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

Malay Roychoudhury is called the Lion of Bengali Literature for two reasons. Firstly, he was born under the Simha Rashi or Leo and secondly he had the guts to start the Hungry Generation movement despite opposition from the leaders of Kolkata establishment. Like a lion he faced the legal ordeal alone and fought through to win it at the end. His character is like a lion. He sits apart from the groups and in order to avoid groupism and dirty literary politics he sold off his Kolkata flat and moved to Mumbai to lead a lion's life. Apart from the above two points his literary works are far more different that the run of the mill both in poetry, fiction and critical essays. He is not scared of the establishment critics and his interviews are quite straightforward. Like a lion he is not afraid of anyone. He is the doyen of Bengali Counter Culture.

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 scre...

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 ...

                                    In every country whenever a poet departed from the beaten path and searched for a new one, older traditionalists became very angry and tried to create problems for him. Many poets had to face humiliation and abuse for such new ventures. Very often they have had to face punishments for their works. They had to fight through their life to establish themselves. In this connection one specially remembers modern French poet Charles Baudelaire. He was kept at a distance by traditionalists during his lifetime. It is obvious that the leading light of Hungry Generation literary movement would face such attacks during his creative time. For this poet Malay Roychoudhury was even put up in lock-up and sentenced by court. Picking up the word Hungry from British poet Geoffrey Chaucer's ...

Malay Roychoudhury's journey from the Hungryalist movement to Magic Realist writing is a logical step in view of his vast experience of having traveled through the length and breath of India. He has visited more than three hundred villages in his lifetime and met people from all walks of life, specially poor peasants, carpenters, fishermen and under caste families who depend on handicrafts. His famous Magic Realist novel is that of journey of the heart of Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore's grandfather Prince Dwarkanath Tagore. The story is based on a real event. Dwarkanath was in London when he died but his family members did not bother about him as they thought that he has departed from the Indian path and has become a lecher, drunkard and a person who ate all sorts of meat. The journey of the heart is by a steam ship of those days. It is carried by his devoted servant Hooli who, being a Hindu, has a right to be born as many times as he likes, whereas Dwarkanath being a Bra...

                                                       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, Ca...