Commentary Literature

Open Wounds

The contested legacy of the Hungry Generation

01 October 2018
Sanchayan Ghosh’s installation featured a tablet bearing lines from a poem by Malay Roychoudhury.
COURTESY EXPERIMENTER GALLERY
Sanchayan Ghosh’s installation featured a tablet bearing lines from a poem by Malay Roychoudhury.
COURTESY EXPERIMENTER GALLERY

In Labour Reconciled, an installation for an exhibition that ran earlier this year at Kolkata’s Experimenter Gallery, the artist Sanchayan Ghosh brought together different elements of labour practices around the intellectual project of envisioning a possible utopia.

Many counterculture figures from the West, such as the American hippie poet David Garcia, sought out the Hungryalists during the 1960s.. COURTESY TRIDIB MITRA / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Many counterculture figures from the West, such as the American hippie poet David Garcia, sought out the Hungryalists during the 1960s.. COURTESY TRIDIB MITRA / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Many counterculture figures from the West, such as the American hippie poet David Garcia, sought out the Hungryalists during the 1960s.
COURTESY TRIDIB MITRA / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

At the centre of the room was a large mortar slab, the sort made by the roof makers of Birbhum district in West Bengal. It was surrounded by pictures of those roof makers, the first edition of a Bengali literary journal and two editions of the journal Labour Law. By putting on headphones that hung from a wall, one could hear the songs of the mostly Dalit women who used to practise this occupation—which disappeared during the 1980s—songs that have often entered poetic traditions largely curated by male poets. The mortar slab bore a looming tablet, as if out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, on which were displayed lines from “Jokhom”—Wound—a poem by Malay Roychoudhury:

Keywords: hungry generation Sanchayan Ghosh Hungryalists Malay Roychoudhury Samit Roychoudhury Srijit Mukherji Baishe Srabon counterculture Bengali cinema Bengali bengali poetry
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