Hungry Generation poet Malay Roy Choudhury passes away at 84

Renowned poet Malay Roy Chowdhury, one of the founding fathers of the Hungry Generation literature movement, has passed away at the age of 84 today.

"It is with profound grief and immense sadness that I inform you that my father, Malay Roychoudhury passed away this morning. May his memories be a blessing and may his soul attain sadgati," a post from the poet's Facebook account reads.

The cause of death is yet to be known.

Author of over 70 books, Malay was born in Chhatna of West Bengal into the Sabarna Roy Choudhury family, which owned the villages that later became Kolkata.

His father, Gouchaprama Roy Choudhury was a photographer and his mother, Amita was from a progressive family of the 19th-century Bengali Renaissance.

His grandfather, Laksmikanta Roy Choudhury, was a photographer in Kolkata who had been trained by Rudyard Kipling's father, the curator of the Lahore Museum.

In the early 1960s, Malay co-founded Hungryalism, an artistic movement in reaction to literary and political authority.

The movement's English name was derived from Geoffrey Chaucer's line "in the sowre hungry tyme", and its philosophy was based on Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West".

The movement lost momentum in 1965, when the West Bengal government issued arrest warrants for eleven Hungryalists, including Malay and his brother Samir Roy Choudhury.

Some members, such as Subhash Ghosh and Saileshwar Ghosh, testified against Roy Choudhury in Kolkata's Bankshall Court. He was jailed for a month for his poem Stark Electric Jesus by Kolkata Bankshal Court in 1966.

However he was exonerated by the Kolkata High Court in 1967.