Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the extent of freedom enjoyed by the artists in post-colonial Calcutta, roughly between 1947-1977, through the raging debates on the writings of the 'Hungry Generation' poets.

Paper long abstract:

The year 1947 significantly transformed the identity of Calcutta. Partition and migration made Calcutta the densest city in the world. Politically, the city saw marked shifts to leftist ideologies. Socially, both the earlier residents and the refugees were experiencing an acute crisis in the job market, growing inflationary tendencies, and falling standard of living. A restive Calcutta became a site of radical protest - on the streets and in the cultural spaces. The current paper explores the politics of representation of these post-colonial experiences in Bengali literature, roughly between 1947-1977, and the vociferous debates that followed.

The 'Hungry' Movement arose from a section of the youth, disillusioned with the affairs of the state and the indifference of the literary environment to it. A self-proclaimed avant-garde movement, it faced charges of obscenity leading to a court case in 1964, where some of its leading poets were arrested on charges of obscenity. The paper traces the rise of this unprecedented radicalism in Bengali literature, the immediate context of their anguish, their infamous method of writing, other acts of resistance apart from the literary, their camaraderie with the poets of the Beat generation, and place them in the global context of the anti-establishment and countercultural movements in the UK and USA.

Looking at these multiple levels of representation in a post-colonial post-partitioned space, the paper explores the kind of morality expected and imposed on the artists and how the latter took up writing as a tool to resist and overcome it.