Malay Roy Choudhury
| Malay Roy Choudhury | |
|---|---|
Roy Choudhury in Amsterdam in 2009.
|
|
| Born |
29 October 1939 (age 77) Patna, Bihar, India |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Occupation | Poet, journalist, and writer |
| Movement | Postmodernism and Hungryalism |
Malay Roy Choudhury (born 29 October 1939) is a Bengali poet, playwright, short story writer, essayist and novelist who founded the Hungryalist movement in the 1960s.
Roy Choudhury was born in Patna, Bihar, India, into the Sabarna Roy Choudhury clan, which owned the villages that became Kolkata. He grew up in Patna's Imlitala ghetto, which was mainly inhabited by Dalit Hindus and Shia Muslims. His was the only Bengali family. His father, Ranjit (1909–1991) was a photographer in Patna; his mother, Amita (1916–1982), was from a progressive family of the 19th-century Bengali renaissance. His grandfather, Lakshmi Narayan Roychoudhury, was a photographer in Kolkata who had been trained by Rudyard Kipling's father, the curator of the Lahore Museum.
At the age of three, Roy Choudhury was admitted to a local Catholic school, and later, he was sent to the Oriental Seminary. The school was administered by the Brahmo Samaj movement, a monotheistic religion founded in 1830 in Kolkata by Ram Mohun Roy, who aimed to purify Hinduism and recover the simple worship of the Vedas. There, Roy Choudhury met student-cum-librarian Namita Chakraborty, who introduced him to Sanskrit and Bengali classics. All religious activities were banned at the school, and Roy Choudhury has said that his childhood experience made him instinctively secular.
Roy Choudhury has proficiency in English, Hindi, Bhojpuri and Maithili, apart from his mother tongue Bengali. He was influenced, though, by the Shia Muslim neighbors who recited Ghalib and Faiz in the Imlitala locality. At the same time his father had two workers Shivnandan Kahar and Ramkhelawan Singh Dabar at his photographic shop at Patna ; these two persons introduced Roy Choudhury to Ramcharitmanasa written by Tulasidasa as well as saint poets Rahim, Dadu and Kabir
...
Wikipedia