose to prominence—it would be interesting to study how Roy articulates his lived experiences of an under-caste and the languages he adopts to resist humiliation. But, before that, it is important to look at the ways in which caste played an important role in shaping the Hungryalist movement.

The first manifesto of the Hungry generation that came out in 1961 had a dual and dichotomic mention of Debi Roy. While his adopted name was hailed as the editor of the manifesto, his real name featured as that of the publisher alongside his slum room as the address for official correspondence. Haradhon Dhara, unlike Debi Roy, is a poignant signifier of under-caste identity. It was consciously employed, as Indrajit Bhattacharjee notes, to lodge an attack on the Brahminical establishment of Bengal. The slum room, in contrast to the decadent offices of commercial mainstreams, was highlighted to offend the conservative elite custodians of culture. (Bhattacharjee: 2008 web) This allows us to raise a point of doubt that might facilitate further enquiry. Does the poet attempt to converge these two dialectic identities or intentionally differentiates them to separate the poet and the upwardly mobile gentleman from the under-caste slum-dweller who began his life with a meagre sum of fifteen rupees?

The Hungryalist movement went on till 1964 until its members had to face the backlash of the puritanical establishment they were fighting, writing, and performing against. Debi Roy, and his comrades—Malay Roychoudhury, Samir Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Pradip Chaudhuri, Shaileswar Ghosh, and Subhas Ghosh—were hounded by the police on charges of obscenity. It was at this moment when the movement lost its unity before splintering into different groups at the closure of the trial. Shaileswar Ghosh, Subhas Ghosh, (who would later attempt to refute the Roychoudhury brothers and claimed the authorship of the movement) and Shakti Chattopadhyay signed bonds and testified against their comrades in the trial that ensued. While Debi Roy and others accused were acquitted by the lower court, the case against Malay Roychoudhury for writing his blasphemous Stark Electric Jesus was taken to the High Court until the verdict came in the poet’s favour in 1967. This marked the beginning of a life-long bitterness between the Ghosh brothers and the Roychoudhurys. The Ghoshs were pious Hindus, and, unlike the other figures of the movement, abstained from eating beef in their rebellious rendezvous. (Basak 2012: web) Allegedly, it was the Ghoses who humiliated Roy at that time.

In a letter dated 22nd May, 1965 to Malay Roy Choudhury, Subhas Ghosh unequivocally articulated his displeasure of Debi Roy’s acquired identity:

Is there any agreement that his poems need to be published in Zebra [a magazine that of the movement] just because an advertisement of his book came out in Khudharto Pratirodh [another magazine, edited by Shaileswar Ghosh]… …I told you not to publish Haradhon’s writings for they lack in merit. The reasons behind your appeasement are the click of his new name, Debi Roy + exploitation + bullshit… (Quoted in M Roychoudhury: 2015 156, emphasis mine)
Roychoudhury, in an anecdote to this letter explains, “In Subhas’s letter, Haradhon is Debi Roy’s erstwhile name. Just because he comes from a lower caste and refused to join their league and sign a bond against me in the court, the approvers belittled him.” (157) Roy’s side of the story is hinted at in a letter he wrote to Roychoudhury, carrying the date 10th May, 1966:
How have you been? I see you’ve used my old full name. It’s a matter of my past, let it be… the other evening in Khalasitola [a country liquor joint in central Kolkata where the Hungryalists gathered], I grabbed Subhas by his collar…. ha ha, I know how it all works.”
(Quoted in M Roychoudhury 2015: 157-58)

The Ghoshes seemed to demonstrate the traditional Savarna mentality of degrading the lower castes on the basis of their supposedly less merit. Their underlying scepticism about Roy’s adopted incognito through a constant reference to the original name brings out their discomfort in accepting an under-caste who aspires for upward social mobility. Names, as poignant markers of caste, have always been important in the Dalit context vis-a-vis how they invite abuse and insults at the moment of their revelation. In another letter, written in 1968, Debi Roy recalls the trauma caused by such humiliation and the betrayal during the days of his trial:

Shaileswar might have written some amazing lines, he will get what he deserves. Even I will pay him back. […] Is getting a job in Ananda Bazar the moot point behind all of this filthy backstabbing? I have not forgotten anything. It is not possible for me to forget. How people behaved with me, how they still behave […] I have not forgotten a bit of it. I might have to commit suicide if I lose my job. I was so disappointed with my friends (?) that I thought of finding company through marriage. I wanted to forget the entire episode. But I couldn’t. Writing is the only thing that matters to me now. (Quoted in M Roychoudhury 2015: 158-59)

    In a memoir, titled, Beginning of the Hungry: Agony and Betrayal, written three and a half decades after this letter, Debi Roy recalls yet again the humiliation he faced from the Ghoshes and posits a set of existential questions:

So much of shit has spewed! Intolerable! I detest! Stop this nuisance! ‘He’ [Shaileswar Ghosh] thinks a lot about history. Subaltern-heaven-afterlife-soul-moksha-the four varnas– these are his truths. […] Just as Jabali once told Ram, do not be blinded by deceitful Brahmins; only the dumb can invest his faith in spirits, afterlife, rituals, reconciliation, etc, even in post-modernism! Will these theories empower the lower castes and marginalized with two square meals a day? [..] Equal opportunities? Will the wheels of historical oppression come to an end? An end to discrimination? Prejudiced mentalities? […] People like me who have fought their way to privilege, do we carry out our duties? (Roy 2015: 191)

This provides us with an entry-point to delve into how Roy deals with caste and his identity in the body of prose and poetry.

Articulations of Caste: Grappling with Modernity and Spirituality
“Such hullabaloo about caste! That Dalit, that OBC, that Yadav, all that discourse with names. Even young men laugh at it.”(Roy 2015: 191)
As the quote suggests, Debi Roy negates the discourse borne out of identity politics. He finds the preoccupation with surnames a domain of the ancient that is supposed to be archaic enough to make the modern subject laugh. Shipra Mukherjee, argues that the Dalits in Bengal, under the growing influence of the communist regime, believed that the advancement of modernity would wipe out aspects that are generally “pre-modern” and aligned with tradition and religion, from the society. The modern society, would therefore, not accommodate caste and the prejudices it carries. There has also been a tendency among them to privilege class exploitation over caste humiliation or club them together as the “implications of both categories appear to be similar in their outcome of limited access to resources, lesser opportunities, and consequent poverty.” (Mukherjee: 2016 128-31)
Debi Roy, a victim of both class exploitation and caste humiliation, in his poetry and prose writes against deprivation in general. Rather than engaging in a “hullabaloo about caste” that would address the inequalities arising out of difference in identity, Roy is concerned with how the problems of starvation and poverty can be solved. In his first two anthologies, Kolkata and I (1965) and Humans, Humans (1972), one hardly finds any reference to caste as Roy places the suffering human being, robbed of his/her gender and caste identity, in the centre and seeks his/her emancipation.

Such an ambiguity regarding caste is not simply his own; he was writing in an age that initiated the gradual ignorance of caste in the public sphere of Bengal because of the thorough decline of identity politics. In the words of Chandra and Nielson: “In postcolonial West Bengal, even groups such as the Namasudras have been compelled to play by bhadralok rules governing emulation, acculturation and assimilation, albeit in pursuit of their own socio-economic ends.” (2012: 60) The unacknowledged presence of caste by no means imply its annihilation; identity hierarchies continued to persist in Bengal and its effected in the reluctance to accept caste as a marker of oppression, leading to the silencing, exclusion, and marginalization of the lower castes in a predominantly unequal society. The void caused by the unavailability of a prominent Dalit leader who could resist such a ploy by motivating and mobilizing the under-castes also provided the wind under the wings of such a project. In a recent interview, Debi Roy confesses his unfamiliarity with the anti-caste ideologies of Ambedkar and Jogendranath Mondal albeit he began writing at a period just after Ambedkar’s demise, when Mondal was still alive and trying desperately to make his mark in the politics of Bengal. When he was asked about his take on the anti-caste discourse carried forward by these figures, he replied:

I immensely respect them. The kind of struggle they put up against this system gave voice to thousands who were silenced for centuries. But I got to know of them much later in my life. At that time, in the sixties, I was hardly familiar with their names. I was far from being exposed to their life and works. [..] Maybe that’s why we never thought so intricately about caste assertion in our times.
(Roy: 2016 web)

However, there is one poem that stands as an exception. Written during the period of betrayal, humiliation, and trial, this poem, titled Riturakto (Menstrual Blood), captures the poet isolated from his circle, reminiscing and ruminating on the anxiety and misery showered upon him:
Contained in myself, I am outpoured like rain through the day and the night
‘I’m an outcaste’, the withered leaves under my feet remind me as I tread past
I am hunger in this absolute darkness
The Hungryalists and hunger have brought me out on the roads
The road under my feet shivers; is something wrong with the road then?
(Roy 2005: 21)

One may therefore be provoked to ask: is something wrong with the way in which Roy himself decides to remain silent about caste in his poetry? Does the unavailability of an informed Ambedkarite consciousness limit his potential to emerge as a ‘Dalit’ poet? Or would it be historically unfaithful to demand that much of a poet writing in Bengali and making ends meet in a region that, for long, has infamously thrived by suppressed any mode of caste articulation? Although Debi Roy’s early writings prefer not to grapple with the question of caste directly, Haradhon Dhara, the signifier that he desperately tried to do away with, sticks with him and continually serves as a reminder and a marker of the humiliation he faced. The poems, compiled in Kolkata and I and Humans, Humans, resonates the poet’s nuanced encounter with urban modernity. As the title of the first anthology underpins, Roy attempts to locate himself in the quagmire of identities, in a cauldron of cultures promised by the ambiguity of city life. The characteristic anonymity of an urban existence allows Debi Roy to sweep aside his caste identity and observe from the vantage point of a nameless random face lost in a crowd of countless faces. Therefore, Roy affords to forget his caste for a while and concentrate his poetic energy on other problems of the day.

But, in contrast, the recurrent presence of his identity in his prose makes us wonder more about his varying degree of treatment across genres. Jean Paul Sartre distinguishes prose from other art forms, especially poetry, for its utilitarianism. He contends that, “poets are men who refuse to utilize language. [..] Nor do they dream of naming the world, and this being the case, they name nothing at all.” (1988: 29) On the other hand, “prose is, in essence utilitarian […] the art of prose is employed in discourse.” (35) Such a suitable Sartrean disposition efficiently elucidates why the modern subject in Debi Roy refrains from directly naming the world of his identity in his poetry but utilizes the linguistic possibilities contained in the genre of personal prose and letters to register the humiliation his identity showers upon him and looks for avenues of resisting it.

The lack of an Ambedkarite consciousness has however driven him to take up other languages of anti-caste articulation. Though an atheist in his youth who found “bread more important than an unnecessary God” (2005: 33), Roy became a firm believer later in his life and found himself seeking the solace of the Ramakrishna Mission. He says to have been drawn by the profoundness and simplicity of Ramakrishna’s teachings expounded in the Kathamrita that provided him peace in his bouts of restlessness, pain, and depression. (2006: 94) In the same article, he takes pride in his Mahishya identity as “in the real sense, they were Kshatriyas. Even Rani Rashmani, the chief patron behind building the Kali Temple in Dakshineswar was a Mahishya.” (88) Roy derives the vigour to resist and retaliate by associating himself with the warrior caste. Taking recourse in religion deviates him further from an Ambedkarite anti-caste idiom. Instead of demanding a complete annihilation of caste as the organized body of Dalit artisans did, he reinforces the organic idea of caste by limiting his resistance only against the dreadful ramifications of the caste system. In an article on Chaitanya, he aligns himself with the views of Swami Lokeswarananda Maharaj who felt that the caste system was necessary in India to increase professional skills and elevate each and every human being to the status of a Brahmin, but miserably failed and became detrimental because of the hegemony imposed by groups that preferred heredity over ability. (2015: 4)

Shipra Mukherjee, has gone further to posit that “Dalit culture and resistance need to be represented in terms both religious and secular.” (2016: 141) Debi Roy’s religious representation of his under-caste resistance must be intricately interrogated to comprehend how the faith he endorses acts as a vehicle of writing against caste humiliation. Both the Bhakti movement in medieval Bengal carried out by Chaitanya and the phenomenon of Ramkrishna Paramhansha can at the most be endorsed as comparatively inclusive offshoots of Hinduism that accommodated and mobilized lower castes by resurrecting the idea of the Brahmin not as a signifier of oppression but as an epitome of wisdom and emancipation. Krishna Verma’s detailed article on Ramakrishna’s take on caste reinforces my contention. Verma offers an extensive account of how Ramakrishna Dev, in spite of hailing from a rigid Brahmin family, was lenient in his own life. He interacted and dined with his followers across castes to defy the societal code of untouchability. Despite such open-mindedness, that opened the doors of Hinduism to a larger population of non-Brahmins and untouchables, Ramakrishna did not bargain for the absolute annihilation of caste. (2006: web) Sumit Sarkar maintains that Ramakrishna, in spite of leading a colourful group of disciples of diverse origins, was an “appropriated and partially bhadralok-constructed Other with whom an urban group plagued with a sense of alienation from roots could relate without undue discomfort.” One can safely assume why an upwardly-mobile urban figure like Debi Roy, who strived to detach himself from his inherited identity by changing his name, was influenced by Ramakrishna’s Kathamrita, the text Sarkar holds in reverence to formulate his understanding. Roy’s anti-caste sentiments manifest in embracing religion, deviating him even more from Ambedkar’s prescription of renouncing Hinduism altogether to uproot casteism. Ambedkar, in his 1936 speech entitled ‘What path to Salvation?’ grapples with the question of veiling identities to avoid caste discrimination. He argues that a changing one’s name, rather than a changing one’s religion, does not erase the possibility of humiliation at the onset of revelation. On the other hand, conversion offers permanent redemption from the evils intrinsically enmeshed within Hinduism. Roy’s decision to remain within the folds of mainstream Hindu spirituality constrains the potential of anti-caste resistance.

The Importance of being Debi Roy: In search of a Conclusion
Studying the variation in the moods of manifestations of Debi Roy’s anti-caste articulation throughout his cannon unpacks how the poet became a victim to the manipulations of his time. Debi Roy allows himself to be gradually co-opted by the Bhadralok hegemony that he wrote against at the beginning of his career. After the Hungryalist movement fell apart, Debi Roy flourished as a poet in his own right. He went to garner popularity, appreciation, and acknowledgment as a poet who wrote on love and dissent in general. In 2013, when a volume of criticism dedicated to his corpus came out, scholarly insights mostly focused on his capacity as a universally romantic rebel devoid of caste subjectivity. He was heralded as a poet’s poet (Dewanji 2015), a minstrel of reclusiveness (Ghosh 2015), and the erstwhile firebrand Hungryalist who has cooled down over time (Bagchi 2015). The Hungryalist movement remembers him more as a pioneer member, foregrounding his presence in the first manifesto, rather than for his literature. The Dalit literary movement in Bengal does not acknowledge himself as a precursor of their lineage for his problematic negotiation in caste. This is evident in the fact that the representative anthology of Dalit writings in Bengali, Shatobarsher Bangla Dalit Sahitya (Hundred Years of Bengali Dalit Literature) does not include a single piece; leave alone a mention of his poetic career. While my paper refuses to claim Roy as Dalit poet ahead of his time because of the lack of caste specificity in his poetry, I prefer to conclude by endorsing him as an exemplar of how anti-caste sentiments were appropriated by the Brahminical system. The simultaneous presence and absence of under-caste subjectivity in his writings, the religious bent in his life that moulded his anti-caste articulation, and most importantly, adopting an ambiguous identity being forsaking his erstwhile surname that could have been a spring of Dalit pride, demonstrate the triumph of his time over him. Debi Roy must be remembered not only as one of the founder members of a literary movement that influenced the Bengali literati in subsequent decades, or as an autonomous poet in his own right, but also, as an under-caste litterateur rooted in his contemporaneousness, unconsciously contributing to the project of invisibilizing caste in the public and mainstream literary sphere of post-partition Bengal.

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