Samir Roychoudhury

Samir Roychowdhury (Bengali: সমীর রায়চৌধুরী) (1 November 1933 – 22 June 2016), one of the founding fathers of the Hungry Generation (also known as Hungryalism or Hungrealism (1961–1965)), 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 (now in Pakistan), 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. Samir's grandfather, Sri Lakshminarayan Roy Chowdhury established a permanent photography-cum-painting shop at Patna, Bihar in 1886, the city from which Samir, along with his younger brother Malay Roy Choudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Debi Ray, had launched the Hungryalism (হাংরি আন্দোলন) movement in November 1961. Samir's uncle Pramod was Keeper of Paintings and Sculpture at the Patna Museum. Pramod's daughters, Sabitri and Dharitri were accomplished veena players and classical singers. Dharitri was a painter as well. Samir's mother Amita Banerjee came from a family where her father Dr.Kishori Mohan Bandyopadhyay was a fellow researcher and an assistant of Ronald Ross, Nobel prize winner for discovering the causes of malaria. Right from childhood, Samir was thus in the company of people who could groom him for his later literary achievements. Samir studied at City College, Calcutta, where he found as his classmates, Dipak Majumdar, Sunil Gangopadhyay and Ananda Bagchi, who were preparing to start an exclusive poetry magazine, named Krittibas (1953). Samir became an active member of the group. Sunil Gangopadhyay's first collection of poems Eka Ebong Koyekjan was funded and published by Samir. However, when Dipak Majumdar left Krittibas, Samir along with Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Ananda Bagchi and Utpalkumar Basu were eased out of the group, although Samir had edited the Phanishwarnath Renu issue of the magazine. Samir left the group and took up a job of marine fisheries expert in a ship which most of the time was in the Arabian Sea, an experience which was later beneficial for Hungryalism inputs. His first poetry collection Jharnar Pashey Shuye Aachhi (ঝর্ণার পাশে শুয়ে আছি) (i.e. "Sleeping Beside An Waterfall") was premised on the blueness of experience of this marine period.