The Hungry Luminaries— Malay Roy Choudhury (Episode 3)

TRANSLATED FROM THE BENGALI BY SRAMAN SIRCAR

Painting by Hungryalist artist Anil Karanjai.

Section: 5

After spending several days in Kolkata, I finally returned to Patna. A big chunk of my salary had begun to be deducted by then for my frequent leaves. I would be scolded at home, while the office would keep sending one reproachful notice after another. Neighbours would put on a smiling face and turn up suddenly, eager to hear bits and parts of the rumours about me that had begun to spread from Kolkata. One day I heard someone shout out my name at the Jahajghata Rickshaw Stand, and when I turned around, it was Phanishwar Nath Renu. He said, “Hey, I got the news from Rajkamal Choudhury that you’ve been up to something in Kolkata; you didn’t tell me anything, so come around in the evening, we can sit down for a chat.” We had familial ties with Renu, and I was very young when I first met him. Renu was beaten up by the police for taking part in politics and had to be admitted to the hospital, when he fell ill after consuming the rancid food of the prison. That’s how he met and fell in love with Latika Roy Choudhury, who at the time, used to work as a nurse at the same hospital. Our entire family would visit him there to check on his health.

Renu belonged to the Maithili speaking community of Northern Bihar, although he could also read and write Bengali. He was on good terms with Satinath Bhaduri, and that’s how he learned to discern the brilliant from the chaff in Bengali literature. He had some land in his village where his wife from his first marriage resided with their children. During the months of sowing and harvesting the crop, Renu travelled back to his village, while he would spend the rest of the year living with Latika in an apartment in Patna. Although, she was the one who supervised his writings, Renu never took her to his village, nor did they ever have any children. After his demise, his son from the first marriage sold off the rights to his work, and that landed Latika in severe financial crisis. Renu had also participated in the armed democratic revolution in Nepal. Due to his steadfast opposition to the emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi, he had to endure unspeakable forms of persecution. He even relinquished his Padmashree Award in protest against the state of emergency. Renu never really had a steady job; his only stint as a professional was the few months he spent at the Patna Radio Station under the supervision of Syed Mujtaba Ali. Whenever Mr. Ali hosted meetings for his employees, Renu would sit in the very last row and take a nap while wearing black glasses. Mr. Ali had even caught him one day in the middle of his sleep!

Renu and Rajkamal Choudhury were the ones who introduced the Hungry Movement to other Indian languages, particularly Hindi. Both were ardent supporters of the movement and extensively wrote about it in Hindi journals and magazines, and that’s how the movement spread to other languages of the country. We quickly discovered that there were several poets and authors of our age who were thinking and writing along the same lines in their respective languages in various corners of India. In Telugu, for instance, the ‘Digambara Kavulu’ group of writers consisted of Nikhileshwar, Nagnamuni, Mahaswapna and Jwalamukhi. The Marathi ‘Asho’ group comprised poets like Ashok Shahane, Dilip Chitre, Raghu Dandavate and Arun Kolatkar, while Rajkamal Choudhury, Alok Dhanwa, Kanchan Kumar and Sudama “Dhoomil” Pandey were the prominent authors in Hindi. Meanwhile, Ameeq Hanafi and Naseem Azimabadi were the torchbearers in Urdu. During the 1970s, various writers involved with the Hungry Movement, as well as several of these poets, had also taken part in the Naxal Movement, and some of them were even mercilessly hunted by both the State and Union police forces.

Meanwhile, in August 1964, the control room of Bengali literature was busy conspiring to smash the Hungry Movement in Kolkata. Everyone had just one thing to say: “You’ll get to see it within a few days!” Subhash Ghosh and Shaileshwar Ghosh were searching for a press, but nobody wanted to publish their work. Our own relations with each other were also souring. Debi and Shaileshwar were no longer on the same page. Subhash and Basudeb were equally at loggerheads. A young guy named Shankhapallab Aditya had started quarrelling with Pradip Choudhuri immediately after joining the movement. The lackeys of the establishment had been biding their time for just such an opportunity; these were the ones who had destroyed the works of the Kallol movement by turning them into commercial scraps thrown at the feet of literary businessmen, and they were convinced that they only had to whistle at the Hungry poets for us to run behind them with our tail between our legs. Amid the turmoil, Pradip quietly found a press and published the Hungry bulletin with whatever writings we had managed to accumulate, i.e. the works of Basudeb Dasgupta, Utpal Kumar Basu, Subo Acharya, Ramananda Chattopadhyay, Subimal Basak, Shaileshwar Ghosh, Pradip Choudhuri, Subhash Ghosh, Debi Roy, Malay Roychoudhury. Samir Roychoudhury had been named, the editor. The address that had been shared was the residence of my paternal uncle in Ahiritola. I was in Patna at the time.

Subimal, Shaileshwar, Pradip and Basudeb distributed the bulletins at the Coffee House and other places in Kolkata. Immediately all hell broke loose! A rival poet, whose relative used to work at the Police Headquarters in Lalbazar, collected several of our bulletins and promptly handed them over to a few newspaper barons and the Lalbazar bureaucrats. Another author personally delivered a ‘top priority’ note from Lalbazar to the Legal Department of the Writers’ Building. Based on all the bulletins seized by the government, the Legal Remembrancer opined that three different charges could be levelled against the Hungry Movement – violation of the Press Act, conspiracy against the state, and the creation of obscenity. Few journalists at a certain newspaper passed the verdict that the Hungry poets should primarily be convicted of creating obscenities, since that would make it easier to demonise us in the press as pornographic writers. It was also decided that each of the Hungry poets would be arrested and then publicly humiliated in their respective neighbourhoods, along with all other sorts of shaming. I got to know these details much later from an employee at Lalbazar.

Since the address of the publication was in Ahiritola, at 9:55 pm on the night of 2 September 1964, sub – inspector Kalikinkar Das, from the Press Section of Lalbazar, filed an F.I.R against us at the Jorabagan police station on the charges of writing obscenities and conspiring against the state. All eleven of us who had contributed to the bulletin, including the editor, were named in the formal complaint. Although the F.I.R was lodged at 9:55 pm, the police had arrested Subhash Ghosh and Shaileshwar Ghosh on the morning of that day itself. Their rooms were raided, their books were torn apart and strewn on the streets, and they were demeaned in front of their entire neighbourhood before being taken in a prison van to the Amherst Street police station, where they were locked up with several crooks and thieves. Afterwards, they were hauled to the Interrogation Room at Lalbazar where they were further terrorised. Subhash Ghosh was a highly sensitive person and suffered a nervous breakdown. The fact that they were both arrested even before the F.I.R had been formally lodged revealed the true face of the cultural establishment of Bengal. Debi Roy was the next to be arrested in Bardhaman. His room was ransacked as well. Without ever issuing an official search warrant, most of the books from his collection in Bardhaman were confiscated and they haven’t been traced till date.

On 4 September 1964, a couple of sub – inspectors from Kolkata – Surendra Mohan Barari and Amal Mukherjee – and a sub – inspector named Krishna Kumar Sinha of the Patna Police, descended on my office to arrest me. Two of them held my hands while the third gripped the shirt on my back. Once we were out on the street, I was handcuffed, and a rope was also tied around my waist. While the inspectors got on a rickshaw, four constables forced me to walk in that manner all the way to the Pirbahore police station where we were joined by a contingent of almost twenty to twenty-five fully armed constables. The next stop was my own home which got immediately surrounded by the armed cops. My parents were there alone at the time, and they were deeply perturbed by the sight of me in handcuffs accompanied by all the cops. Our home was searched till 8 pm. Barari – Mukherjee from Kolkata used an iron rod to break open my mother’s trunk, smashed the glass of the wardrobe that contained my books, and threw the texts and clothes all over the floor. Some of their words still ring in my ears, and they’re worth quoting –

The bloody typewriter seems to be nicked!
Which room has the press?
Oh, this is hot stuff, a book called The Flesh and Blood of Solitude! It’ll make such a good exhibit!
You guys get loads of foreign money, where’s all that dough?
What are all these letters for? Seems like correspondence for scoring hash and stuff! The more we get these the better!
So, where are all the pornographic books? Have you already stashed them away fearing such a raid?

After three hours of search, the police managed to acquire a bundle of books, letters, files, diaries and the typewriter. A long list of the items was made, and the bundle was placed in the police van. Two sweepers of the Patna Municipal Corporation were randomly picked up from the street to be the official witnesses, despite them having no knowledge of Bengali. Then back to the police station. Much later, once I had won the court case, I went to Lalbazar to enquire about my belongings, only to be told that all the documents had been destroyed by the termites infesting their storage rooms.

The handcuffs and the rope were taken off after I had been put in the lockup at the police station. There were already five other prisoners. One of them was a drunk whose vomit was all over the floor. A corner of the lockup had been used by the prisoners to relieve themselves, and only a torn quilt was holding back the urine from spreading across the room. Thankfully, not everything could be seen in the dim light, but the stench was unbearable. We had to keep shaking off the innumerable mice that constantly tried to climb up our legs. Late at night I struck up a conversation with the other prisoners. Three of them had been imprisoned before multiple times. The fourth one was a carpenter who had accidentally broken the furniture he was trying to repair and was too poor to pay the compensation. The fifth one was the drunk who had been locked up for drinking too much. Later in the night my father came to inform me that Renu and Rajkamal had been informed about my plight. In the morning, they briefly allowed me to venture out to answer nature’s call, but with the rope and handcuffs again back on me. The guards carefully extended the rope bit by bit so that I didn’t manage to escape while taking a dump. Although, I had to resort to a weird sort of gymnastics given the situation, it didn’t bother me because I hadn’t really eaten anything at night.

The next couple of hours, I saw Barari – Mukherjee shouting in various ways in their bid to intimidate me. Some of the choicest abuses were hurled by them in order to rile me up just enough to confess all the alleged crimes. They even punched the table and kicked the floor. Around ten in the morning, all the prisoners including me were handcuffed and tied again, and later taken to the court of criminal justice. By then, people known to me had started crowding all around. I was made to join a group of almost two hundred prisoners at the court who had been brought from various police stations of the city. My turn eventually came in the afternoon, and I was granted bail. But I was ordered by the judge to surrender myself within five days to the Bankshall Court, the City Sessions Court of Kolkata. After returning home, I just ate and fell asleep. In the evening, a peon from my office came over and handed me the formal letter of suspension from my job. Basanta Kumar Bandyopadhyay was my lawyer in Patna and was known to charge a hefty daily fee of five thousand rupees even back then. A few days later, I turned up in Kolkata and officially surrendered myself to the Bankshall Court.

I had been suspended from my job after being arrested and was in terrible financial distress. Subhash Ghosh and Pradip Choudhuri were even worse off because they didn’t have a job in the first place. I was forced to take refuge in my ancestral home in Uttarpara. One day my paternal grandmother suddenly collapsed. After placing the stethoscope on her frail, emaciated chest, the doctor declared her dead. Amidst the chaos that ensued among my relatives, everyone started blaming me for her demise, while I sought to juggle her last rites, my legal battles at the court, and my struggles with the Lalbazar bureaucrats. Meanwhile, all of us got to know that my younger uncle had inherited some of the property of my late grandmother, and it immediately triggered a cold war among all the branches of the family; it felt like we were part of a cheap, poorly written and overtly sensationalised family saga! Except Subimal Basak, my remaining friends had also reduced their interactions with me and I would only occasionally run into them during our trial at the Bankshall Court. Subo Acharya had in fact fled from Kolkata to avoid being arrested. Ramananda Chattopadhyay had similarly escaped to Bishnupur long ago. Basudeb Dasgupta would seldom make an appearance at the court.

I was in dire straits back then. The house in Uttarpara mostly lied empty. The uncle and his wife, who were accused of stealing our inheritance, resided in one section of the house, while I just had one room to myself that I shared with pigeons and crickets. I barely had any time to focus on my writing and would just sit aimlessly on the banks of the Ganga. Every other day, I would take a local train to Howrah and then walk from there till Lalbazar. The two sub – inspectors who had arrested me in Patna would tactfully avoid my gaze whenever I would run into them. I had heard that their superiors had reprimanded them for being too harsh with me. One day, I saw Shakti Chattopadhyay and Sandipan Chattopadhyay at the Press Section of Lalbazar. They slid away into a different room immediately after seeing me, probably because both had become witnesses of the prosecution in the trial against the Hungry poets. I was not on speaking terms with them since the time Subimal Basak had been beaten up. When Shakti had first returned to Kolkata after meeting me in Patna in 1961, he had borrowed one of my manuscripts called The Inheritance of Marxism to get it published. However, the book never saw the light of the day because after it was fully ready, Shakti poured petrol on all the copies and set them on fire. He had not even bothered to proofread them. Entrusting the book to him was a philosophical blunder on my part.

My first book of poems called Satan’s Face came out in 1964. Sunil Gangopadhyay was the publisher. This infuriated both the Hungry poets as well as the ones who would regularly contribute to the Krittibas literary magazine started by Sunil Gangopadhyay in the 1950s. It was the time when Sunil had just ventured to the US, and the authors in the lower rung of the Krittibas group, who were left behind in Kolkata, became scared that I was about to steal all their glory. The Hungry poets, on the other hand, were convinced that this was part of my ulterior motive of covertly joining the literary establishment. Both these groups were so upset with me that they almost came to blows. However, despite being the publisher of my book, Sunil had never voiced his unequivocal support for the Hungry Movement. But he did admit to Professor Kamal Gangopadhyay, who had researched the little magazines, that the Hungry Movement had the necessary courage, motivation and correct thought to scale heights never reached by any other literary group. In The Telegraph newspaper, Sunil had written, “I did not join them [the Hungry Movement] for in my naïve sensitivity, I convinced myself that the only reason why Shakti and others had launched this stirrer was to crush the one developed by us through Krittibas.” Then again, in his letter to me from America, he had claimed, “I did not break up your Hungry Generation right at its very beginning only because I was feeling indulgent towards a handful of my friends who had taken part in it.” But in the end, while editing the book called Modern Stories published by Adhuna, he had observed, “there are often new movements within literature, and these days the Hungry Movement is one of the most prominent ones.”

One day Subimal’s younger brother came and informed my father that the trial had come to an end and the verdict would be announced on 26 July 1967. T. P. Mukherjee was going to be the judge. I had no desire to travel to Kolkata, not because I harboured any anger and resentment or that I had no place to stay, it was merely the fact that I had lost interest in everything beyond myself. 26 July came and went. A week later, Subimal turned up with a big smile and a few newspapers. The Statesman had come up with the headline: “Poet Acquitted!” I later paid the fees of the lawyers in instalments. The High Court’s verdict informed all of us that the trial in the lower court of criminal justice was utterly baseless because it was launched without even drafting an actual charge sheet against me. In fact, there was no question of framing such a charge sheet in the first place since they never found enough evidence to bolster their case. But nonetheless, the lords of the literary establishment had pulled strings from behind in order to compel the police into lodging an F.I.R against me. Moreover, they had also issued clear instructions about me being singled out for harassment, so that other witnesses of the prosecution would not land in any trouble.

Afterwards, I stopped writing and bid adieu to literature for almost a decade and a half. Over those fifteen years, a profound transformation took place in my struggle to make something out of my life, my circle of friends, my finances, my self-expression, my personal and familial history, as well as my mind and body. Wood ash for brushing my teeth came to be replaced by actual toothpaste, the charcoal oven gave way to the gas stove, mustard oil was substituted with sunflower oil, suits won over the ordinary shirt and pant, the bed over the mattress, high – end restaurants over roadside eateries, foreign scotch over country liquor, and the entirety of India over College Street and the Coffee House. Later, looking back on those years, I started to write again, and composed the following poem called A Throne of Termites—

Oh You, who was once nourished by Words,

Why hide yourself like ants in today’s World?

You’ve come to celebrate a life of Conjugality,

The way hunters adore all their prized Trophies.

Strutting around this land as if you’re its Mistress,

Not a nation but an official fiefdom, silent and worthless.

The above has been excerpted from the book titled Hungry Kingbadanti: History of a Literary Revolution written by Malay Roy Choudhury, and first published in July 1994. To read the first episode and second episode, click on the following link: