Top 5 Hungry Generation Poems
Mood:  blue
Topic: HUNGRYALISM

1.Prachanda Boidyutik Chhutar

by Malay Roychoudhury

2. Aamaar Vietnam

by Samir Roychoudhury

3. Aami Ekhon Manush

by Falguni Ray

4. Madak

by Subo Acharya

5. Ghulghuli

by Tridib mitra

(For this list only those poems have been selected which were printed in the Hungry Generation Bulletins edited by Haradhon Dhara and published from his Netaji Subhas Road hutment during 1961-63)

Malay Roychoudhury's Postmodern Drama by Arup Chowdhuri
Mood:  suave
Topic: Critique

     I started writing about the Hungryalist legend Malay Roychoudhury, and found out that no other Hungryalist writer has written a drama. Only Falguni Ray has written a few film scripts. When the young Hungryalists entered  the literary world during 1960s, traditional drama was being challenged by Theatre of the Absurd, Brechtian drama, New School Folk Drama etc. Had other Hungryalists also written plays, we would have had a Hungryalist School of Drama.

     Malay Roychoudhury, using his pioneering capabilities, has left for posterity three outstanding plays: HIBAKUSHA (1964), ILLOT (1965) and NAPUNGPUNG (1965). I have read them time and again, and have been stunned everytime for their pathbreaking contribution and theatrical possibilities. Apart from these three he has not written any other play in his literary careers of more than forty decades, although the poems he has been writing since then, and the trilogy of novels DUBJALEY JETUKU PRASHWAS, JALANJALI and NAMGANDHO are unparalelled in writing style and imaginative genius.

     Seeds of postmodern drama are found in all the three plays, though the concept of postmodernism had not been evolved till then. At a time when drama had shifted from surface reality to inner reality, Malay Roychoudhury, with his erudite craftmanship, has interwoven hyper-reality; a mixture of strange language built on selected Bengali wordsn an open-ended form.. It was very fresh and innovative compared to traditional drama enacted on Calcutta stages of the time; one should remember that group theatres were also evolving at that time, but the groups failed to foresee the social putrefaction looming all around the Bengali people. Malay Roychoudhury's dialogues are succinctly strange and shockingly original. All the three plays are polyphonous and multilinear; they contain irony and subtle indulgence. For example in ILLOT one character frequently gets up from his deep sleep and exclaims "everything is in order', and immediately falls asleep; the character is self-content, power-hungry, megalomaniac named DODON; from his slumber emanated a status quo of terror.

     In Napungpung, the breast of a lady's torso opens up like a lid, and a hairy hand protrudes out of it with a stick which beats up the character named THALAM in a flurry of darkened light. The socio-political dialogues are stingingly funny and comical. I am taking the liberty of calling them dialogues, but they appear to be monologues as well. We can make out the rotting and disgusting state of affairs of India. The plays are almost prophetic.

     All the three plays are free from any discipline of subject matter or content. They are beyond socalled logical construct; they are devoid of chronological actions. Dialogues appear to be instant, as if the speaker has not had no time to think of it before he said those words, as if people are retorting back to back as we find these days among politicians of various countries. As a result the audiance or the reader forgets the distantness of procenium and participate in the drama. The plays successfully attack the monopoly and theatricality of procenium drama.

     When the characters talk, it appears that he is not talking only to the person or persons in front of him; he is talking to himself as well as to none, though the utterences can not be called soliloquy; the character would have said the same things irrespective of the persons around him. Malay Roychoudhury has broken the logical sequences of sentences as well as words.

     The Theatre of the Absurd had disregarded Pirandello's dictum that 'dialogue is the action in word' to exemplify non-stories. In Malay Roychoudhury's plays non-stories are presented through dialogues pregnant with action. In Illot, the lengthyness of sentences without coma, colon semicolon fullstop signs appear to be a monologue in which one word is not linked to the next word; even then the sentences are able to represent the chaos, the lack of law and order, the indiscipline, the mental riots, the incoherence, the instability of our life and living termed as SYSTEM in India. This is where we live in.

     Open-ended form is an important attribute in postmodern literature which is exemplified in all the three plays inasmuch as a half-sequence develops before a sequence is completed; the dialogue circuit is never complete, and a new dialogue erupts which lacks prima facie meaning, purpose and connectivity. The reader may enter a play from any point. The audiance may come late and would not miss the begining.

     The titles of the plays and the names of characters are strangely uncommon and ludicrous; meaning and history is being put into them by the author at every scene. Names such as DODON, ROMESH, LOMESH, RAJAN, DHURTAK, SHAS, SHAV, DHANJOY, DHAP are not from any Indian language or Indian puranas; there is a TORSO of a lady and a demigod who is disembodied. The demigod is called ostensibly The Great Hidiku, who is a pious priest of the terror regime. The moment he is remembered, Romesh and Lomesh become overwhelmed and scared; the memory itself get haunted.

     Each character seem to represent an idea of post 1947 neocolonial schisms in Indian social structure. The projection of characters are also hyper-real and immanent. There are no specific reference points for their identity and social status. They dont have family and social background; their education, economic position, livelihood are unknown. The reader or the audiance has to react and decide. Since the characters are not linear. it is not possible to bring them under one single umbrella to unify the episteme of a particular play. Their deportment and conversation do not represent the real. Each character contain several characters. Same character has many voices.

     The plays depict neo-Fascist power hunger, democidal mobocracy, dictatorial lunacy, totalitarianism both at micro and macro levels. Protests get blurred with sly sychophancy, satire, insinuations, sarcasms and ridicule. There are no specific indications and hints as are quite common in modernist plays. One has to ideate from the strange behaviour and language of Dodon, Dhurtak, Jambuk, Lomesh, Romesh, Shav, Shas, Ganesh, Rajan, Dhanjoy, Yalam, Torso etc. They can not be clearly earmarked in leftist and rightist format as they prevail in post-colonial India. The characters are multidimensional.

     Incidentally, in the last scene of both ILLOT and HIBAKUSHA we find four persons in underpants; ropes are tied around their waist. In ILLOT they unanimously sound alert against entrenched interests and hollow lectures. In HIBAKUSHA they are drawn toward helplessness and animal destiny; the sheer utterence of the word "hunger" terrorise them and force them to put the put the same rope as a noose around their neck; despite this they try to crswl out of the trap.

     Reading Malay Roychoudhury's plays has been a memorable experience for me. The Bengali theatre groups are scared of enacting these plays even now. During the 1960s, BAHURUPI and GANDHARVA, two periodicals of repute which publised drama, had refused to publish ILLOT!

(This article was first published in 2001 in MALAY ROYCHOUDHURY COMPENDIUM edited by Murshid A M)