Jyotirmoy Datta (born 1936) is a Bengali writer, journalist, poet, and an essayist. He worked for The Statesman, Calcutta's oldest English-language daily, as feature writer, film critic, correspondent, and associate editor. He visited the University of Chicago as a lecturer, 1966–1968, and also did a residency at the University of Iowa. He has published 2 books of verse, several novels and collections of essays and short stories. Datta currently lives in Hillsborough Township, New Jersey, near New York City, where he works as an Editor for South Asia Journal. He attends many poetry readings in Manhattan and Queens and is a famous figure among the Indians and New York poets.
Jibanananda Das was an indian poet, writer, novelist and essayist in the Bengali language. Popularly called "Rupashi Banglar Kabi'', Das is the most read poet after Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam in Bangladesh and West Bengal. While not particularly well recognised during his lifetime, today Das is acknowledged as one of the greatest poets in the Bengali language.
The Hungry Generation was a literary movement in the Bengali language launched by what is known today as the Hungryalist quartet, i.e. Binoy Majumdar, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Saileswar Ghosh, Malay Roy Choudhury, Samir Roychoudhury and Debi Roy, during the 1960s in Kolkata, India. Due to their involvement in this avant garde cultural movement, the leaders lost their jobs and were jailed by the incumbent government. They challenged contemporary ideas about literature and contributed significantly to the evolution of the language and idiom used by contemporaneous artists to express their feelings in literature and painting.
Malay Roy Choudhury is an Indian Bengali poet, playwright, short story writer, essayist and novelist who founded the Hungryalist movement in the 1960s.
Binoy Majumdar was a Bengali poet. Binoy received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2005.
Uttarpara or Uttarpara Kotrung is a small town and a municipality of Hooghly district in the Indian state of West Bengal. It is a part of the area covered by Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority (KMDA). Uttarpara is located at 22.67°N 88.35°E, within 10 km from Kolkata, the capital of the state of West Bengal. It is located along the Hooghly river, across from the Dakshineswar Kali Temple. Uttarpara is home to the Uttarpara Jayakrishna Public Library, Asia's oldest free public library.
The little magazine movement originated in the 1950s and 1960s in many Indian languages like Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, Hindi, Malayalam and Gujarati, as it did in the West, in the early part of the 20th century.
Supriya Devi was an Indian actress who is known for her work in Bengali cinema for more than 50 years. She is best known for her portrayal of Neeta in Ritwik Ghatak's Bengali film Megha Dhaka Tara (1960). She was conferred the Filmfare Award and the BFJA Award twice. In 2011, she received the Banga-Vibhushan, the highest civilian honour in West Bengal. In 2014, she was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India, the fourth highest civilian award in India, for her contributions to the entertainment industry.
Parijat was a Nepalese writer. Her real name was Bishnu Kumari Waiba but she wrote under the pen name Parijat. Her most notable publication is Shiris Ko Phool. The English translation of Shiris ko Phool, the blue Mimosa has been adapted in the literature curriculum of the University of Maryland.
Samir Roychowdhury, one of the founding fathers of the Hungry Generation, was born at Panihati, West Bengal, in a family of artists, sculptors, photographers, and musicians. His grandfather Lakshminarayan, doyen of the Sabarna Roy Choudhury clan of Uttarpara, had learned drawing and bromide-paper photography from John Lockwood Kipling, father of Rudyard Kipling, who was Curator at the Lahore Museum, and thereafter established the first mobile photography-cum-painting company in India in the mid-1880s. The company was later taken over by Samir's father Ranjit (1909–1991). Samir's mother Amita (1916–1982) was from a progressive family of 19th-century Bengal renaissance.
Subimal Basak, is an Indian fiction writer. He is a member of the Hungry generation, with Samir Roychoudhury, Falguni Roy, Shakti Chattopadhyay and the movement's creator Malay Roy Choudhury.
Anil Karanjai was an accomplished Indian artist. Born in East Bengal, he was educated in Benaras, where his family settled subsequent to the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. As a small child he had spent long hours playing with clay to make toys and arrows. He also began very early to draw animals and plants, or whatever inspired him. In 1956 he dropped out of school to become a full-time student at Bharatiya Kala Kendra, headed by Karnaman Singh, a master of the Bengal school and a Nepali by origin. This teacher encouraged Anil to experiment widely and to study the art of every culture. Anil remained here until 1960, exhibiting regularly and teaching other students. During the same period, he practised miniature painting at Bharat Kala Bhavan under the eye of the last court painter to the Maharaja of Benaras. He also enrolled at Benaras Polytechnic to learn clay modelling and metal casting.
Kavigan, Kobi Gaan, Kobi Lorai or Kabigan is a form of Bengali folk performance wherein folk poets sing and perform. A verbal duel among the poets, this mystic minstrels art was popular with rural folk form in nineteenth century in Bengal region, which includes the Indian state of West Bengal and Bangladesh.. The mythological themes from both Hindu and Muslims religious texts were commonly used for Kobi Gaan.
Basudeb Dasgupta is an Indian novelist and short-story writer associated with the Hungry generation movement in Bengali literature. He is considered one of the most significant avant-garde and controversial figures in the history of Bengali literature.
Falguni Roy was an anti-establishment Bengali poet born in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. Along with Shakti Chattopadhyay, Malay Roy Choudhury, Samir Roychoudhury, Subimal Basak, Debi Roy, Utpal Kumar Basu, Binoy Majumdar, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Basudeb Dasgupta, Roy was also associated with the Hungryalist movement. Anti-establishment poet Tushar Roy was his brother.
Bimal Guha is a Bangladeshi poet, and a leading poet of his generation. He appeared on the Bangladesh literary scene in the 1970s. His themes revolve around the war of liberation and the eternal subjects of love, nature, motherland, mother-tongue, tradition, and modernity.
Tridib Mitra was one of the pioneers of the Hungry generation movement in Bengali literature which changed the literary landscape of West Bengal once and for all. With his wife Alo Mitra, he edited Hungry generation magazines The Waste Paper in English and Unmarga in Bengali. He and his wife were the ones who started Poetry Readings in Burning Ghats, Graveyards, Ganges river banks as well as in Country liquor joints of Kolkata. He was, in fact, one of the cultural game changers during the sixties when Hungry generation literary movement arrived with full force in the Bengali cultural arena. He and his wife were the ones who delivered Hungry generation masks of demons, jokers, gods etc. at the offices and houses of Ministers, Administrators, Newspaper Editors and other power holders of the West Bengali Establishment. He was an Anti-Establishment writer.
Rabindra Guha is a Bengali poet of the Hungry generation movement in literature who subsequently started the Neem Sahitya Andolan with Mrinal Banik and Biman Chattopadhyay from the steel factory city of Durgapur in West Bengal. He has written several collections of poetry, short stories and novels. He is known mainly for the language of the Bengali diaspora which he adopted and developed for his narratives. He lived in Kolkata until the Hungry generation movement died down at the end of the 1960s, and shifted thereafter to Durgapur. At the end of 1970s, he shifted his base to New Delhi where he invented his narrative language of the Bengali diaspora, i.e. of people who live outside West Bengal. Rabindra Guha is a diasporic post-modern writer with a prolific body of work in relation to inner as well as outer diaspora. He has been a creator of language which is a fantastic combination of national and local dialect. His work had been recently accoladed in Jessore University.
Kolkata Little Magazine Library And Research Center is a privately owned library of alternative and experimental literary magazines in Kolkata, India. It was founded by Sandip Dutta on 23 June 1978 with a small number of periodicals which grew to one of the finest collection of alternative magazines in India. The library is situated at Tamer Lane in College Street in the Boipar neighbourhood of North Kolkata.
Utpal Kumar Basu was a Bengali poet and story teller.
