Malay Roy Choudhury

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Malay Roy Choudhury (born 1939) is a Bengali poet and novelist who founded the "Hungryalist Movement" in the 1960s. His literary works have been reviewed by sixty critics in HAOWA 49, a quarterly magazine which devoted its January 2001 special issue to Choudhury's life and works. Gale Research, based in Ohio, United States, published an autobiography of Choudhury (in CAAS vol. 14), and both the Dhaka Bangla Academy and the Northwestern University (Illinois), have archives of Choudhury's "Hungry Literary Generation" publications.

The Movement was initially spearheaded by Roy Choudhury, Samir Roychoudhury (his elder brother), Shakti Chattopadhyay, and Haradhon Dhara (alias Debi Roy). Thirty more poets and artists subsequently joined them, the best-known being Benoy Majumdar, Utpal Kumar Basu, Falguni Ray, Subimal Basak, Tridib Mitra, Shambhu Rakshit, and Anil Karanjai.

Roy Choudhury is to the "Hungryalist Movement" as Stéphane Mallarmé was to Symbolism, Ezra Pound to Imagism, André Breton to Surrealism, and Allen Ginsberg to the Beats. The movement is now known in English as the "Hungry Literary Generation", its name being taken from the movement's bulletins, published in Bengali and infrequently in English by Choudhury since November 1961.

Although the Hungry Literary Movement gradually faded after 1965, it is today hailed as the most important in post-colonial Bengali creative literature. Choudhury has been identified as a major post-colonial poet and novelist, and remains the single most controversial thinker in the past four decades. During that period, he had experimented with various genres, and amongst his works, the most discussed are the poetry collections: Medhar Batanukul Ghungur, Naamgandho, and Illot, and the short story, "Aloukik Dampatya".

Choudhury has translated into Bengali the works of William Blake ("Marriage of Heaven and Hell"), Arthur Rimbaud ("A Season in Hell"), Tristan Tzara ("Dada Manifestos", and poems), Jean Cocteau ("Crucifixion"), Blaise Cendrars ("Trans-Siberian Express"), and Allen Ginsberg ("Howl" and "Kaddish"). Ginsberg stayed with Choudhury's parents in 1963.

Choudhury's grandfather, Lakshmi Narayan Roychoudhury, who was from the Savarna Choudhury clan (Job Charnok), was a pioneer photographer in Kolkata. He was also an artist who established a firm in 1886 that created life-sized oil paintings for the Maharajas and their kin. Choudhury’s father, Ranjit, carried on the business till his death in 1991. Choudhury's mother, Amita, died in 1982.

Choudhury now lives in a small apartment in Kolkata with his wife, Shalila, who was a field hockey player from Nagpur when he first met her. Their daughter, Anushree, lives with her husband, Prashant in Holland, and his son, Jitendra,lives in Mumbai.