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Allen Ginsberg and India : Ginsberg failed to understand India

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Review of BBC 3 documentary: Ginsberg in India From The Sunflower Collective Source: http://asiasociety.org/ Allen Ginsberg came to India for the first time in early sixties. These were important times for India; most importantly, its long standing dispute with China over Tibet and border areas reached a crescendo in the shape of a war in 1962. Ginsberg was in India when the war was on. However, his travelogue Indian Journals, which documented his time here barely mentioned the war which India lost miserably. (Within two years of the defeat, Pandit Nehru passed away; he and his defence minister V.K.Krishna Menon were heavily blamed for not being able to anticipate China’s aggressive designs. Both Nehru and Menon were considered leftists, the latter more so and their ideological orientation was cited by the critics as the prime reason behind their slip to identify the threat posed by China. The war with China divided the Indian Left also, with one fa
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Hungryalists and the Beatniks: Malay Roychoudhury Interviewed Part-2

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Hungryalists and Beat Generation : Maitreyee B Chowdhury interviewed by Michael Liminos

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  Posted by Michael Limnios Blues Network on February 4, 2019 at 6:30pm "Throughout the world, poetry and music have been forerunners in challenging the mindsets of people. Irrespective of the genre and language both music and poetry have constantly motivated people into thinking differently, into rising in revolt against mediocre or oppressive thought processes." Maitreyee B Chowdhury: Bangalore Blues Maitreyee B Chowdhury is a Bangalore based poet and writer. She has three books to her credit- ‘Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen: Bengali Cinema’s First Couple’ and ‘Where Even the Present is Ancient: Benaras’. In the year 2013, ‘Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen: Bengali Cinema’s First Couple’ was nominated for the Crossword Book Awards, 2013 (Non Fiction category). Maitreyee is organiser of Bengaluru Poetry Festival, and poetry and fiction editor of The Bangalore Review, a literary journal. Maitreyee’s writings can be
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Hungryalist Movement and Beat Generation by Kapil Arambam

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I wish I was there during the three decades from the Fifties to the Seventies. Those were the days, as I loved, when the whole world was witnessing a literary tsunami, yet of the good kind. No tsunami, but say, a revolution. With Jack Kerouac touring around North America, the Beat Generation was driving all across the globe; then we have the Malay Roy Choudhury & Co, describing in plain words how literature can pinch hard the arses of the authority while producing great works of art; and closer home, the three poets, Yumlembam Ibomcha, Wahengbam Ranjit and Thangjam Ibopishak published the anthology of Shingnaba (Challenge/Resistance) in volumes. In music, the Fifties was archaic yet the rise of Led Zep, the Doors, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and the other bands in the Sixties was changing the way how we rock and roll literally. Anyways, a few decades down the revolutionary road, now we have a multiverse of art and literature that thrills us, amazes us, and inte
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Hungry Generation & Beat Generation - Revolt of the Personal : Steven Belletto

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    The Beat Generation Meets the Hungry Generation: U.S.—Calcutta Networks and the 1960s “Revolt of the Personal” Steven Belletto Department of English, Lafayette College, Easton, PA 18042, USA Abstract : This essay explores the relationship between the U.S.-based Beat literary movement and the Hungry Generation literary movement centered in and around Calcutta, India, in the early 1960s. It discusses a trip Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky took to India in 1962, where they met writers associated with the Hungry Generation. It further explains how Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Books in San Francisco, was inspired to start a new literary magazine, City Lights Journal , by Ginsberg’s letters from India, which included work by Hungry Generation writers. The essay shows how City Lights Journal packaged the Hungry Generation writers as the Indian wing of the Beat movement, and focuses in particular on the work of Malay Roy Choudhury, the
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