'Indecent' exposures

Last Tuesday, art critic Juliet Reynolds released a book edited by her on artist Anil Karanjai (1940–2001), who was also her husband. Titled Roads Across the Earth: On the Life, Times and Art of Anil Karanjai, the book with essays on Karanjai’s life and works has been published by Three Essays Collective. In his youth, Karanjai had been a member of the avant-garde movement Hungry Generation, one of the earliest cultural and political responses to the failures of post-Independence India. In her presentation, Reynolds spoke of how the association with the movement was key to understanding Karanjai’s work, but there are few books on it. (One is scheduled to be published next year from Penguin.)

When we think of Bengali literature these days, we tend to consider works produced mostly in Kolkata or Dhaka. This is a sort of a reductive view, akin to considering only those works produced in the British Isles as English literature, and ignoring everything else from the US, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Europe, or Australia. One of the key centres of Bengali literature was Varanasi, which was also Karanjai’s home. Another was Patna, where the Hungry Generation began. There is a theory in currency that the movement started after Beat poet Allen Ginsberg met the Bengali poets. This is anachronistic. Ginsberg, along with his friend and lover Peter Orlovsky, arrived in Mumbai only on February 15, 1962. Hungry Generation has published their first manifesto November 1961.

Members of Hungry Generation responded to political failures of post-Independence India. Photo: Wikimedia commons

 It was written in English and printed at a press in Patna. The signatories were Malay Roychoudhuri, Samir Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay, and Debi Rai (whose original name was Haradhon Dhara and who was, arguably, the first post-Independence Bengali Dalit poet). Samir writes about how the movement started: “As the tenure of the Second Five-Year Plan ended (in 1961), the Hungry Generation emerged.” Disillusionment with India’s economic, political and social progress was not new. Four years before the first Hungry manifesto, Sahir Ludhianvi had written “Jinhe naaz hai Hind pew oh kahan hai? (Where are those who are proud of India?)” for Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957).

Having said that, one can hardly deny the influence of Ginsberg on the movement, and it extended beyond poetry — it also influenced their lifestyle. Scholar John Tytell in his book Naked Angels, writes: “...for the Beats nakedness did not exist simply as an aesthetic standard, it was to become a symbolic private and public stance, making art and action inseparable.” His ritualistic and performative nakedness continued in India also. There is a humorous story Samir told me: “One morning, my mother discovered him bathing naked at a tank in the courtyard of our house. ‘Why is he doing this?’ she asked me. ‘That’s how they do it in their country,’ I replied. She did not like it. From the balcony, she dropped two towels and told Ginsberg: ‘My boy, cover yourself with one, and use the other to dry yourself.’”

The Hungry Generation also tried to explore how far their contemporary society would allow them to subvert the limits of established culture. At the height of the movement in 1963, they delivered masks of animals, demons, clowns, and cartoon characters to the homes of famous and influential people. On the masks were printed: “Please take off your mask.” In other words, it was an invitation to be naked. All hell broke loose. On September 2, 1964, Malay, Samir, Debi, along with Subhash Ghosh, Shaileshwar Ghosh, and Pradip Choudhuri were arrested on charged of obscenity and criminal conspiracy. Malay was convicted and fined for his poem, “Stark Electric Jesus”. It was only in 1967 that the Calcutta High Court exonerated him.

The writer’s debut book of poems, Visceral Metropolis, was published last year and his novel, Ritual, is forthcoming next year