Malay Roychoudhury : Los Angeles Review of Books
WHEN I FIRST MOVED to Mumbai (which I still call Bombay), I learned that Allen Ginsberg had once passed through in the 1960s. The details of how I learned this — who told me, where, when — escaped my memory immediately. The fact that I lived in the neighborhood where Ginsberg had stayed when he visited was, and still is, worth more than the why. Ginsberg, I’d soon find out, made two trips to India. The first was in 1962 when he and his partner, Peter Orlovsky, arrived in Bombay by ship. He was fresh off the heels of his 1957 obscenity trial following the success of Howl , and India was the old land for a new story. Unbeknownst to him or Orlovsky, he’d go on to spend a year in India and record his days there in his 1970 Indian Journals . In November 1961, a few months before Ginsberg arrived in India, though, a group of Bengali poets would found something called “The Hungry Movement”: brothers Malay and Samir Roy Choudhury, Haradhan Dhara (who would later go by “Debi R