Malay Roychoudhury, born under the sign of Leo which is Simha in Bengali, launched The Hungryalist Movement

                                                      

It was obvious that Malay Roychoudhury ( 1939 ), who was born under the sign of Leo and spent his impressionable childhood in Patna's Imlitala slum will be the force behind the Hungryalist movement, the first Anti-Establishment counter cultural movement in West Bengal. With his leadership qualities and ability to organize he gathered around himself about thirty to forty young men to launch the Hungryalist movement from his Patna residence on 1st November 1961. He masterminded to hand over the editorship of the one-page mouthpiece to an under-caste named Haradhon Dhara who at that time lived in a Howrah slum.

Malay Roychoudhury was well educated with good academic results and his command over Bengali was immaculate. His English also was admired by Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carol Berge, Margaret Randall, Howard McCord, Dick Bakken, Allan De Loach, Karl Weissner  and other poets, poets and editors who later spread the news of his trial in the Western world.

Malay Roychoudhury's parents, though poor, were from reputed "Savarna Choudhury" families of West Bengal who had made their contribution for social causes to be appreciated by the intellectuals of their time. The "Savarna Choudhurys" were the zamindars of the villages which became famous as Calcutta after they were taken on lease by Job Charnock of East India Company. The "Savarna Choudhurys" supported Sirajuddaullah, the ruler of Bengal who was defeated by Lord Clive and as a result the East India Company were against the family compared to other families of Calcutta at that time who became lackeys of the British. The "Savarna Choudhurys" became quite impoverished and they had to eke out their living by resorting to various artistic methods in which they were quite effecient.

Malay belonged to the Uttarpara brach of the Roychoudhurys. Uttarpara was established by his ancestor Ratneshwar Roychoudhury in 1703 and his mansion was called "Savarna Villa" which has since dismantled and a housing colony has come up in its place. Malay and his elder brother Samir have forgone their claims to that property.

Malay's  paternal grandfather, Lakshminarayan Roychoudhury was a roving mobile photographer and artist who visited the princely states of British India in order to draw paintings of the members of the royal families of Kings, Zamindars and Nababs. Lakshminarayan moved from one princely  state to another and died at Patna when he was a guest of Maharaja of Darbhanga for drawing portraits of Maharaja's family members. He had learned photography from John Lockwood Kipling who was curator of Lahore museum when he met him. Lakshminarayan's parents were Jadunath and Matangini.

Malay's father Ranjit, who was born in Lahore during Lakshminarayan's visit to that town, and named after the famous king Ranjit Singh, was forced to eke out a living at quite at young age. Ranjit opened a photographic shop at Patna and followed Lakshminarayan's footsteps in taking photographs and drawing paintings based on them. Some of his customers brought only the face of their mother or grandmother from fading photos and Ranjit's wife had to pose for the lady, her face to be superimposed on shoulders, there being no photoshop technology or mobile at that time.
                                                                

Ranjit had to feed twenty members of his and families and children of his brothers. Excepting for the elder brother Pramod the other brothers of Ranjit were more or less idlers as well as mental. Promod later got a job of keeper of paintings and sculptures at Patna Museum which gave young Malay chance to roam  about in various rooms of the Museum and imbibe in himself the excitement of the world from the pre-historic days to modern times. This experience also contributed to his anti-establishment spirits as he found there were forces in every society which were dominating and against which the underdogs fought for their space.
                                       

 

Portrait of Malay during Hungryalist movement by Sanchayita Bhattacharjee

Malay's maternal grandfather Kishori Mohan Bandyopadhyay of Panihati in West Bengal, was assistant to Ronald Ross who discovered the reasons for malaria and was awarded the Nobel prize. For his contribution Kishori Mohan was awarded  a Gold Medal by the King of Great Britain. Malay's mother was a proud lady and inculcated that pride in her two sons.
                                                                

                                               Malay with his mother Amita during Hungryalist movement

Malay studied first in a Catholic School for primary education and after India's Independence his parents shifted him to Ram Mohun Roy Seminary, a coeducation school run by the Brahmosamaj. As a result Malay's faith in religion developed a polymorphous quality. The Imlitala locality where he spent his childhood was an area populated by destitute Muslim clans who had fled from Lucknow during British attack,  and under-caste 'untouchable' Hindu families. He was free to visit anybody's house anytime during playing hide and seek with friends. The Imam of local mosque did not prevent him to hide in it behind praying mats. 

During this period he used to visit the house of a Muslim family where Malay faced his first sexual encounter with a girl above his age whom Malay called Kulsum Apa and who recited poems of Ghalib and Faiz to Malay. This was Malay's first introduction to poetry and sex. Malay has written poems on Kulsum Apa and dedicated a book to her though she has disappeared from the house she resided in, which Malay found out during a visit some forty years later. Malay's house servant Shivnandan Kahar used to recite from Ramayana and this gave Malay an insight into Indian epics. His father's shop assistant Ramkhelawan Sing Dabur used to recite from saintly poets such as Rahim, Dadu and Kabir.

In the Seminary school he met a young girl who ran the school library ; she was Namita Chakraborty for whom Malay developed a crush, the girl had a dimple just like Kulsum Apa. Malay has written in his memoirs that all the girls he fell in love with invariably had dimples, including his wife Shalila Mukherjee. 

Namita Chakraborty gave Malay selected books written by famous Brahmo writers and poets like Tagore and Jibanananda Das. Later she introduced Malay to English and French poets and novelists which had a beneficial impact on the young man. When she became a lady school teacher, she introduced Malay to Marxist literature. Malay, though initially attracted to Marxism, withdrew from the philosophy after his encounter with Oswald Spengler.

Malay's parents had never been to any school and were self-taught as far as reading and writing were concerned. When Malay's father found out that he is evincing interest in poetry, art and culture, his father gave him funds to purchase books on Art and artists of the West. His elder brother Samir also used to gift Malay poetry collections and novels which Samir collected during his Calcutta City College days. By the time Malay had reached eighteen, he had a library of his own to boast about. Though most of the books were stolen during his trial at Calcutta for having written a poem in Hungryalist bulletin. We shall discuss it later.

The reason why Malay and Samir thought of launching a movement was their experience of post-partition plight of refugees at Calcutta's Sealdah Station as well as the rallies of refugees for bread and roof on the streets of Calcutta in late fifties and early Sixties. Both the brothers became very angry. 

Malay had already read Oswald Spengler's interpretation of Culture and Civilization which talked about society in decline and their insatiable need to engulf everything they got in their path. Malay took this concept of insatiability and falling human values in the light of Chaucer's famous line "In The Sowre Hungry Tyme". The combination of Chaucer's words to describe a specific time was very apt and the name of the movement was called 'Hungryalism" and the participants "The Hungryalists". Malay and Samir felt that it was now impossible for Bengali society to give birth to 19th Century stalwarts like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Ram Mohun Roy, Rabindranath Tagore,  Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar. They were correct in their anticipation. Bengal declined to a bottomless pit from which it has been impossible to recover.
                                          

                               Portrait of Malay by Biva Basu  
At the start of the movement, Malay knew that his name was not known to the young writers of West Bengal and wanted to include in his team someone who was known as well as young. On advise from his elder brother Samir Roychoudhury, with whom a poet named Shakti Chattopadhyay was residing as a guest for more than two years at Chaibasa in Singbhum district of Bihar, Malay invited Shakti to Patna and discussed with him about launching the Hungryalist movement. Shakti was more than happy as he also lived in a slum at Calcutta with his mother, his father having departed at his young age.
                                                                

                                             Samir Roychoudhury at his Chaibasa hutment

With Haradhon Dhara, a Dalit, Malay Roychoudhury invited his friend Subimal Basak, another Backward caste writer,  to join the team as a challenge to the ruling elite of the Cultural Establishment of Kolkata in particular and India in general, who had hitherto been avoiding the works of under-castes in their literary magazines. Pradip Choudhuri, who was studying at Santiniketan also joined in 1962. Unfortunately, Haradhon Dhara changed his name to Debi Roy, a seemingly upper-caste name, in order to avoid the taunts of upper-caste editors and writers.
                                           

                                     Shakti Chattopadhyay  
The first bulletin, which was a manifesto on poetry was printed thrice by Malay at Patna. The first bulletin was published on 1st November, 1961. 

Thereafter he wrote a manifesto in Bengali which was published by Haradhon Dhara in April 1962. It was distributed freely to academicians, poets, authors, news persons, students and young men at the Calcutta Coffee House etc. It took Kolkata by storm. It also attracted many young aspirants to the Hungryalist movement. The Bengali equivalent of Hungryalism, Malay had made it clear, was 'Sarvagras' and not Kshudharto or Khutkator as some academicians had translated the word in their own way. Sarvagras meant eating everything like the sun having been eaten during complete eclipse.
                                             

                                 Malay with a fag in left hand in middle
Those who joined the movement in 1963-64 were Subo Acharjee, Falguni Ray, Tridib Mitra, Alo Mitra, Abani Dhar, Basudeb Dasgupta, Subhash Ghosh, Utpal Kumar Basu, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Appa Bandyopadhyay, Robiul, Saileswar Ghosh, Ramananda Chattopadhyay, Binoy Majumdar, Sambhu Rakshit, Rabindra Dutta, Anil Karanjai, Karuna Nidhan Mokhopadhyay, Arupratan Basu, Satindra Bhowmik, Harnath Ghosh, Nihar Guha, Amritatanoy Gupta, Tapan Das, Ashok Chattopadhyay, Jogesh Panda, Shankar Sen and Bhanu Chattopadhyay.

Malay did not want the movement to be run on the lines of Surrealism wherein Andre Breton had the final say. Malay made it clear from the start that Hungryalism will not have any Headquarter, Polit Bureau, High Command or a power centre. Every member was free to write whatever he wanted and get it printed and distributed. However because of paucity of funds most of the members had to depend on Malay or Samir for funding them. 

More than hundred bulletins, manifesto, posters and booklets were issued by the members. However, there was no effort to save them for a future archive. Malay and Samir had said in their interviews that they were not after a place in history of Bengali culture and therefore no efforts were made to archive them ; neither the members thought that they should have group photographs or photos with famous visiting poets on the lines of Beat Generation poets. 
                                           

                           Poster for the movement drawn by Karuna Nidhan
The manifesto on religion and politics created such a hullabaloo in Kolkata that a leading newspaper 'Jugantar' wrote two editorials. The editorials were written by Marxist poet Krishna Dhar. Thereafter the group on advise and funding from Malay purchased paper masks of demons, gods, animals etc and sent them to the main personalities of Kolkata establishment. On the back of the paper masks were printed "PLEASE TAKE OFF YOUR MASK". This angered the ruling class who felt insulted and requested the Kolkata Police Commissioner Mr Pranab Kumar Sen to take action against the Hungryalists. Abu Sayeed Ayub and Santosh Kumar Ghosh took a leading role to get the Hungryalists arrested and jailed. Calcutta was taken by storm because of the activities of the Hungryalists which far surpassed that of the Dada movement.

The Hungryalist submitted a child's shoe-box for review to a leading newspaper as Sunil Gangopadhyay attached to that paper had declared that whoever is his close friend would get a good review of his book. Similarly the Hungryalists submitted full scape size blank paper to a sub-editor of a periodical who was selecting short stories for the magazine. This sub-editor had his own photographs hung in his house almost everywhere, including his toilet.

Some of the newspapers and broadsides started attacking them and provoked the Police administration to take action against the Hungryalists, specially Malay Roychoudhury, Cartoons of Malay and Haradhon Dhara were published on the front page of Anandabazar Patrika, Jugantar, The Statesman. A tabloid named Janata not only published a first page news with a full page cartoon but castigated the administration for not taking any action against the Hungryalists.

Sunil Gangopadhyay, who had gone to Iowa Poetry Workshop to learn poetry writing wrote threatening letters to Malay, Sandipan, Shakti and Utpal. Sunil thought that the Hungryalists were trying to dismantle his 'Krittibas' group. Sandipan and Shakti became scared and left the movement in 1964. Shakti even gathered a bunch of hoodlums in front of College Street Coffee House to encircle and beat up Subimal Basak, which they failed to as Subimal had the body of a muscleman at that time.
                                            

                              Portrait of Falguni Ray by Subimal Basak

Malay and Samir were not deterred. They got Hindu marriage card printed in English on which was written, when the receiver opened the card with a happy feeling for an invitation to a marriage dinner, "Fuck the Gangshalik School of Poetry". There was no such school of poetry called "Gangshalik School" but the poets of the earlier generation thought that the Hungryalists were attacking them and complained to the Police Commissioner. The Kolkata police let loose some informers at the Coffee House for collecting information about the Hungryalists and their publications. The main informer, it was later revealed, was a little magazine editor nameb Pabitra Ballabh, who was a friend of Basudeb Dasgupta. Unfortunately, Basudeb Dasgupta, did not warn other members about the informer. 

Malay had highlighted the difference between the Surrealist and other Western movements and the Hungryalist movement. He said that the Western movements did not give importance to space and devoted themselves to time; the Western thought was dependent on the philosophy that time proceeds on a single line. Malay said that this was wrong interpretation of human  history. Time proceeds on many lines which is unpredictable as we have seen during the fall of the Soviet empire.
                                           

                                 Pencil sketch of Malay bu Utsab Chatterjee

Some academicians have claimed that the Hungryalists were the result of a visit by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg to Calcutta, Chaibasa, Patna and Varanasi where he met the Hungryalist artists and poets. That the argument is incorrect has been explained categorically by Juliet Reynolds in these paragraphs.

"As both movements were predominated by poets and writers, there can be few to argue with the established perception that the Beat Generation and the Hungry Generation were primarily literary in character. While the two movements have tended to invite comparison with the Dadaists, no-one would define either as an ‘art movement’, as Dada so patently was, its literary associations notwithstanding.

Yet a closer look at the history and legacy of the Beats and the Hungryalists reveals beyond doubt that visual art and artists occupied a more pivotal place in their movements than is generally supposed. This seems at first reckoning to be truer of the Beat movement, whose annals contain a riveting art narrative that runs from their very beginnings and has barely come to a stop. Of course, it must be borne in mind that Beatdom is much better documented and appraised than Hungryalism, thanks in the main to the First World-Third World divide.  While the Beats’ counter-culture evolved in the most powerful nation on earth, the Hungryalists’ took shape in an impoverished, underdeveloped country, that too in a single state or region.

Moreover, Hungryalism was politically suppressed in a way and to an extent that Beatdom was not. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Corso, Burroughs and the rest could turn their notoriety to advantage, even if they didn’t desire it.  This would allow their movement to endure and evolve so that it would live on in the collective consciousness and become a cult.

On the other hand, the movement launched in 1961 by Malay Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Samir Roychoudhury and Debi Roy was decimated within a few years due to official hounding as well as internal strife, a good deal of it fomented precisely because of the harassment. The prosecution of Malay and others for obscenity and his subsequent imprisonment was but part of the Bengal administration’s crackdown on Hungryalism. Booked for conspiracy, every member of the group was subjected to ruthless police raids resulting in the confiscation of their intellectual and personal property, including books, writings and letters. The Hungryalist artists – Anil Karanjai, Karunanidhan (Karuna) Mukhopadhyay, and others attached to their studio in Banaras, named the Devil’s Workshop – witnessed the seizure of their art works and all

Anil Karanjai, The Dreamer, 1969

records of the movement, never to see their restitution. Fortunately, a body of Anil’s work, created in the immediate post-Hungryalist era, remained in his hands or became part of collections, and because the imagery this encompasses is strongly marked by the ideas and concerns of the movement, it provides the basis for a more comprehensive understanding of Hungryalism. It’s not a cliché to state that images so often speak more eloquently than words.

Just as Anil Karanjai (1940-2001) was the only adherent of the Hungry Generation to dedicate his life to art,

Portrait of Allen Ginsberg by Robert LaVigne, c. mid-1950s

there was a sole true Beat painter, Robert LaVigne (1928-2014). As recorded by Allen Ginsberg, LaVigne had helped give birth to the Beat Generation.  The artist’s roomy house in San Francisco was a gathering place for the wild, unclothed ‘bohemians’ of all genders who personified the movement. LaVigne did graphics and poster art for the group, as well as producing his own paintings. Anil and Karuna worked similarly with the Hungryalists.

Ginsberg and LaVigne shared aesthetic concerns. They both focused on themes of decay and death reflecting the angst of the young generation in the Atomic Age which, to quote LaVigne, ‘gave the lie to permanence’.  The question of creating durable art in a world with no future had a paralysing effect on him, a state he might not have come out of had he not discovered Beatdom. ‘The mad, naked poet’, as Ginsberg was known, and ‘the naked, great painter’, as Ginsberg

Sketch of a Young Girl, Anil Karanjai 1991

described LaVigne, both created telling portraits of friends and intimates, the former searingly in ‘Howl’, the latter more gently in lines and colour.  His oil portrait of the young Ginsberg illustrates this amply.

In contrast to his Beat counterpart, Anil Karanjai came to portraiture quite late in his life. Stylistically, the two artists are at variance but in several of their portraits there is a similar expression of tenderness for the subject. This is much in evidence, for instance, in Anil’s charcoal sketch of Karuna’s young daughter, a girl Anil had known since birth and who had been almost a mascot for the Hungryalist artists.

                Portrait of Peter Orlovsky by Robert LaVigne, c. mid-1950s

Ginsberg’s favourite work by his painter friend LaVigne, also his rival in love, was a huge portrait of the young Peter Orlovsky. Naked with an uncircumcised penis and crop of dark pubic hair, the work is sexually charged but it is also sad and contemplative. Ginsberg wrote that when he first saw the portrait, before ever meeting the subject, he ‘looked in its eyes and was shocked by love’. By the standards of the day, Ginsberg and LaVigne were both pornographers. But unlike the poet, the painter managed to evade prosecution, a remarkable feat given that full-frontal nudity was deemed obscene until the early 1970s and homosexuality was a cognizable offence.

Like Robert LaVigne, Anil Karanjai painted nudes, without legal repercussions.  But, as may be remarked in his romantic canvas ‘Clouds in the Moonlight’ (1970), the Hungryalist was more of a visionary than the Beat painter.

                                               Anil Karanjai, Clouds in the Moonlight, 1970

The grand poet and co-founder of City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was charged with obscenity for publishing ‘Howl’ and who published the Hungryalists when they were standing trial, was also a painter of considerable accomplishment. Ferlinghetti’s expressionistic imagery – the earliest semi-abstract, the later figurative and often directly political – is very compelling and underlines his deep commitment as an activist.

             Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Against the Chalk Cliffs, 1952-7

The prosecuted author of ‘Naked Lunch’, William Burroughs, is a further major figure of the Beat Generation to have been a visual artist. But the paintings and sculptures of Burroughs are literal horrors. He was known at times to have painted with his eyes shut in order to explore his psyche, which was considerably deranged, not just by an overload of hard drugs and perverse sexual drives. Some of his canvases are riddled with bullet holes, a reminder to his viewers that he shot his wife to death while playing William Tell, mistaking her head for a highball. Later known as ‘the father of Punk’, Burroughs enjoyed a friendship with the ‘father of Pop Art’, Andy Warhol, himself no stranger to guns, even if as victim rather than shooter. Burroughs was a frequent visitor to Warhol’s New York studio, known as ‘The Factory’.

In their earlier days, the Beats were loosely linked to the Abstract Expressionist painters and although the latter were not quite so flagrant in their unorthodox personal lives, they shocked the media and public in equal measure when it came to their work. They also created in a similar vein, eschewing conventional art forms and expressing themselves spontaneously; to achieve this end, they applied rapid, fluid strokes on outsized

Anil Karanjai, Summer Morning (detail) 1971

canvases; this was consistent with ‘the orgasmic flow’ that was a lynchpin of Hungryalism. Abstract expressionist paintings may appear anarchic but, in common with the writings of both the Beats and the Hungryalists, their art was conceptual in construct; in essence, their chaos was planned.

The image of the artist creating in a frenzy of uncontrolled passion is but a cliché, and few painters underlined this more cogently than Anil Karanjai. Even as a neophyte, full of fury and restless energy, he produced painstaking, considered work. If anything, his experience with the Hungryalists, among whom he was one of the

Hieronymus Bosch The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail) late 15th-early 16th century

youngest, served to heighten these qualities. The only western painter to have influenced him in any way was the Dutch master, Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516). Bosch’s grotesque satirical imagery inspired Anil as he struggled to create his own unique vision of the hierarchical, oppressive society around him. Abstract Expressionism was unknown to Anil until much later on.

The most notorious Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock – ‘Jack the Dripper’ – likewise an ‘action painter’, is one of several artists who finds a place among the writers at The American Museum of Beat Art (AMBA) in California. So too is the supreme Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp, who had coined the term ‘anti-art’ before any of the Beats were born and was, therefore, one of their idols. But the story goes that when Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso met Duchamp in Paris in the late 1950s, they were so inebriated that the former kissed his knees while the latter cut off his tie; by now an elder of the art world, Duchamp was probably not amused. The Beats’ conduct in those days could be so selfishly outrageous that they managed to antagonise many, including Jean Genet, hardly known for model behaviour himself.

It’s doubtful whether the subject of art arose in a meaningful way between Anil Karanjai and Allen Ginsberg when they spent time together in Banaras. The American had his mind on ‘higher things’, namely sadhus, burning ghats, mantras and ganja. Apart from introducing Ginsberg to the harmonium, in the company of the Buddhist, Hindi poet, Nagarjuna, Anil and Karuna taught Ginsberg and Orlovsky the art of chillum-smoking, an almost ritualistic activity, not at all easy to master. Otherwise, Ginsberg appears to have shown little curiosity about the art of the Hungryalists. This did not offend Anil who was then very young, thrilled to have the opportunity to converse in English, a language with which he was not then familiar. Neither Anil nor Karuna would have been overawed by the feted American, but Anil would sometimes quote him later: “America when will you send your eggs to India?”, from the poem America, was a favourite line.

Ginsberg no doubt was not a racist, not at least on a conscious level. But there was an element of white man’s arrogance within him, as there surely was in other Beats. Despite being an anti-establishment movement, it was at some levels a highly elitist one as well. Burroughs, for example, seems to have got away with his wife’s killing because he was a Harvard alumnus and came from a rich family. The background of Ginsberg was not quite so privileged but he rose to superstardom young. No amount of ‘slumming-it’ in India could change that, could knock him from his pedestal; in addition, he must have been treated to a fair share of ‘chamchagiri’ during his travels. Probably the Hungryalists were among the few to exchange ideas with him as equals, and his failure to acknowledge their impact on his poetry and thinking reflects poorly upon him.

Ginsberg, who was evidently quite taken by religion in India, may not have entirely appreciated the Hungryalists’ views on the subject. They denounced god and all forms of belief and worship in the most condemnatory of terms. Anil’s upbringing in Banaras had rendered him particularly irreligious; he’d been challenging temple elders since the age of 12, often defeating them with his superior knowledge of the Hindu scriptures and his sharp tongue. With a scientific bent of mind, he would remain a staunch atheist throughout his life.  Early Buddhism did appeal to him, but he was critical of the Tibetan form of Buddhism, later embraced by Allen Ginsberg. Of course, the Beat poet’s anti-war politics and activism did accord with Anil’s worldview, as it must have with others of the erstwhile Hungry Generation.

As far as the Hungryalists’ politics was concerned, Anil was at one with their ferocious attack on the entrenched establishment, but he rejected their anarchism, their precept that existence is ‘pre-political’ and that all political ideologies should be precluded. He had enrolled in and quit the Communist Party much prior to joining Hungry Generation, but he would thereafter remain committed to the far left. It is a myth he became a Naxalite when Hungryalism fizzled out.

There is truth in the legend that the Hungryalists engaged in sexual anarchy in Banaras and Kathmandu, but compared to the shenanigans of the Beats this was really quite tame. Anil and Karuna did live with seekers and hippies in an international commune, and indeed Karuna was its manager and sometimes head cook. Further, a large part of their subversive activities did involve the consumption of consciousness expanding substances including LSD, magic mushrooms and the like, but their experiments were always undertaken in a controlled environment. This did make a great mark on Anil but because he never consumed substances irresponsibly, the outcome was positive, helping to liberate and enhance his vision as a painter. This hardly constituted ‘drug abuse’ as claimed by some.

Further, the deliberate burning of paintings by their Hungryalist creators is a much exaggerated story, largely based on the aftermath of an exhibition in 1967 at a well-known Kathmandu gallery. The event coincided with a writers’ conference that was attended by Malay and others who had remained loyal to Hungryalism. It was Karuna alone who destroyed his work. Anil enjoyed the spectacle but remained on the side-lines. Such anti-art gestures didn’t fit his philosophy. His iconoclasm was of another kind.

                                                       Anil Karanjai, The Competition, 1968

Yet, whatever his divergences with Hungryalist ideology, Anil shared the movement’s aesthetic concerns. This is most immediately perceptible in his works of the late ’60s such as ‘The Competition’. Painted in 52 straight hours in the Banaras commune, the work is based on a banyan tree, a metaphor for the chaos and struggle of the times. It also reflects the aspiration of the Hungryalists, as well as that of the Beats, to reintegrate humans with the natural world, a world in which obscenity is non-existent and lost innocence is restored.

Although Anil’s work metamorphosed and matured in his post-Hungry Generation decades, his experience with the movement remained in his consciousness. His ideas may have come from many sources, but he never lost sight of that Hungryalist goal. Much of his late work is apparently classical, an expression of realism. His landscapes in particular seem to be the antithesis of his early ‘surreal’ imagery and this tends to confound his viewers. But while it is certainly true that the provocative, rhetorical imagery has vanished, the foundations remain the same. From beginning to end, Anil’s art expresses the drama of the human condition through the moods and forms of nature. And this does accord with Hungryalist poetry. Take, for instance, the lines of Shakti Chattopadhyay:

“Like a football the moon is poised over the hill
Waiting for the late night game and the war cries
At these moments you can visit the forest…”

(Translated by Arunava Sinha)

                                                                      Anil Karanjai, Moonrise, 1990

The poet conjures up an image very close in mood and feeling to a late work of Anil’s, part of a series of mysterious night landscapes. Binoy Majumdar also approaches the spirit of this image when he says:

“all trees and flowering plants stand on their own
grounds at a distance forever
dreaming of breathtaking union.”

(Translated by Aryanil Mukherjee )

The concept of nature’s creations ‘dreaming of breathtaking union’ is echoed time and again in the life’s work of Anil Karanjai.

So too is the theme of the lonely creator or thinker which he expressed with great range. In a canvas of  1969,  titled ‘The Dreamer’, the thinker is

Anil Karanjai, The Builder (watercolour), 1979

shaped by confrontational Hungryalism and LSD, while a work in watercolour presents the theme in a way that parallels a declaration of Malay Roychoudhury: “…for me, the first poet was that Zinjanthropus who lifted a stone millions of years ago and made it into a weapon.” Later, Anil’s solitary poets or philosophers, set in stone, are encircled by nature, their only weapons their knowledge and experience. All these works are executed with mastery. It reflects well on Hungryalism that it is associated with an artist of such calibre and originality."

…

                                                 Anil Karanjai, Solace in Solitude, 2000

…

( *All the works by Anil Karanjai accompanying this piece belong to the collection of the writer, with the exception of ‘The Dreamer’, which is in the collection of Anjana Batra, New Delhi; ‘Clouds in the Moonlight’ is part of the collection of The Kumar Gallery, New Delhi and New York. )

  
 Here are a few poems of Falguni Ray, translated from Bengali by Sourodeep Roy.
 

nonchalant charminar
       ma, i can’t smile well-scrubbed twisted-smirks in your noble society anymore

in the godly dense ocean of kindness with krishna’s duffed up white teeth      with studious eyes of the devil      i can’t

anymore    in a ramakrishnian posture     use my wife according to the matriarchal customs
       substitute sugar for saccharine and dread diabetes no more   i can’t no more with my unhappy
organ do a devdas again in khalashitola on the registry day of a former fling.
       my liver is getting rancid by the day   my grandfather had cirrhosis   don’t understand

heredity    i drink alcohol  read poetry   my father for the sake of puja etc used to fast   venerable dadas in our para

swearing by dharma gently press ripe breasts of sisters-born-of-the-locality on holi
       on the day ma left for trips abroad many in your noble society had vodka   i will
nonchalantly    from your funeral pyre    light up a charminar    thinking of your death my eyes tear
up    then i don’t think of earthquakes by the banks or of floodwater   didn’t put my hand on the string of the petticoat of an unmarried lover and didn’t think of baishnab padavali ma, even i’ll die one day.
       at belur mandir on seeing foreign woman pray with her international python-bum veiled in a skirt

my limitless libido rose up   ma because your libido will be tied up to father’s memories even beyond death      i    this fucked up drunk am    

 envying you   carrying dirt of the humblest kind looking at my organ

i feel as if i’m an organism from another planet   now the rays of the setting sun is touching my face on a tangent

and after mixing the colour of the setting sun on their wings a flock of non-family-planning birds is going back towards bonolata sen’s

eyes peaceful as a nest – it’s time for them to warm the eggs –

 

a personal neon

i am completely talentless so i touch the tip of the nose with my tongue

to prove my talent

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

of a tram sometimes i wonder – was it this tram that had once

trampled upon jibanananda’s body –

i have been moving on in this way – in this way my earth sun stars have been moving

at that moment when my foetus was formed another death had fallen upon the solar family

a friend of mine sits in a bar and drinks alcohol from far-off regions of the world quite often –

one day he became very angry and called me a toddy-addicted

ganja-addicted fucker

i consider dronacharya a murderer

for snatching away eklavya’s thumb

manik bandyopadyay’s specs

your paddy ridden field in baishak is my soul’s stamp – not the heart’s

in the winter fog i exhale smoke - not a cigarette's

in bed bereft of a woman i masturbate early in the morning

in whose tummy will my child arrive

one for which i will provide two morsels of rice?

                        without a party flag i have been surviving     without

                        the love of a woman i have been surviving    in order to listen to

rabindranath’s songs  at twelve thirty in the afternoon sun i have been surviving

no i never wanted to be rabindranath never ever     i have never wanted to love

sumita never ever    had never wanted her body   have never wanted mita’s

body      had only wanted her love but nothing happened to me

but of course the khan army in bangladesh     the US mines from the coast of tonkin

and the CRPF hiding behind the sand bags in kolkata      have left

the china nixon treaty has been signed    white black America has sent

a jeep to the moon     some grains in bharat     some armymen in vietnam

and some athletes for the Olympics

                        hindu bengalis

                        have killed

                        hindu bengalis

                        in kolkata – then under

                                                netaji

                                                lenin and

                                                gandhi’s statues

the wellwishers of shahid minar have called a public meeting – hence –

a lot of things have happened but i’ve still not got a job

                                                   and so haven’t got a wife

hehehehehe

the prostitute’s pimp and the bride’s parents never let their women

in our hands if we don’t show them some money

but will we all keep our organs settled inside a loincloth

and become sanyasis?

tear up for martyrs and become ministers?

once on my way to vote i saw a hungry person die

in the voting line their name was called as a proxy    and their ration card

confiscated     my father died even after receiving good dietary

medication and even His ration was confiscated – i have finally seen

death makes no difference between the rich and the poor or between the bourgeois and the                                                                                                                                                                   communist                                                                                                                                                                    

                        yet some deaths are lighter than a bird

                        yet some deaths are heavier than the mountain

hai bharatbarsha! will my death be heavy or light

hai bharatbarsha! will i be a dead body or a martyr – or will i die the way buddhadev

died when he tried to find a reason behind death?

death – are you just extinction or are you a passport to reincarnation?

who will tell me where is my real path?

who has provided me with life inside my heart – who will tell me what price is my heart?

who will provide me with pen and paper to write poems?

if i’m sick who will provide me with dietary medication?

who will provide for my food if i’m hungry?

who’ll provide me with a woman if i long for love?

                        can the state provide for everything?

                        can communism make the last boy first?

                        can socialism make a bad poet into a good one?

yet the vedic song of praise songhocchodhong songbaddhong etc means

                        our paths become one

                        our languages become one

                        our thoughts become one . . . this higher communism

was constructed by indians four thousand years before marx was born

                        our meals become one

                        our clothes become one . . . magical magical

but if after listening to this someone gets up and says our wives become one then

i mean i mean i’ll run away because i cannot i cannot think of sex with a woman and

sucking up to the guru as one and the same thing

so even after sucking our mother’s milk we can’t ever think of sucking our mother’s flesh

but after sucking the milk out of the cow we've had the cow’s flesh.

Now a time came when the Calcutta establishment was compelled to take some action in order to dismantle the Hungryalists. Their main target was Malay Roychoudhury. On 2nd September 1964 the Calcutta police issued arrest warrants against eleven Hungryalists, of which they arrested Malay Roychoudhury, Pradip Choudhuri, Debi Roy, Saileswar Ghosh Samir Roychoudhury and Subhas Ghosh. In May 1965 charges were withdrawn against all except Malay Roychoudhury. The initial charges were conspiracy against the State and Obscenity. The charge of conspiracy was well intended so that Malay could be handcuffed and a rope tied around his waist just like hardened criminals. Malay was made to walk the street in this condition and kept with the criminals in a lockup flooded with urine and shit of the persons lodged in the small dark room during the night.

The poem which was charged with obscenity has now become very famous. Here is the poem titled "Stark Electric Jesus".

Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die
My skin is in blazing furore
I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick
I'll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha
Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon
In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain
The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted
I can't resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex
I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace
Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart
Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness
other why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton
I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's ass
But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well
I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss
I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse
In to the sun-coloured bladder
I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me
I'll destroy and shatter everything
draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger
Shubha will have to be given
Oh Malay
Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today
But i do not know what I'll do now with my own self
My power of recollection is withering away
Let me ascend alone toward death
I haven't had to learn copulation and dying
I haven't had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops
after urination
Haven't had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darkness
Have not had to learn the usage of French leather
while lying on Nandita's bosom
Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya's
fresh China-rose matrix
Yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain's cataclysm
I am failing to understand why I still want to live
I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna-Choudhury ancestors
I'll have to do something different and new
Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of
Shubha's bosom
I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born
I want to see my own death before passing away
The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury
Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your
violent silvery uterus
Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace
Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream
Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm
Would I have been like this if I had different parents?
Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm?
Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my                                             father?
Would I have made a professional gentleman of me
like my dead brother without Shubha?
Oh, answer, let somebody answer these
Shubha, ah Shubha
Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen
Come back on the green mattress again
As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of a magnet's 
I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956
The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished
with coon at that time
Fine rib-smashing roots were descending in to your bosom
Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
I do not know whether I am going to die
Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience
I'll disrupt and destroy
I'll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art
There isn't any other way out for Poetry except suicide
Shubha
Let me enter in to the immemorial incontinence of your labia majora
In to the absurdity of woeless effort
In the golden chlorophyll of the drunken heart
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?
With her eyes shut supine beneath me
I felt terribly distressed when I saw comfort seize Shubha
Women could be treacherous even after unfolding a helpless appearance
Today it seems there is nothing so treacherous as Woman & Aet
Now my ferocious heart is running towards an impossible death
Vertigoes of water are coming up to my neck from the pierced earth
I will die
Oh what are these happenings within me
I am failing to fetch out my hand and my palm
From the dried sperms on my trousers spreading wings
300000 children gliding toward the district of Shubha's bosom
Millions of needles are now running from my blood in to Poetry
Now the smuggling of my obstinate legs are trying to plunge
Into the death-killer sex-wig entangled in the hypnotic kingdom of words
Fitting violent mirrors on each wall of the room I am observing
After letting loose a few naked Malay, his unestablished scramblings. 

When Allen Ginsberg came to know about Malay's trial he wrote letters to Shyam Lal, Pupul Jayakar, Khushwant Singh, Jyotirmoy Dutta, Abu Sayeed Ayyub as well as to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. On receiving, though others started requesting the Government to desist from any action against Malay, it was Abu Sayeed Ayyub who wrote an angry letter to Ginsberg telling him that his knowledge of Bengali literature was better that Ginsberg and that Ginsberg need not worry. It later transpired that Abu Sayeed Ayyub was one of the main complainants against Malay. When Sunil Gangopadhyay revisited New York during Malay's trial, Sunil also told Ginsberg not to worry. However, due to a TIME magazine report in November 1964, The Hungryalist movement became known worldwide and magazines such as City Lights Journal, Intrepid, El Corno Emplumado, Image, Earthquake published the news as well as the poem. Prof Howard McCord brought out a special booklet of the poem for sale in USA. Dick Bakken brought out a special Hungryalist issue of his magazine 'Salted Feathers'

                                                           

                                     First Hungryalist manifesto published from Patna in 1961

When the trial started at the Lower Criminal Court, it became clear that Subhas Ghosh and Saileswar Ghosh has become approver, that is, prosecution witness against Malay in order to save their skin. Malay also came to know that Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Utpalkumar Basu and Shakti Chattopadhyay had also agreed to become Police witness to testify against Malay. Sunil Gangopadhyay wrote an editorial in his 'Krittibas' magazine against the Hungryalists  in order to show the Calcutta establishment that he is with the ruling power of the time.

It was a Marxist poet and professor, Tarun Sanyal, who disobeyed the direction of his Communist Party and came forward in support of Malay.  Prof. Sanyal also advised Malay as to how the poem should be analysed before the judge. Another poet, Jyotirmoy Dutta, who was the son-in-law of reputed Bengali poet of Thirties, came forward to be a defense witness. He also introduced Malay to a barrister named Karuna Shankar Roy, who had just returned to India after practicing in England.

The judge Amal Kumar Mitra, however depended on the testimony of prosecution witnesses and sentenced Malay for one month's imprisonment. Malay appealed at the High Court and was honourably exonerated. Though most of the Bengali newspapers and magazines wrote against Malay and Hungryalist movement, he got support from such Hindi stalwarts as Phanishwar Nath 'Renu', Rajkamal Chaudhary, Kamleshwar, Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar', S.H.Vatsayan 'Ajneya', Nagarjun, Srikant Verma, Mudrarakshas, and others who wrote in his defense. The Gujarati and Malayalam press also supported him and the Hungryalist movement.

The reasons for which James Joyce left Ireland and went to live in France, Malay Roychoudhury also left Calcutta and went to live in Mumbai.