India's Beat Generation

While interest in the poets has certainly piqued in recent years readers will be left with more questions than answers after reading the book.

The Hungryalists
The Poets Who Sparked a Revolution
Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury
Penguin India
Pages 187; Price: Rs 599
 

This is the first book in English on a generation of writers in the 1960s who called themselves the Hungryalists. They were self-proclaimed “anti-establishment” writers and wrote mostly in Bengali. Some of their publications, which were bulletins, were also published in English and Hindi. In the “Epilogue”, Ms Bhattacharjee Chowdhury acknowledges that the Hungry Generation never made a comeback in Bengali literature, but “recent years have seen a better understanding of the movement”. While interest in the poets has certainly piqued in recent years — and this book is certainly a result of that — readers will be left with more questions than answers after reading the book.

 
One reason for the recent interest in the Hungryalists is a renewed interest in the Beat Generation. Allen Ginsberg met the poets when he visited India, but, unlike him, one of the Hungryalist writers, Malay Ray Choudhury, was arrested and jailed for obscenity. Ms Bhattacharjee Chowdhury relies on Ginsberg’s  India Journals  among other sources, but the singular attention in following Ginsberg’s journey in India— his fallout with his lover Peter Orlovsky, for instance — makes for unnecessary deviations. Midway through the book, one wonders whose story is being told. But Ms Bhattacharjee Chowdhury handles the two narratives deftly in the beginning which alternates between Malay Roy Choudhury’s train ride to Calcutta in October 1962 and an exposition of Ginsberg’s visit to India in Bombay in February 1961. She convincingly imagines the anticipation Roy Choudhury would have felt when he was visiting the big city for the first time as she sets the social and political context in which Ginsberg visited India. We are gripped by the narrative even as there is a diversion. As the book progresses, the narrative meanders into two separate streams and her control over structure is seldom seen again. 

 
Her choice of narration, as well as some of her claims, can be called more accurately a reimagining of the Hungry Generation movement. The reviewer would advise against reading the book as literary history, or even, as an introductory history to the Hungry Generation movement. The book, of course, does not claim to be an authoritative history but even as popular non-fiction, there are too many jumps in the narrative. The book, for instance, claims there was a rivalry between those who published the Hungryalist bulletins and the editors of another cult magazine, Krittibash.  This does not mean that writers who published in one magazine didn’t publish in the other. Ms Bhattacharjee Chowdhury correctly points this out. In page 64, we learn that an editorial by Sunil Gangopadhyay in  Krittibash had admonished the Hungry Generation movement. Ms Bhattacharjee Chowdhury says that this was because of a letter Sandipan Chattopadhyay, another contemporary writer, wrote while declaiming the state of contemporary literature, which named Sunil and other writers. After 20 pages, on page 84, we see an episode where Malay Roy Choudhury and his brother Samir Roy Choudhury, visit Sunil Gangopadhyay’s house. In spite of the tensions between the Hungryalists and the Krittibash group, Malay Ray Choudhury’s first poetry collection is published by Krittibas Prakashani in 1963. Ms Bhattacharjee Chowdhury reasons that this was because Samir was close to Sunil. But how can one explain why Malay’s book was brought out by the same publication that had publicly stated in an editorial that the Hungry Generation literature has no literary worth? Or why Sunil had testified for Malay Ray Choudhury in court in the obscenity case? Finding reason in literary rivalries is difficult, and Ms Bhattacharjee Chowdhury must be congratulated for her effort, but one wishes such questions are answered more pointedly.

 
The Hungry Generation has often been labelled an-establishment group, but what constitutes the establishment often gets muddled in the course of the book. Ms Bhattacharjee Chowdhury points out some biographical details: the bohemian lifestyle of the writers, their attempts at changing their upper caste food habits, the inclusion of Dalit writers in their fold. Literature, however, primarily concerns itself with language, and we get the impression that it was the Hungryalists’ use of language that offended the establishment. Early in the book, Buddhadev Bose is described as “Bengal’s premier literary figure”. Later on, we learn that Bose’s novel  Raat Bhore Bishti (Rain Through the Night)  had also been censored. What happens when a novel by a “premier literary figure” also gets censored? How is he different from Malay Ray Choudhury — anti-establishment’s favourite child? Ms Bhattacharjee Chowdhury does not attempt to probe these questions. Looking through some of the labels the Hungry Generation writers had proclaimed for themselves, and not taking them at face value, would have worked better.

 
The book does have flashes of Ms Bhattacharjee Chowdhury’s lyrical narration. Here is an example: “The winds would often howl while they were in Chaibasa, scream like a widow losing her hair.” Her inclusion of letters exchanged among the various people embroiled in the tumultuous period in this literary history, are the best parts of the book. The reviewer, however, was particularly disappointed to see almost all the names in the Bengali script were misspelt, editing errors that could have easily been avoided.  The reviewer is a research scholar at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. He tweets at @souradeeproy19