A Brief Encounter with the Hungryalist Movement

Hungry Generation With text collected and arranged by Tridib Mitra and from other additional sources
Typeset for the In Pursuit of Freedom

I wish I was there during the three decades from the Fifties to the Seventies. Those were the days, as I loved, when the whole world was witnessing a literary tsunami, yet of the good kind. No tsunami, but say, a revolution. With Jack Kerouac touring around North America, the Beat Generation was driving all across the globe; then we have the Malay Roy Choudhury & Co, describing in plain words how literature can pinch hard the arses of the authority while producing great works of art; and closer home, the three poets, Yumlembam Ibomcha, Wahengbam Ranjit and Thangjam Ibopishak published the anthology of Shingnaba (Challenge/Resistance) in volumes.

In music, the Fifties was archaic yet the rise of Led Zep, the Doors, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and the other bands in the Sixties was changing the way how we rock and roll literally. Anyways, a few decades down the revolutionary road, now we have a multiverse of art and literature that thrills us, amazes us, and intellectually excites us. 

Today, I will be sharing a few essays from a wonderful blog The Hungry Generation (hungryalistgeneration.blogspot.in)  that I had discovered a while ago on the Hungryalists. Some day, I would love to do a comparative analysis of these guys and the Beatniks. So, I will start with a paragraph textually from one of the posts on that blog and then continue graphically:

Since 1961 when the Movement started, till date, there have been many articles written on the subject, in India and abroad. Essays and criticisms in Bengali are easily available at the Little Magazine Library and Research Centre, Kolkata. English material is not easily accessible to readers and researchers. An attempt is therefore being made to locate, collect and bring as many articles as possible, in one place. Those left out by me may please be added to this web by anyone interested on the subject Lot of things written about the participants have become outdated which may be discerned from various websites. Some of them have even been bestowed with National literary awards. For historical reasons, however, entire discourse should be kept on record. 

(Read Stark Electric Jesus by Malay Roy Choudhury below)

For clearer references

Malay Roychoudhury and Bengal’s Hungry Generation of Anarchist Writers
By Sara Hussain, Homegrown
homegrown.co.in/article/801658/malay-roychoudhury-and-bengals-hungry-generation-of-anarchist-writers

“No Hungry Generations Tread Thee Down”? — Exploring the Poetics of Alterity
By Sanchari Bhattacharya, Information and Library Network Centre
inflibnet.ac.in/ojs/index.php/Margins/article/download/2261/1861

The Bohemian Hungry Generation Assemble at Kolkata
By Abhijit Pal, Bohemian Hungry Generation Poets, Novelists & Artists of Kolkata
bohemianhungry.blogspot.in/2016/10/the-bohemian-hungry-generation-assemble.html

Art, the Hungryalists, and the Beats
By Juliet Reynolds, Café Dissensus
cafedissensus.com/2016/06/16/art-the-hungryalists-and-the-beats/

Source: Unknown

Stark Electric Jesus 
Malay Roy Choudhury

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 brilliance
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.

[Poem sourced from Poem Hunter https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/stark-electric-jesus/]