Introduction of Malay RoyChoudhury

Introduction

Better known as Malay, Malay RoyChoudhury was born in 1939 in the chaotic township of Patna. He did his post graduation in 1960 , gave up Ph.D. research half way through for poetry,dissent and freedom,and moved to Kolkata to take up the leadership of the famous “Hungryalist” literary movement. The impact provoked powerful hostilities.

He lost his job for writing poems,earned the wrath of his friends and relatives, and was perpetually scandalized by a section of the media, Life became miserable and he stopped writing around 1967. With his mother’s death in 1983 he started writing again and emerged as a major Bengali poet of the Indian sub-continent and, as a backlash of the sixties decade of incendiary iconoclasm, became a legend. He has written more than forty books, including novels, drama, social polemics, translations of Allen Ginsberg, Federico Garcia Lorca, Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, Blaise Cendrars, Paul Gaugin, William Blake, Dharmavir Bharati,and others. Academic researchers have done their M.Phil, and Ph.D. on his works, specially poetry. Several little magazines have published special issues on Malay. The poems here are from his book “Selected Poems” published in 1989. Bengali being a language of sophisticated nuances, the poems that follow are those that lent themselves to presentable versions and may not, therefore, be treated as the best.