উত্তরাধুনিকতা সম্পর্কে সমীর রায়চৌধুরী

by Samir Roychoudhury

Samir wrote several treatises on Adhunantika aspects of Indian, especially Bengali society, that have impacted post-colonial mindset, and obviously arts, literature and culture. Critics have claimed that Adhunantika is Postmodern version of Hungryalism, and that postmodern features of Bengali creative writing had emerged way back in the 1960s when the Hungry generation movement was launched with freely distributed weekly bulletins which could have been published by any participant of the movement. Samir introduced an Indianised version of postmodernism which was being called, apart from Adhunantika, Uttaradhunika, Uttar-Adhunika, Bitadhunika, Bhashabadal, Atichetana and Adhunikottarvad etc. Hungryalism got a new valuation with these concepts, and the newer generation of poets, writers and thinkers got an alternative platform. Samir edited, since 1990, books on Ecofeminism, Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, Complexity, Hybridity and The Other. He edited Postmodern Bengali Poetry (2001) and Postmodern Bengali Short Stories (2002) which included writings from Bangladesh as well as entire India. Earlier only upper-caste writers from West Bengal used to have pride of place in such collections. Samir changed it all; he invited poems and short stories from all strata of, not only West Bengal, but entire India and Bangladesh. A new word Bahirbanga was coined by him for diasporic Bengalis.

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Abhijit Pal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Creativity ran in the veins, so early in life, both Samir and his brother Malay directed many plays including 'Kauwa Babula Bhasm' the script of which was prepared by the noted writer Phanishwar Nath 'Renu'. Samir has been creative off and on. After his first collection of poems, he published Aamar Vietnam a collection of poems, though not based on Vietnam, but premised on the sensitivity of a person who lives in a different world and is regularly bombarded by war-news which is shockingly inhuman. Then after a decade his third collection of poems Janowar (জানোয়ার) (The Beast) was published written in a different vein. Among the Hungryalists, he is considered to be a master of word formation and language-plasticity. He shifted his base permanently to Calcutta (Kolkata) in the beginning of the 1990s and started his own magazine aptly called HAOWA#49 or Unapanchash Vayu in Sanskrit which is a state of unknown mind. He also started Haowa#49 Publications for which his younger brother Malay Roy Choudhury joined as Creative Consultant. HAOWA#49 (হাওয়া # ৪৯) magazine virtually changed the avant garde literary scene. People who were once critical of the Hungry Generation movement (হাংরি আন্দোলন), and even denigrated Hungryalism, started respecting them. Some post-graduate theses have been written on the two brothers, considered to have up-welled fresh mind-waves in an otherwise stagnant creative pool.