Postcolonial Precarity and The Hungryalists
Nishtha Pandey
Supervised by:
Dr. Vikram Singh Thakur
Submitted to Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi in Partial
Fulfilment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Master of Arts in English
School of Letters
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi
Lothian Road, Kashmere Gate Campus
Delhi - 110006
2023
Declaration
This is to certify that this thesis titled “Postcolonial Precarity and The Hungryalists” submitted for the award of the degree of Master of Arts in English to Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi is a bonafide work carried out by Ms. Nishtha Pandey under my supervision.
The work embodied in this dissertation is original and has not been submitted in part or full for the award of any other degree of any other university.
Nishtha Pandey Dr. Vikram Singh Thakur
Student Supervisor
School of Letters School of Letters
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi
Professor Satyaketu Sankrit
Dean, School of Letters
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi
Acknowledgements
I would first and foremost like to thank my supervisor Dr Vikram Singh Thakur, whose insight and knowledge into my area of research were an invaluable help. Apart from his academic prowess, he also guided me on how to handle the deadlines and was incredibly calm and patient with my mistakes and naivety. If there is even a slight improvement in my research and academic writing skills, it is the result of his perseverance with my work.
I would also like to thank Mr. Malay Roy Choudhary for his time to give me an exclusive interview, and for his constant communication throughout the research. It has been an honour to get to talk and know about the movement through his first-hand experience.
I cannot thank my parents enough for the trust they have put in me ever since I decided to pursue literature. It took immense courage for them to ignore everyone, even themselves, and instead listen to their 18-year-old daughter choose her own path in life. Not a day goes by when I am not thankful for their faith.
I would have not been able to go through this research without constantly complaining about it. My brother and my friends, who were more than happy to lend an ear to my whining, have made it possible for me to keep my wits about me. Right from the idea for a proposal to writing this acknowledgement, I have been surrounded by wonderful and compassionate people I am lucky to call my friends.
Contents
Introduction 4-7
Chapter 1: Performance as Precarity 8-20
Chapter 2: Hopelessness in the modern city 21- 32
Conclusion 33-35
Works Cited 36-38
Postcolonial Precarity and The Hungryalists
Introduction
The avant-garde movement in literature aimed at challenging existing conventions, resulting in an increase in the number of back-lash from both the public and the critics, resulting in an abrupt end to these movements. Such movements went through obscenity trials, changing the public perception of the movement and the poets itself, often also encountering pressure from the State. I propose situating my research at the Hungryalist Movement of 1960s India to illustrate the effects of postcolonial precarity and bodily vulnerability in performance poetry. Performance poetry across the world has had to face its own set of challenges, which is why this research will also briefly discuss performance poets from the West to highlight the postcolonial precarity of the Hungryalist Movement.
Research around obscenity trials has mostly focused on texts from western literature, looking at authors like James Joyce, Henry Miller, and D.H. Lawrence. These trials certainly did pave the way for freedom of expression in literature, fighting existing social taboos and conventions. Chris Forster in Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity writes,
For those who celebrate modernist literature’s subversive potential, obscenity offers invaluable evidence. It confirms the things we most like to believe about modernism as a radical rejection of the stultifying power of the status quo. (Forster, 2)
In 1957, Lawrence Ferlinghetti faced obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. He benefited from earlier court decisions that made an exception for “ideas with even the slightest redeeming social importance” (Black 9). These factors have become a fixation surrounding most of Beat poetry, because of the “trial that was preoccupied with sexual accounts, references to narcotics, and the effects of both on young people” (Black 3). What scholars have often neglected to notice is the performative aspect of poetry that the Beats promoted, an aspect that brought along with itself a kind of vulnerability to such charges and attacks.
Allen Ginsberg, the most celebrated poet of the Beat movement, visited India in 1962, and stayed for a year. During this time Ginsberg came in close contact with poets of The Hungry Generation, forming bonds over a shared vision of using poetry as a performative tool that will usher in an age of rebellion. Ginsberg was already a famed poet by the time he met the Hungryalists in Calcutta, known through the infamous obscenity trial. When in 1964, eleven poets of The Hungry Generation were faced with obscenity charges, the main accused was Malay Roy Choudhary for his poem Prachanda Baidyutik Chhutar (Stark Electric Jesus). The trial was harrowing, filled with fines, harassment, and police brutality. The eventual win did give the Hungryalists credibility as social crusaders in the international avant-garde circles. Their works were published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in City Lights Journal, but there is little research into the aftermath of the trial. Maitreyee B. Chowdhury’s The Hungryalists: The Poets Who Sparked a Revolution does look closely at the lives of the Hungry poets and the effects of the trial. She writes, “But what the arrests really did to the poets was far more than scaring them. It broke their morale” (Chowdhury 168).
In 2018, Chris Forster did attempt to look at the obscenity debates from a new perspective, an angle devoid of the usual discourse of sexual politics and transgressions. In the Introduction to Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity, he writes,
Because, as this book will show, debates about obscenity involved reckoning with the materiality of literature- its physicality; its technologies of production and reproduction; its networks and means of circulation, distribution and sale- modernist obscenity offers an opportunity to reflect on the medial identity of literature. (Forster, 5)
The proposed research will shift the focus of existing scholarship of aesthetic transgression and sexual liberations, and look at the debate from the lens of precarity. The research aims to investigate the reason for the differing degrees of reception of obscenity through the poetry of the Hungryalists. The Hungryalist Movement of India was one of the many poetic movements in modernist literature. Its aims and vision were very much similar to its Western counterpart, the Beats Movement. However, the similarities between the two end here, as the Hungryalists went through trials and tribulations that led to the end of this short-lived movement. The question therefore this research aims to look into is why could the Hungryalists movement not survive in India, and the factors that led to their obscenity trial of 1964. The research aims to investigate an unforeseen factor neglected by scholars so far, which is their postcolonial precarity. The Beats and the Hungryalists were both vulnerable due to the performative aspect of their poetry, but the end of the Hungry Generation due to the trial highlights the fact that postcolonial precarity plays a bigger role here that existing research has neglected.
I would like to approach the research through Judith Butler’s idea of enhanced precarity and bodily vulnerability. Butler has explored the idea of bodily vulnerability and precarity in Notes Towards A Performative Theory of Assembly wherein she discusses the recurrent threat to the democratic right to protest. Butler discusses the idea of existing institutions and policies making certain communities even more precarious and vulnerable to destruction by others. Performative poetry, promoted by the Beats and the Hungryalists, leading to bodily exposure, as opposed to the lack in traditional writers, has consequences that scholars have neglected. The Beat poets and The Hungryalists have been called parallels of each other, but the existing research ignores the effects of their respective obscenity trials. The Hungryalists, according to Butler, are therefore more precarious due to their class and caste dynamics, leading to the subsequent effects of the trial. Chapter 1 of the research will look at the performative aspect of the Hungryalists, highlighting some of their specific performances and the impact they created. The research will also employ Slavoj Zizek’s idea of structural violence, looking at violence as an institutional method to curb any anti-establishment processes. Existing research around the Hungryalists neglects the institutional dismantling of the movement, when it is crucial to look at the social and political factors that were specifically in place in 1960s West Bengal. Chapter 2 of this research will focus on this systematic violence, employing theories of violence into the existing literature we have about the Hungryalists.
Chapter 1
Performance as precarity
Performance poetry was slowly growing around the world, as dissent grew stronger across border and countries in the second half of the twentieth century. The two world wars, Holocaust, and wars of Independence in multiple imperial colonies had left the world in a state of unrest. The Angry Young Men Movement in England was a major literary movement in the 1950s that started the trope of the “angry young man”, characters that were dissatisfied with the state of the world and expressed rage and frustration. Complacency and conformity by institutions were measures to try to reinstate a sense of normalcy after the upheaval of the past two decades, but this was met by resistance. American poetry during the 1960s and 70s then became an unstructured, uninhibited force that meant to shake people from their dormant state. For this very purpose, poets used performance as a means to awaken people. The advent of Happenings and poetry performances in America was when “performance art” became a distinctive term, a new movement in poetry that was not limited to books. Happenings did not essentially have a checklist of features, but were unscripted and random, and were adaptable based on the situation. It was the performance art of the late 1950s and 60s, with forms such as auto-destructive art representing the perpetual impermanence of things. Starting from the Futurists and the Dadaists, to John Cage’s performance in 1952, at Black Mountain College, there was a growing trend that saw poetry as a means of resistance, combining but also erasing the boundaries between the performer and the audience. What came out of it was a certain element of shock that created outrage, an important step in shaking people out of their compliant state. Jazz and rap became instruments of performance to voice out the need for racial equality, with poets like Langston Hughes and Patricia Smith.
Performance poetry did mean to attract attention, and it was not always a welcome one. The performance involved the poet’s involvement in their social setting, and this involvement made the position of the poet more precarious than it traditionally was. Performance poets were often the target of government, capitalist institutions, right-wing politicians, traditionalists, and any other hegemonic institutions that were the subject matter of poetry. David Bergman in The Poetry of Disturbance writes, “It seems to me that many of the disturbing elements of recent poetry have come from this turn to the oral, for the oral invites both an intimacy and a largeness that had been missing in modern poetry.” ( Bergman 34) Bergman focuses on the tradition of oral poetry in postwar America, but his observations about the tradition of oral poetry are applicable to such postmodernist poetry that was happening and would happen around the world, and not just in America. As suggested, performance poetry involved a lot more closeness with its subjects, creating an urgent atmosphere that stimulated thoughts and ideas, which in turn would lead to actions. Not only that, performance poetry had to face discrimination and elitism within the literary community. Traditionalists and High Modernists often expressed their distaste towards such poetry that glorified drugs, sex, homosexuality, and “immodesty”. Allen Ginsberg’s poems and the outlook towards the Beatniks is a prime example of the incapability of acceptance performance poetry faced. This led to Ginsberg’s works being censored often, and publicly, including the recitation of Howl at the opening of Six Gallery in 1955. Its subsequent publication, confiscation, and eventually trial in 1957 reflected America’s attitude towards the kind of poetry Ginsberg and his fellow performance poets were writing.
While the West was trying to come to terms with this form of poetry, India already had a long-standing tradition of oral poetry. But when Tridib Mitra read aloud his poem Hatyakando at Howrah railway station, it stirred a movement in Bengal that would attempt to shift how poetry was viewed by intellectuals, an attempt to make poetry a more public activity. In the 1960s, a group of young men in Calcutta, furious about the state of affairs in the country, decided to start a movement. They called themselves The Hungry Generation or the Hungryalists. One of the Hungry poets, Tridib Mitra, decided to perform one of the poems he had written at the Howrah railway station, leading to a revival of performance poetry amongst the urban literati of Bengal. This was not however the first instance of performance poetry, nor were the Hungryalists trailblazers in bringing forth this tradition in Bengal. They were influenced by multiple sources themselves, both Western and Indian, storytellers and bards whose poetry was not confined to the pages of a book or to the upper class and the literate of the society. One such tradition that mimicked the Hungryalists in their vision, were the Bauls of Bengal. When Allen Ginsberg of the Beat poets arrived in India along with his partner Peter Orlovsky, they visited the Bauls in Siuri, with the hopes of Ginsberg finding a spiritual guru in Nabani Das Baul. Maitreyee B. Chowdhury in The Hungryalists: The Poets Who Sparked A Revolution writes, “Ginsberg hoped to find in Baul spiritual teachings and songs, a new wellspring for his own poetic work. Tagore had once sat at Nabani’s feet with the same intention. Along with the songs of Lalon Fakir, those of Nabani’s were often cited as one of the principal sources of inspiration of the Nobel laureate.” (Chowdhury 53)
This reverence for the Baul singers was new among the Bengali intelligentsia, whose literary consciousness was largely formed and impacted by a colonial and Western influence. The Bauls or their way of poetry and life did not occupy a space in their readership. Bauls, and other such folk traditions, only came to light when the nation was gripped by a nationalistic fervor. There was a shift from the colonial to the Indian in all aspects of life, including poetry and art forms. This is when writers like Rabindranath Tagore began to embrace a more indigenous cultural form of expression for poetry. Colonialism and imperialism, a British school system, and then a subsequent focus on only nationalist writings made performance poetry of India a non-literary endeavor. Fabrizio M. Ferrari in Mystic Rites for Permanent Class Conflict: The Bauls of Bengal, Revolutionary Ideology and Post-Capitalism writes, “…how intellectual elites, from Rabindranath Tagore and his acolytes to the contemporary Bengali bourgeoisie, modified the public reception of the Bauls. This was reshaped to respond to the new political and socio-economic needs of an emergent class.” (Ferrari 34) There was a gentrification of the performance arts and the idea of “Baul” itself was being modified to fit into the aesthetics and archetypes laid down by the upper class of Bengal, which was being influenced by imperialism. They simply rejected Baul ideals that did not fit into the mould, in order to project a nationalist ideal that was highly cleansed. So, when the Hungryalists did attempt to revive it and bring it into the mainstream literary tradition of Bengali literature, the Bengali intelligentsia was appalled. This style of poetry was not something the bourgeoisie or the bhadraloks of Bengal were used to, having been educated in a Western framework. Performing poetry was looked down upon, but the Hungryalists saw the need to create urgency and immediacy among their audience. Their poetry reflected the instantaneous, and so when Tridib Mitra recited Hatyakando (A Case of Murder), it was rife with references and ideas that existed right at that very moment for the people of Bengal.
all around me humiliation and trickery keep on being enacted
by human beings
humans never loved each other
from the roof of skyscrapers corpses with hearts keep on falling falling
I can make out how necessity is creeping up to the sky
I am unable to remember my religion as I never understood it
The incomplete sentences, lack of sentence structure, repetition of certain words, and a flow of language that depended on the breathing of the poet, were all common characteristics of performance poetry. However, flouting the traditional norms and meters, such poetry was considered unacceptable and unworthy of any literary merit by the literary elite of the time. Maitreyee B. Chowdhary in The Hungryalists: The Poets Who Sparked A Revolution recalls the performance:
Tridib’s voice rose just ahead of Malay’s thoughts in a fantastic yet calming gesture to those around him. A strange electricity crackled in the air, like Mahler’s fourth symphony, it felt surreal and peaceful. From time to time Tridib made eye contact with someone near him, bent down and touched the shoulder of another standing close by. His expression was a mix of anger and plea. All the while he clenched his fists as he read. (Chowdhury 23)
When the Hungryalists chose print as their method of resistance, they distributed the pamphlets and bulletins across a wide range of social groups, deemed unworthy of reading and understanding something as elite and noble as poetry. Such groups often included drunkards from Khalasitola, a rustic cheap bar that used to be the haunt of the Hungryalists. Shakti Chattopadhyaya would often perform his poetry to the people at the bar, an eclectic mix of government officials, and Calcutta University officials. Malay Roy Choudhary in an interview recalls some of the performances of the Hungryalists that defined their movement:
There were a few of them. One was at the cemetery of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, limited to us only, though Tridib Mitra and his girlfriend Alo Mitra had distributed cards of the event among writers and poets. The one which attracted a crowd was at Howrah station when I stood upon a bench at platform number one and read the Bengali version of Stark Electric Jesus loudly. Tridib Mitra read his poem Hatyakand. Third was at a country liquor den, Khalasitola on Jibananda Das’s birthday when Abani Dhar got up on a table and sang a song; he had worked as a ship mate for some time. This became news in the next day's newspapers and literary magazines. The incident has also been included in the book ‘A Poet Apart’ by Klinton B Seely, on Jibananda Das’s life and poetry.
As described in the interview, one of the readings that the Hungryalists held was at the Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s grave. The literary rebel and icon was paid tribute by the city of Calcutta, and laid to rest next to his wife. His life and poetry was an inspiration to many of the Hungryalists, Dutt himself experimented with diction and verses, and introduced the blank verse (amritrakshar chhanda) in Bengali literature. Hailed as the pioneer of Bengali dramas, and credited with the beginning of modern literature in Bangla, Dutta was a revered figure among the Bengali intelligentsia. The Hungryalists conducting a poetry reading at his grave site was therefore considered offensive and improper by many. It also, however, did attract a huge audience because of the same reason. Other peculiar performances would include the Hungryalists reading out their poetry at the Imlitala fest in Patna, the locality where the Roy Choudhary brothers grew up.
The Hungryalists garnered attention and controversy in every aspect of their movement. Whether it be the content matter of their poetry, the style, the structure, or the performances, the Hungryalists were going against the convention of Bengali poetry that had been set by the upper caste for all these years. This temperament was not unique to them, all around the world, rebellions were on the rise, delinquency was becoming the norm, and people were generally dissatisfied. With two world wars, the Holocaust, and independence struggles across countries, an insurgent environment was created. Governments tried to bring a sense of normalcy back, but it ended up being oppressive, because the effects of the wars could not be subsided, nor was it possible to go back in time. This was not the case socially, but also politically and economically. Countries and its populations were worse off than before, while people in power insisted that everything was back to normal. This created a sense of disillusionment, that in turn became the collective consciousness of the people in the 1960s and 70s.
Voicing out this disillusionment and making people aware of it was a dangerous undertaking. It was asking questions that should not be asked, and demanding answers from authorities. The duality of the Hungryalist movement being a poetic movement and a socio-political movement led to them being attacked from more sides than one. Judith Butler discusses in one of her theories about performances how precarity works in the case of any kind of performative activity. Precarity, or vulnerability, is a human condition that varies from individual to individual, and is largely dependent on their socio-economic context. Performing, specifically in Butler’s context, performing as an assembly, increases an individual’s precarious position. Gender, race, class, caste, all are factors that affect an individual’s precarity to differing degrees. When we apply her theory to the Hungryalists, we see a kind of double-edged sword of precarity that seemed to loom over them. Not only did they attract disdain from the literary elite of Bengal, but they also did manage to cause disruption in the eyes of the legal system. They readily exposed themselves to the public forum, creating a bodily vulnerability for themselves that Butler describes “happens when assemblies deliberately expose their bodies to police power on the street or in public domain”. Butler wrote these theories keeping in mind assemblies and performances such as sloganeering and protests. The Hungryalists then become a case study in what happens when theories of performance art are applied to a literary movement.
The culmination of the Hungryalist’s precarity happened in 1964. The movement had been declared perverse and disruptive by the establishment, and on September 2, 1964, there was an arrest warrant issued against several members of the movement including Malay Roy Choudhary, Samir Roy Choudhary, and Debi Rai. Malay Roy Choudhary was the main accused in this case, with his poem Prachanda Baidyutik Chhutar (Stark Electric Jesus) being the poem labelled “obscene”. Arrest warrants had been issued against eleven of the Hungry poets under IPC sections 120b (party to a criminal conspiracy to commit an offence, punishable with death, imprisonment for life or rigorous imprisonment for a term of two years or upwards) and 292 (a book, a pamphlet, paper, writing, drawing, painting, representation, figure or any other object shall be deemed to be obscene if it is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or if its effect can deprave and corrupt person, who are likely to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it). It was not just the anti-establishment sentiments echoed in their poems, but the Hungryalists had managed to draw the attention of powerful people. Paper masks of animals, monsters and gods were delivered to the postboxes of critics, ministers, popular publishers and many other powerful people. The slogan that accompanied these posts said “Please remove your mask”. The aim was to startle and shock people, especially people who controlled the means of literary production. The Hungryalists were more than poets, they were social crusaders. They fought directly against the elite of Bengal, attacked the intellectuals, and rallied for a literary movement that would be accessible to the people.
The Hungryalists could never fully recover from the trial of 1964, being disadvantaged from the beginning. The actions against them were swift and brutal, with no support from the state or the literary elite of Bengal. Malay Roy Choudhary was fined, jailed, lost his job, had his home ransacked, and his morale broken, as he was the main accused in this case. While an outpour of support came later, it didn’t change the fact that the Hungryalist movement ended after this trial. Discourse and scholarship about the movement has always focused on the friendship between the Hungryalists and the Beat poets of America. When Allen Ginsberg arrived in India in 1962, along with his partner, Peter Orlovsky, he stayed for a year, wandering around the country, meeting up with religious personas, poets, and seeking spirituality. This was when he met the Hungryalists, and the two groups swapped their poetic visions, their ideologies, and their literary ambitions. Ginsberg was a celebrated poet by this time, known through the trial he faced in 1957 for Howl, when he first recited the poem in Six Gallery Studios, San Francisco. A revolutionary trial, that eventually went in Ginsberg’s favour, led to the Beatniks achieving popularity, and Ginsberg became the poster-boy against censorship. Both the Hungryalists and the Beatniks were anti-establishment poetic movements, and focused on reviving poetry through performance, and therefore making it accessible to all. However, drawing a parallel between these two movements is a problematic approach that seems to call the Hungryalist movement, an Indian or Eastern counterpart of the Western Beat movement. The reason for this is the western literary discourse that dominates scholarship and influences definitions and titles. Ginsberg sent “The Hungryalist Manifesto on Poetry”, and a long letter describing his exploits in India to his friend and publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti in the year 1962. When the poems by the Hungryalists were published by Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg’s introduction to the poems frames these writers as “iconoclasts invested in remaking language just as he and his circle had done in the States” (Belletto 10). The impact of this introduction cannot be diminished as it led to an entire generation of scholars and people calling the Hungryalists as “India’s Beats”, a title officially bestowed upon the Hungryalists by Time Magazine in 1964. It read, “Born in 1962, with an inspirational assist from visiting U.S. Beatnik Allen Ginsberg, Calcutta’s Hungry Generation is a growing band of young Bengalis with tigers in their tanks.” The following is an excerpt from an interview with Malay Roy Choudhary, where he reminisces the impact created by the meeting of these two poetic movements, and how the Hungryalists achieved international repute and fame, and the consequent image of the Hungryalists for a western literary audience.
Malay : Yes it did. Not in India but in America. In India prominent Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi writers wrote about our movement in the papers/magazines of their languages. Allen Ginsberg sent our manifestos and bulletins to Lawrence Ferlinghetti who published them in four issues of his City Lights Journal. This attracted other editors and writers of various little magazines in the USA, Latin America, Europe, Turkey and Arab world. Research is being done in those activities by academicians now. You may find them in academia.edu. But his visit cannot be termed as a catalyst. Our movement started in November 1961 and Ginsberg came in 1962. He met my elder brother Samir in 1962 and came to meet me at Patna in April 1962. My photographer father was annoyed with Ginsberg when he found out that Ginsberg was taking photos of lepers, beggars, destitutes, half-naked sadhus. He eventually made money by printing them in India Journals and Exhibiting them in various studios. He was, like other foreigners, an Orientalist.
While the meeting of the East and the West was a great moment in literary and poetic history, it seems that the East was swallowed up by the West. The Beat poets, unknowingly so, created a discourse that diminished various aspects of the Hungryalists, aspects that were unique only to the Hungryalists. The poetry that came out of 1950s America and the poetry of the 1960s Bengal could never be considered parallel. In a sense, the whole world was in turmoil, and therefore anti-establishment voices were constantly on the rise, constantly being curbed, constantly being criticized by the dominant classes. The likes of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary Snyder, could never understand the challenges faced by the Hungryalists, and vice-versa. While both poetic movements faced obscenity charges, due to the fact that both focused on poetry through performance, the Hungryalists had an added layer of precarity due to their postcolonial standing.
Members of the Hungryalist movement were neither economically, nor socially, in possession of any powerful standing. Most of the members came from lower economic backgrounds, with little education to their names. This combined with their caste identity led to the movement being under close scrutiny, at all times. When the first Hungryalist manifesto was published, it declared Debi Rai as the editor. Rai came from a lower-class background, and therefore the decision to make him the editor, and let his name be visible in print was an important one. Debi Rai was simply a pen name, chosen by Haradhan, which he eventually adopted as his official name. The publishing of the manifesto was therefore an attack of the casteism that was prevalent in the literary circles in Bengal. “In the prosed-rhyme of those born-old half-literates, you must fail to find that scream of desperation of a thing wanting to be man, the man wanting to be spirit.”, reads the first manifesto of the Hungryalists that was published in 1961. It was an exclusionary move, and eventually the Hungryalists came to be associated with anti-caste poetry, giving voices to poets who were denied a space in the Bengali literary circle. One such poet was Binoy Majumdar, who left the Krittibhash magazine to join the Hungryalists. Krittibhash had always been at odds with the Hungryalist poets; it published in one of its editorial statements that the Hungryalist movement had no “literary merit”, and their writings were “juvenile”. Later when the trial happened in 1964, Binoy Majumdar too was taken into police custody. Beaten blue by the officials, Majumdar eventually lost his mental faculties, and went through electroconvulsive therapy sessions. His friends would later tell news that he was admitted at the Gobra mental hospital.
Maitreyee B. Chowdhary in The Hungryalists: The Poets Who Sparked A Revolution writes:
Even as the Hungryalists violently attacked the administration and the media that had so long guarded rather zealously what comprised literary merit or not, their own output often emerged as a postcolonial counterdiscourse, where they moved out of conventional representation. As a result, their works were often considered vulgar and obscene by the erudite middle class, who had already chalked out a hierarchy for literature based on their preconceived ideas of refinement, which they believed were right. All literary output that lay outside this perception was considered wrong and hence mostly misunderstood. (Chowdhury 34)
Breaking out of any kind of literary canon has always been difficult, but also essential. In fact, it was on Oswald Spengler’s theory in The Decline of the West on whose ideals had the Hungryalist movement taken shape. According to Spengler, every culture in the world has a trajectory much like an organism, and it has a rise and an eventual fall. The Hungry Generation was founded on the premise of finally moving on from the modernist Bengali writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Gopal Chandra Bhattacharya, Meghnad Saha, Prafulla Chandra Ray, and many more. The Bengali elites were still dragging around remains of a past that no longer fit into their current reality. They had to be woken out of their stupour, and it was the Hungryalists who overtook this task. Their multiple layers of precarity made them extremely susceptible, or as Butler would describe, vulnerable, to violence and conflict. Performing poetry made the Hungryalists even more vulnerable than their Indian or Bengali counterparts, due to their physical body being the site of resistance itself. Coming from an underprivileged background made them more vulnerable than the Beats had ever been. The socio-political climate of the state also played a major role in the eventual rise and fall of this movement, which would further be discussed in the subsequent chapter.
Chapter 2
Hopelessness in the Modern City
“On its chaotic streets, Calcutta managed to erase all distinction between what was public and private. Whether you liked it or not, every social problem was yours”
- Malay Roy Choudhary, The Poets Who Sparked A Revolution
These were the thoughts of Malay Roy Choudhary as he walked around the Calcutta streets with Debi Rai, witnessing the pavements flooding with an outpour of refugees. This would be the state of Calcutta for a couple of decades. Starting from the 1947 partition, the city would receive an influx of refugees from the other side of the border, i.e., East Pakistan, that would change the city not only geographically but also culturally. Calcutta became the hotbed of revolution as the city saw multiple crises in the form of adequate food, affordable public transport, fair wages, accommodation and peasant’s rights. Having gone through two partitions, a terrible famine, West Bengal was still trying to get back on its feet from extreme poverty and homelessness. Looking back at the literature of the time, scholars have come to the conclusion that the literature of Bengal however, seemed to be stuck in its Tagore era, not really reflecting the disillusionment its people were going through. Monopolized by the upper caste, the bhadraloks of Bengal, the literature was becoming stale and inadequate.
With the end of colonization, literature in Bengal came at a crossroads with its imperialistic tradition and the new postcolonial, patriotic literature that seemed to be promoted enthusiastically by institutions in place. In Bengali poetry specifically, the romantic temperament persisted due to Rabindranath Tagore’s domination in the literary circle and the Bengali intelligentsia. This temperament was, however, far removed from the reality of the state. Bengali literature could not afford to be romantic in the same sense anymore. Ashis Sanyal in Post-Independence Bengali Poetry writes:
The market for Bengali literature written in India has shrunk to a great extent due to partition. The loss in readership thus suffered is yet to be made up. In this context, a group of poets came forward to start a struggle for existence within the liberal, egalitarian frame. Another group moved away from the existing life and society and yet another tried to evolve a new imagery by following the path of pure poetry. (page number missing)
Sanyal describes three directions Bengali poetry took after Independence, out of which two relied solely on a past that was long gone. Poets such as Alok Sarkar, Rajlakshmi Debi, Kabita Sinha, and Samarendra Sengupta, who were “following the path of pure poetry” relied on literary training, brilliant romanticism, and following a Tagore-like affinity. Poets like Ram Bose, Tarun Sanyal, and Manas Ray Chowdhury who struggled for existence in a new age, tended mostly to look inwards, and write as a recluse. Sanyal describes most of the poets from the Hungry Generation as “moving away from the existing life and society” when the case could not have been more opposite. Sanyal’s criticism stems from the fact that the Hungryalists and their poetry did not enter the mainstream, the content of their poetry could not have been more rooted in the societal sensibilities of Bengal.
Samir Roy Choudhary’s “So”, translated from Bengali, speaks of the neglect on behalf of the government that was leading to the worsening of the refugee condition of Calcutta. The poem draws a parallel between the urban, developing Calcutta, and the Calcutta that is “underground”, i.e., the city and its inhabitants that are rotting and starving. He writes:
Beneath five feet three inches deep within the subject lives
the rat of circus company
in four millimeter depth of feelings reckless shiverings have
booked their tickets
The poem has an accusatory tone, delivering the anger of injustice straight to the readers, asking “I delivered a counter- is the country OK?”. While making specific references to the city of Calcutta, using locations like “Jadavpur subway” and “Tollygunj Metro booth”, Samir Roy Choudhary is using the city as a synecdoche for the country itself. The poem also represents the caste divide that was growing at an alarming rate in Bengal due to the partition and the migrational framework. The refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) were mostly from the “lower” castes, and this increase in the demographic caused discomfort amongst the elite, upper-class, bhadraloks of Bengal. According to the statistics, out of the total 21.2 million population of West Bengal at the time, twenty five percent, or 5.3 million people were Muslim minorities. Out of this, only 0.4 million Bengali Muslims migrated to East Pakistan or Bangladesh. On the other hand, East Bengal’s population consisted of thirty percent of Bengali Hindu minorities or 11.4 million, out of which 5.16 million migrated to West Bengal after the Partition. This resulted in West Bengal having an increase in the percentage of minorities, both Hindu and Muslim. The situation did not improve, and acceptance of the refugees slowly turned to discontent as the problem persisted. The refugees too became hopeless, wondering if their existence was merely being confined to the streets and being a refugee.
The discontent and the loss of personal identity can be seen echoed in Falguni Roy’s “a personal neon”. There is an evocation of the past literary figures like Manik Bandopadhyaya and Jibananda Das, through whom Roy wishes to make sense of the present. He looks for their presence in the present day Calcutta, but is unable to find them, indicating the death of literary scholarship in Bengal, in Calcutta. Roy is simultaneously reminiscent of the past and painfully aware of his own inadequacies in the poem. He writes:
sometimes while walking in front of manik bandyopadyay’s house
i wonder – the same street through which manik bandyopadyay
walked, i worthless, phalguni roy, am walking, inside the second class
He strolls around Calcutta and compares his internal state with that of the city. The sentiment of a perishing city was inspired by the Hungryalist’s influence of Oswald Spengler’s theory. Spengler saw history not in a linear fashion, but he compared histories and cultures to the blooming of a flower. Each culture goes through the process of growing, going through their seasons, and eventually perishing, according to Spengler. The Hungryalists felt the ideology to be apt, especially in the current scenario around them. Tridib Mitra and Alo Mitra in Hungryalist Influence on Allen Ginsberg writes,
Once the creativity reaches its zenith, the culture starts waning, and starts feeding on alien resources. As a result, the culture starts degenerating, and its hunger for outside supplements becomes insatiable. The Hungryalists felt that there was no further scope to produce cultural and intellectual giants like Rammohan Roy, Vidyasagar, Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore.” (Mitra, 2)
In the Indian context, “alien resources” and “insatiable supplements” would refer to imperial influences that overtook the cultural sensibilities of writers and artists, losing their own personal identity or “personal neon” as Roy calls it. He uses language to convey the sense of identity sharing he feels with these other poets, but also simultaneously expresses a sense of detachment that he experiences because of forging this sense of shared identity. Roy uses language such as “same street” and “that tram” to create in the reader’s mind this sense of belonging that Roy desperately wants to feel with the poets himself, but is also refuting it constantly.
Tridib Mitra’s “A Case of Murder”, which he performed in the Howrah railway station in front of a clamoring crowd, was written in the year 1963. This was after the Indo-China war of 1962 that saw India’s defeat and loomed the threat of an attack and infiltration. The attacks on Assam led to desertion of cities, and populations fled in wide numbers. Large number of Chinese families too settled in Calcutta, fearing repercussions as Chinese traders were being captured in Assam. The population and homelessness in Calcutta grew exponentially, giving way to a demographic whose identity, survival and exile played out in front of everyone, in front of the streets, on pavements, on traffic lights, on the margins, all around the modern city. “A Case of Murder” describes the war of the personal, the hopelessness with the self, as a result of this injustice. Mitra intertwines the personal and the political, with Calcutta as the backdrop of his personal angst. He points out the hypocrisy when he writes, “352 billion humans what to talk of tradition and domesticated debauchery”; Mitra is utterly hopeless at the state of the city and its people. The suffering of the city is evident through the poem as Mitra describes his setting as “mountains of shredded bloody human heaps keep on growing” and “today nobody is able to find out a straight road to walk on//all roads keep on prostrating”. Calcutta was crumbling, choking, and dissent was commonplace. There is a direct questioning that is meant to echo in the reader’s head too. Society is shown a mirror through the use of language, and is not spared the questioning. Not just politically, but even the language used by Samir Roy Choudhary gives us a sense of the social good that he is trying to convey through the use of language. Phrases like “media-fedia” and “dailies-failies” is used deliberately here. Language like this is conversational, and by using it in his poem, Samir Roy Choudhary makes the point of going against elitist poetry that uses ornate language and elaborate rhyme schemes.
Not all of the Hungryalist poetry was introspective. Some of their works are clearly anti-establishment, expressing their disillusionment and exasperation. Malay Roy Choudhary’s “Shame on You Calcutta” is a poem that expresses the rage felt by the poet as he witnesses the desolation around him. Maitreyee B. Chowdhury writes “All around him Malay saw hunger and helplessness, anger and an excess of nationalism, which filled him with disgust. He no longer found romance in the misery around him and was unable to conform to the language of the poets who wrote about the green pastures of the Bengal countryside.” (Chowdhury, 50). In this poem Malay Roy Choudhary establishes a relationship between the reader and the city of Calcutta, addressing the city as the second person “you”. The personification of the city creates a relationship with the reader that surpasses the otherwise, non-personal relationship one would expect, simply because it was necessary to do so. Choudhary writes,
But I am a monster inferior to man
Can smother you with my elastic limbs
Tie boulders on your legs and throw you in the sea.
When I enter, the pimps keep knocking at your door
'Hurry up, a customer is waiting for a go'.
The direct addressal is Malay Roy Choudhary’s way of expressing Calcutta’s state as he blames the city for being “pimped out”. Calcutta has sold itself to pimps, making itself filthy and disgraceful in the process. The pimps and the customers in the poem are the people of the city and country itself, the corrupt officials, the dishonest politicians. The poem shows the relationship that is damaged, is on the brink of ruin, and needs to be salvaged desperately. The language also shows a sense of informality, a sense of intimacy, and helps the reader understand the relationship between the poet and the city better.
The infamous “Stark Electric Jesus” by Malay Roy Choudhary is the desperate plea of a man who is trying to find recluse in the bosom of his lover. The poet is utterly dismayed, and hopeless, and wishes to return to a primordial state. There is chaos all around him, including the chaos in his art, that he must make sense of. Once again the poem reflects how the personal is disturbed due to the public, specifically when Malay Roy Choudhary writes, “Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs//today” (lines 26-27). The entire poem is populated with mentions of human anatomy, which was what made the poem “offensive” and “obscene” in the first place:
Why wasn't I lost in my mother's urethra?
Why wasn't I driven away in my father's urine after his self-coition?
Why wasn't I mixed in the ovum -flux or in the phlegm?
However in these excessive mentions of the human sexual organs is an urge of the poet to crawl back to his own birth, to his fetal form, to hide away in a womb, in order to escape the terrifying ordeal of being alive. It is only his writing that can manifest his innate desires, sexual and otherwise. He lets his body speak through language, as he writes, “I'll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art//There isn't any other way out for Poetry except suicide” (lines 77-78). While an incredibly personal poem, even considered confessional, at times, “Stark Electric Jesus” reveals more about Calcutta in its reception. “It is this sense of poetry as something embodied that Stark Electric Jesus really argues for, and what has made it a powerful testament to the poetics of the Hungry Generation.”, writes Steven Belletto in The Beat Generation meets the Hungry Generation: U.S.- Calcutta Networks and the 1960s “Revolt of the Personal”. Unfortunately for Malay and the Hungryalists, Calcutta could not look beyond the sexual imagery of the poem. They looked past the desperation, the urgency and immediacy of the poet’s plea, past the confession he is trying to make. Both the intelligentsia and the everyday reader instead chose to focus on the unrefined language of the poem, the taboo topics it spoke about, and the unflinching sexual desire it portrayed. The Hungryalists and their poetry had Calcutta’s stamp all over them and vice-versa. It is therefore important to investigate the relationship between the city and the movement.
So much of the city’s cultural and literary control was in the hands of upper-class, in the hands of the bhadraloks, that it was impossible for the Hungryalists to go against them without having to face the wrath of an entire system that worked in the favour of these upper class men. The Roy Choudhary brothers were from Patna, and while the Hungryalist movement was at its peak in Bengal, there were multiple instances where they would have to publish their manifestos and poems from the Patna press. The reason for this was the refusal of Calcutta publishers in aiding the Hungry movement in any way. It would be difficult for any literary movement to make a noticeable splash if the literary center of the state would become the gatekeeper of literary ethics and morals. Calcutta, while simultaneously being the city for writers and poets, was the city that denied writers and poets. Or rather, it denied a certain kind. The hegemonic powers controlled everything, from publishers to newspapers, ascertaining that any kind of poetry or writing that did not fit their idea of merit, simply lacked any literary value. This was what happened with the Hungryalists. From the rivalry against Krittibhash (a Bengali literary magazine, see Chapter 1 for a detailed reference), to their court case that saw support from critics like Abu Sayeed Ayyub, who wrote in a letter to Allen Ginsberg, “Malay Roy Choudhary and his young friends of the Hungry Generation have not produced anything worthwhile to my knowledge, though they have produced and distributed a lot of self-advertising leaflets and printed letters abusing distinguished people in filthy and obscene language.” (Chowdhury, 150), all kinds of social systems were pitted against them. The price of challenging the status quo was a very high one, and the Hungryalists had to pay their dues. The eventual and constant targeting of the Hungryalists caused a rift within the movement too, with people taking sides to save themselves. It therefore becomes crucial to observe these intricate systems in place that were at work in the literary Calcutta to hopefully find an answer to why the Hungryalist movement was fated to its eventful and untimely demise. The comparison of the Hungryalists with the Beats loses all its validity when we compare how the two movements attempted to survive in a postmodern society. Upon asking if the Hungryalist movement’s precarious position in a postcolonial, post-independent country affected the outcome of the movement as compared to the socio-cultural atmosphere the Beat poets had, Malay Roy Chaudhry replied in a personal interview:
The Beats came from rich families. Very rich families, when you think of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs. We were paupers compared to them. Saileswar Ghosh, Subhash Ghosh, Basudev Dasgupta, Pradip Choudhuri came from refugee families. Haradhan Dhara had to work as an errand boy at a tea stall; his mother collected garbage from vegetable markets. Falguni Ray did nothing. Came from a slum. We did not get publishers for our books for more than two decades.
It is evident from the reception the Hungryalists received that a certain kind of violence was at play against them, a violence that was not just physical (the police brutality certain poets had to receive at the hands of the institution during the 1964 court case), but also worked on a structural and systematic level. The study of violence has so far revealed that it is a tool, a goal-oriented manifestation to bridge the gap between law-making and law-preserving. Multiple existing institutions are put in place that act on the basis of violence being a legitimate act. Violence becomes therefore acceptable as it takes the form of structural and systemic violence. Kathleen M. Weigert in Structural Violence describes it as, “Such violence emerges from the unequal distribution of power and resources, or, in other words, is said to be built into the structure(s).” (Weigert, 2005). These structures are specifically put in place to give space to human beings to do harm to each other in the guise of performing their duty of being citizens. An example of this would be the hierarchical caste system in India that exists and survives on the basis of existing structures that intend to keep a certain section of the community downtrodden. If we look at the case of the Hungryalists, we can see how the movement faced even more challenges as it tried to publish poets and writers from the lower castes, writers that were being looked down upon and denied an opportunity. They went against the existing systems and structures in place, and suffered the violence that comes with opposing the hegemony. The violence inflicted on them was a way for the system to preserve and institute a law that denied freedom of expression to the people who needed it the most. Elite publications kept their doors closed and as a result the Hungryalists would often self-publish and self-distribute their bulletins and magazines. They targeted colleges and universities, coffee houses, and pubs and taverns. They had no financial support either, making them vulnerable to attacks from government institutions. The Hungryalists were existing in Calcutta at a time when uprisings were at their most notorious, and so was the oppression.
Slavoj Zizek in his book Violence writes, “We’re talking here of the violence inherent in a system: not only direct physical violence, but also the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence.” (Zizek, 9). Zizek’s description of this structural violence, and the subtlety of it becomes clear as day when we dissect the Hungryalist movement and the factors that led to its eventual breaking up. The idea on which the basis of the movement was laid: the idea of bringing poetry to the masses, making it accessible, making language accessible and de-colonize it in the process, all of their agendas went against some of the most powerful existing systems in place. The movement’s trajectory lasted barely four years, till 1965, and the obscenity charges and the eventual court case was the final blow for the Hungryalists by the institutions, by Calcutta. The city was both their provider and their attacker simultaneously. The movement and Calcutta were intertwined from the beginning, intrinsically linked, and that was both a curse and their saving grace.
The Hungryalist movement did exist after 1965. It does exist today too, as once again the younger generation of Calcutta is faced with hopelessness in a society that did not deliver on its promises. The Hungry Movement was a combination of the literary and the political when at its peak. Did one aspect stem from the other or were both of them intertwined from the beginning? It has been made clear to those in literary studies that it is impossible for a text to exist independently, that the public and the personal cannot be separated. The extent of the public, the political, determined the attention Hungryalists received and while they did want to stir people and the society up from their passive and inactive state, the damages they suffered in return ran too deep. However, they did manage to bring in a new perspective to poetry, and it was under the umbrella of this movement that the subaltern first found a voice. Their work towards promoting regional dialects and writers. Subimal Basak’s Chatamatha was his first novel that garnered a lot of attention after the movement had died down. It stirred some hopes for a revival, but more than that, it brought hope for a new kind of literature and readership that did not limit itself to an elite group.
Conclusion
Based on the two chapters, we can conclude that the Hungryalist movement’s end came about due to two major reasons, due to two major factors that made them more precarious than most poetic movements. In the Hungryalists there was a blend of the literary and the political that made them doubly disadvantaged, fending off attacks from both the fronts. Their writing was hugely experimental, influenced by the chaos of their time, taking inspiration from unlikely sources, and creating a poetic sensibility of their own. Their poetry was suspended between the personal hopelessness that emerged as a response to Bengal’s cultural landscape, and a strong anti-establishment sentiment that was a result of political inadequacy from the leaders of the country.
In Chapter 1 we investigated the different performances from the poets of the Hungry Generation, their content matter, their choice of unconventional locations, their style of poetry, and the subsequent trial of 1964 that was a direct result of their precarious position as performance poets. The chapter answers the question as to why the movement could not survive after the trial, investigating the background of the Hungryalists poets along that of the Bengali intelligentsia. Chapter 2 of the research focuses on the social and political conditions of Bengal, zooming in on the city of Calcutta, where most of the action took place. The chapter draws a direct correlation between the content matter of the poetry of the Hungryalists and their socio-cultural background. It consists of a textual analysis of the primary readings of the research in order to find the thread between Calcutta and the Hungryalist poetry, and their interdependence on each other. It is also an investigation into the institutional forces that were a roadblock to the movement at every step, making it impossible for the movement to exist. The violence that the movement faced was multi-layered and structural, inviting backlash from numerous sources that the chapter expands on.
The aim of this research was to investigate the reason for the abrupt end and short lifespan of the Hungryalist movement. However, in an interview with Malay Roy Choudhary, he talks about the continuation of the movement and the efforts to keep the spirit of the Hungry Generation alive:
The movement was continued by other members but they did not give publicity to their magazine “Khudharto '' as I did by distributing leaflets and pamphlets which reached readers quickly; nobody had to pay. Leaflets/pamphlets had a greater reach as some of them were in English as well. “Khudarto” was in Bengali and Kolkata Centric. In fact seven issues of “Khudharto’ were published as an anthology by Sahitya Academy. Unfortunately those who published “Khudharto '' took a decision to have only a few writer friends as contributors. I used to increase the number of participants which included writers, poets, dramatists, cartoonists and painters. The movement took roots in North Bengal and Tripura in 1975-1980 but then again they were not publicized. Politics played a role as far as the then West Bengal government wanted to stifle our voice, arrested us and charged me for my poem Stark Electric Jesus. When my elder brother returned to Kolkata and started a literary magazine called HAOWA39, and I got transferred to Kolkata, interest among younger generation writers about our movement received attention. I was requested to write about the movement by a magazine of Bangladesh which was republished in Kolkata by a publisher and published again by another publisher with lots of photographs. After Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Choudhury wrote The Hungryalists published by Penguin Random House, the movement again got an Indian attention.
The interest in the movement stays alive and well among the youth of Bengal as time and time again there is a need to echo the sentiments of a hungry generation from six decades ago, a need to stay hungry despite the opposing forces of a confirmative and oppressive society and regime. Precarity is an inescapable part of being a member of the society, as Butler mentions, and therefore each person, group, movement, has their own set of precarious labels that try to limit them from achieving their potential. In the case of the Hungryalists, it was their emphasis on performance poetry and writing in a turbulent socio-cultural atmosphere. With time, one only hopes that these once precarious labels can become acceptable and empowering instead of being the cause of persecution and subjugation. Further research on the Hungryalists can perhaps look at this change in the movement, can investigate if anything has changed, and if it is at all possible for a movement like this to exist in the current socio-political context. Are we done with the precarious labels or have we simply added more?
Works Cited
Primary Readings:
Mitra, Tridib. “A Case of Murder”. Zebra, 1963
Roy, Falguni. “Personal Neon”, PoemHunter. Com- The World’s Poetry Archive. Web. 20
December 2022. <http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ personal- neon/>.
Roy Choudhary, Malay. “Shame on You Calcutta”. Selected Poems by Malay Roy Choudhary,
1989.
______________. “Stark Electric Jesus”. Stark Electric Jesus: A Poem, Tribal Press, 196.6
______________. “The movement did continue after 1965”. Received by Nishtha Pandey. 2
November, 2022. Email Interview. <https://hungryalist.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/the-movement-did-continue-after-1965/>
Roy Choudhary, Samir. “So”, PoemHunter.Com- The World’s Poetry Archive. Web. 19
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Secondary Readings:
Belletto, Steven. “The Beat Generation Meets the Hungry Generation: U.S.—Calcutta Networks
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