Papers by Malay Roychoudhury
Margins, Aug 6, 2014
This essay discusses the Hungryalist Movement of the 1960s which attempted to change the path of ... more This essay discusses the Hungryalist Movement of the 1960s which attempted to change the path of the early 20th century Bengali literature because it failed to represent the existential angst and pessimism of the youth of post-Partition Bengal. There is no doubt, of course, that the movement ushered in a violent surge of change that hit right at the outdated mode of conceiving literature and art according to a city-centric, western educated, bourgeois sense of taste. But despite their constant revolution for almost five years, the extent of success of the Hungryalist movement still remains questionable. It is argued here that although it set out to attack and disintegrate contemporary Bengali literature on the premise that it was unbearably imitative of the West, the movement itself seems to have been heavily inspired by certain revolutionary ideas conceptualized largely by the Occident.
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
In this article, we explore how the destinies of some poets were intertwined in the history of pu... more In this article, we explore how the destinies of some poets were intertwined in the history of publications of El Corno emplumado, a Spanish-English bilingual literary journal that was edited by Octavio Paz among others and published in Mexico from 1962 to 1969. The epistolary relationships that El Corno emplumado engendered contributed to the writing ethic of an entire generation. The poets developed the flipped metaphor as a descriptive fall for differential semantics, as a rhetorical figure or strategy which endows words with sensations that differ from the immediately embodied or corporeal moments they represent. El Corno thus unites Allen Ginsberg, Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal, Malay Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay, and others in the recognition of a global style or poetics. We discuss epistolary contents from within the orbit of El Corno Emplumado to understand how the dialogue between Paz and Malay offers hermeneutical insights into the surreal, Hungry poetics born in the...
Funding No funding received. Published free of any charge.
Writers in Conversation, Jul 29, 2019
It is not an overstatement to say that the poetry of the 1960s is characterised by counterculture... more It is not an overstatement to say that the poetry of the 1960s is characterised by counterculture. The Beat poetry of America became an international influence by the end of 1950s. Young Californian poets rebelled against the norms and mores of society under the leadership of Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg's 'Howl' is a passionate critique of the sordid life of post-World War II America. Thousands of miles away, a poet from India, was giving similar leadership to a generation of Bengali poets. Malay Roychoudhuri and his Hungryalist Movement came to be recognised as one of the most culturally influential poetic movements which overruled standards of conventional literature, spurned mercenaries of culture, introduced new models. The lives of the artists spanned extraordinary frames changing the poetic landscape forever Malay Roychoudhury (1939) is an Indian Bengali poet, playwright, short story writer, essayist and novelist who founded the Hungryalist movement in the 1960s which changed the course of avant-garde Bengali literature and painting. He was born in Patna, Bihar, India, into the Sabarna Roy Choudhury clan, which owned the villages that became Kolkata. He grew up in Patna's Imlitala ghetto, which was mainly inhabited by poor lower caste Hindus and Shia Muslims. His was the only Bengali family. His father, Ranjit (1909-1991) was a professional photographer; his mother, Amita (1916-1982), was from a progressive family of the nineteenthcentury Bengali renaissance. At the age of three, he was admitted to a local Catholic school, Roychaudhuri-2-Mitra and Sarangi
Books by Malay Roychoudhury
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Papers by Malay Roychoudhury
Books by Malay Roychoudhury