The Bengali Little
Magazine Movement 

“The Hungry Generation” was a little magazine movement that took West Bengal by storm. The movement — largely focused on poetry — was founded by four ‘Hungryalists’ and well-known poets: Malay Roychoudhury, Samir Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Debi Roy. 

The name Hungry came from poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s line “In Sowere Hungry Tyme”. Their literary sensibilities were influenced by Oswald Spengler’s idea of ‘non-linear time’. Spengler, in his work, rejects linearity and argues that time and history have an organic cyclical movement. Malay Roychoudhury, who encountered Spengler’s writings as a 22-year-old man, found this to be a fitting metaphor, especially in the post-Partition Bengali culture. 

Stylistically distinct, the Hungryalists built a movement rooted in anger – one that often found itself in opposition to conventional literary thought and political establishments within West Bengal. What they sought was a new kind of literature, an expression that was raw and unsanitised. In a March 2023 interview with Evan Kennedy for  Citylights, Roychoudhury recalls: “We were trying to write differently. Everybody was from poor or refugee or lower-caste families. Our expressions, our founts of words, our thinking was different, so why not write whatever we like? Subimal Basak wrote a novel in the language of the horse cart drivers. Everyone started writing in his own way, not in the sophisticated manner of Bengali literature.”

The first manifesto published by the Hungryalists in 1961 declared: “Poetry is an activity of the narcissistic spirit.” Inspired by the French and American Modernists like Baudelaire and Ezra Pound, this avant-garde movement was produced as a rebellion of sorts, against the existing Bangla culture of the time. As the manifesto further asserts, “In the prosed-rhyme of those born-old half-literates, you must fail to find that scream of desperation of a thing wanting to be man, the man wanting to be spirit.”

In the interview with Citylights, six months before his death, at 83, Roychoudhury also spoke about the backlash against their work. In 1964, the then West Bengal government issued arrest warrants against eleven of the forty Hungryalists, accusing them of obscenity. Roychoudhury’s poem “Stark Electric Jesus” sat at the centre of this controversy, grabbing headlines for using explicitly sexual language. He was arrested; and the police vandalised his house and his father’s photographic shop. It took the court 35 months to release him, and he remained disturbed by his time in prison. 

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

An excerpt from Malay Roychoudhury’s “Stark Electric Jesus”.

This was a crucial moment; the movement turned against itself. Fellow Hungryalists and friends, including Shakti Chattopadhyay, testified against Roychoudhury, marking their exit from the movement. Though he initially felt betrayed when his friends testified against him, he says: “Debi Roy told me that if he had lost his job, he would have committed suicide. It was not possible for his parents and brother to carry on without him.” Poverty restricted their speech and Roychoudhury spoke about them with empathy. 

He adds: “It is very strange now. The generations then, in between, and now have completely changed. Now, ladies recite my poems on YouTube.” 

The movement died abruptly after liberalisation. Abdullah Abu Sayeed, founder of Bengal’s first little magazine, “Kantashwar”, cites the unrealised dreams promised after Independence for its short-lived existence. “...society was different. Now, you cannot have a literary movement. Everything has been covered,” says Malay Roychoudhury.

This feature was compiled by Sangamitra Baskar.