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Samir Roy Chowdhury | |
|---|---|
 Samir resting at home inKolkata,West Bengal | |
| Born | (1933-11-01)1 November 1933 |
| Died | 22 June 2016(2016-06-22) (aged 82) Kolkata (Calcutta),West Bengal, India |
| Occupation(s) | Poet and writer |
| Movement | Postmodernism andhungryalism |
Samir Roychowdhury (Bengali: সমীর রায়চৌধুরী) (1 November 1933 – 22 June 2016),[1] one of the founding fathers of theHungry Generation[2] (also known asHungryalism or Hungrealism (1961–1965)), was born atPanihati,West Bengal, in a family of artists, sculptors, photographers, and musicians. His grandfather Lakshminarayan, doyen of theSabarna Roy Choudhury clan of Uttarpara, had learned drawing and bromide-paper photography fromJohn Lockwood Kipling, father ofRudyard Kipling, who was Curator at the Lahore Museum (now in Pakistan), and thereafter established the first mobile photography-cum-painting company in India in the mid-1880s. Thecompany was later taken over by Samir's father Ranjit (1909–1991). Samir's mother Amita (1916–1982) was from a progressive family of 19th-centuryBengal renaissance.
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Samir's grandfather, Sri Lakshminarayan Roy Chowdhury established a permanent photography-cum-painting shop at Patna, Bihar in 1886, the city from which Samir, along with his younger brotherMalay Roy Choudhury,Shakti Chattopadhyay andDebi Ray, had launched theHungryalism (হাংরি আন্দোলন) movement in November 1961. Samir's uncle Pramod was Keeper of Paintings and Sculpture at the Patna Museum. Pramod's daughters, Sabitri and Dharitri were accomplished veena players and classical singers. Dharitri was a painter as well. Samir's motherAmita Banerjee came from a family where her father Dr.Kishori Mohan Bandyopadhyay was a fellow researcher and an assistant ofRonald Ross,Nobel Prize winner for discovering the causes of malaria. Right from childhood, Samir was thus in the company of people who could groom him for his laterliterary achievements.
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Samir studied atCity College, Calcutta, where he found as his classmates, Dipak Majumdar,Sunil Gangopadhyay and Ananda Bagchi, who were preparing to start an exclusive poetry magazine, namedKrittibas (1953). Samir became an active member of the group.Sunil Gangopadhyay's first collection of poemsEka Ebong Koyekjan was funded and published by Samir. However, when Dipak Majumdar leftKrittibas, Samir along withSandipan Chattopadhyay, Ananda Bagchi and Utpalkumar Basu were eased out of the group, although Samir had edited thePhanishwarnath Renu issue of the magazine. Samir left the group and took up a job of marine fisheries expert in a ship which most of the time was in the Arabian Sea, an experience which was later beneficial forHungryalism inputs. His first poetry collectionJharnar Pashey Shuye Aachhi (ঝর্ণার পাশে শুয়ে আছি) (i.e. "Sleeping Beside An Waterfall") was premised on the blueness of experience of this marine period.
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From marine Samir shifted to inland fisheries, which gave him an opportunity to become a part of the poorest boatmen, fishermen and fishnet-knitters families of rural and riverine India. For three decades he travelled extensively in such tribal areas as Chaibasa, Dumka, Daltonganj, Bhagalpur, Muzaffarpur and Darbhanga etc. These places were the centres where the Hungryalist poets, writers and painters gathered and engaged in creative happenings which has become a part of Bengali literary folklore. During this period Samir emerged as one of the original thinkers, a school of thought later termed asAdhunantika by the famous linguist Dr Prabal Dasgupta. Young writers, poets and artists as well as filmmakers visited him during his tribal sojourn. Among the visitors wereOctavio Paz,Allen Ginsberg,Peter Orlovsky,Gary Snyder, Rajkamal Choudhury,Phanishwarnath Renu,Dharmavir Bharati, Santoshkumar Ghosh, S H Vatsayan Ajneya, Falguni Ray, Basudeb Dasgupta, SuboAcharya, Tridib Mitra and Alo Mitra etc.Shakti Chattopadhyay stayed with him at Chaibasa for more than two years. He is still an important figure before the contemporary younger poets and thinkers (like Anupam Mukhopadhyay).
Creativity ran in the veins, so early in life, both Samir and his brother Malay directed many plays including 'Kauwa Babula Bhasm' the script of which was prepared by the noted writerPhanishwar Nath 'Renu'.Samir has been creative off and on. After his first collection of poems, he publishedAamar Vietnam a collection of poems, though not based on Vietnam, but premised on the sensitivity of a person who lives in a different world and is regularly bombarded by war-news which is shockingly inhuman. Then after a decade his third collection of poemsJanowar (জানোয়ার) (The Beast) was published written in a different vein. Among theHungryalists, he is considered to be a master of word formation and language-plasticity. He shifted his base permanently to Calcutta (Kolkata) in the beginning of the 1990s and started his own magazine aptly called HAOWA#49 or Unapanchash Vayu in Sanskrit which is a state of unknown mind. He also started Haowa#49 Publications for which his younger brotherMalay Roy Choudhury joined as Creative Consultant. HAOWA#49 (হাওয়া # ৪৯) magazine virtually changed theavant garde literary scene. People who were once critical of theHungry Generation movement (হাংরি আন্দোলন), and even denigratedHungryalism, started respecting them. Some post-graduate theses have been written on the two brothers, considered to have up-welled fresh mind-waves in an otherwise stagnant creative pool.
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Samir wrote several treatises onAdhunantika aspects of Indian, especiallyBengali society, that have impacted post-colonial mindset, and obviously arts, literature and culture. Critics have claimed thatAdhunantika isPostmodern version ofHungryalism, and that postmodern features ofBengali creative writing had emerged way back in the 1960s when theHungry generation movement was launched with freely distributed weekly bulletins which could have been published by any participant of the movement. Samir introduced an Indianised version of postmodernism which was being called, apart from Adhunantika, Uttaradhunika, Uttar-Adhunika, Bitadhunika, Bhashabadal, Atichetana and Adhunikottarvad etc.Hungryalism got a new valuation with these concepts, and the newer generation of poets, writers and thinkers got an alternative platform. Samir edited, since 1990, books onEcofeminism,Postcolonialism,Postmodernism,Complexity,Hybridity andThe Other. He editedPostmodern Bengali Poetry (2001) andPostmodern Bengali Short Stories (2002) which included writings from Bangladesh as well as entire India. Earlier only upper-caste writers fromWest Bengal used to have pride of place in such collections. Samir changed it all; he invited poems and short stories from all strata of, not onlyWest Bengal, but entireIndia andBangladesh. A new word Bahirbanga was coined by him for diasporicBengalis.
In 2011Srijit Mukherji directed a Bengali film titledBaishe Srabon wherein the role of Hungryalist poet was portrayed by film directorGautam Ghosh.
