Malay Roychoudhury : Hungryalist Legend & Pioneer Anti-Establishment in Bengal : Abhijit Pal

TSC Interview with Malay Roychoudhury by Café Dissensus on June 16, 2016 By The Sunflower Collective   Malay Roychoudhury is an Indian Bengali poet and novelist who founded the Hungryalist Movement in the 1960s. He was awarded a Sahitya Akademy award for translating Dharamvir Bharati’s Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda in 2003 but he refused to accept it. He spoke to The Sunflower Collective at length about his work, Hungryalist Movement, Allen Ginsberg, other writers associated with the Movement, politics and rifts with other poets, publishers, and the establishment during the Movement.   The Sunflower Collective: Young poets are calling themselves Hungryalists in West Bengal again, as you said in a recent interview. Jeet Thayil is making a BBC documentary on Ginsberg’s time in India for which he met you. Deborah Baker wrote a book about the same not so long ago. Internationally, several films about the Beats hit the screens in quick s

Malay Roychoudhury (born 29 October 1939) is a Bengali poet, playwright, short story writer, essayist and novelist who founded the Hungryalist movement in the 1960s. Early life and education Roychoudhury was born in Patna , Bihar , India, into the Sabarna Roychoudhury clan, which owned the villages that became Kolkata . He grew up in Patna's Imlitala ghetto, which was mainly inhabited by Dalit Hindus and Shia Muslims . His was the only Bengali family. His father, Ranjit (1909–1991) was a photographer in Patna; his mother, Amita (1916–1982), was from a progressive family of the 19th-century Bengali renaissance . His grandfather, Laksmikanta Roychoudhury, was a photographer in Kolkata who had been trained by Rudyard Kipling 's father, the curator of the Lahore Museum . At the age of three, Roy Choudhury was admitted to a local Catholic school, and later, he was sent to the Oriental Seminary . The school was administered by the Brahmo Samaj movement, a monotheistic