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 )
