Dharma Bums in the Land of Cows and Krishna
BY: VRINDA NABAR
Aug 16, MUMBAI, INDIA (DNA) — A review of the book, A Blue Hand: The Beats In India by Deborah Baker,
Penguin Viking, 246 pages, Rs499.
To my generation, the presence of the Beats in India had long been confined to two references. While R. Parthasarathy had recounted the alleged response of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky to Indian English poetry (“If we were gangster poets we’d shoot you…”), Keki N Daruwalla had satirised our postcolonial dependency on Western recognition, remarking how he stood “bowled by Indian culture and Indian hemp” ever since Oppenheimer quoted from the Gita and Allen Ginsberg and the psychedelics discovered “cow and Krishna”.
Indian culture and Indian hemp are central to Deborah Baker’s book. Working with material from memoirs, journals, diaries, and archived collections, Baker produces a riveting account of that period, placing it in the larger context of a very muddled world caught up in the frenzy of Cold War rhetoric.
At the start, as Ginsberg and one-time lover Peter Orlovsky hurtle across the countryside on the train taking them from Calcutta to Benares, his mind seethes with virtually every topic under the sun. It is December 11, 1962, and while one part of him reflects on the Chaucerian potential of every human figure he sees on Howrah Bridge (“Each comb seller and watch repairer, each woman with a basket of fish on her head, carried a tale he would never hear”), another is already drawing up a five-point programme for world peace that includes a debate between Khrushchev, Kennedy, Mao and Nehru, “to be translated into every language and broadcast globally…”
In detailing Ginsberg’s complicated and troubled journey from East Harlem to India, complete with his first vision of God while a student of law at Columbia University, Baker gives us the world of the dharma bums, warts and all. Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr, Gregory Corso and Neal Cassady are only some of the players crucial to that world, which Ginsberg remained tied to even as he tried to escape and find inner peace. His was a struggle not amenable to Pupul Jayakar’s pragmatic scepticism.
Jayakar, India’s cultural czarina at the time, had bluntly pointed out that “While you look to her [India] to find answers, the young in India look to the West”, but Ginsberg remained convinced that India held all the answers. He wanted to “touch real poverty”, “experiment with drugs”, find ecstasy and, failing these, at least a gay guru - it was “essential” that he “find God through a guru whom I can love.”
Baker’s narrative escapes becoming merely trivia-focused by expanding on the conflicted lives of several of Ginsberg’s associates - an exercise that runs through the book, giving readers who had imbibed the Kerouac mystique a broader perspective on a much-hyped phenomenon. The elusive presence in India of the intriguing Hope Savage whom Burroughs had loved and Ginsberg almost considers marrying adds another, somewhat mysterious dimension to the chronicle.
To Ginsberg and his fellow-travellers - Orlovsky and poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger - the India experience was not always sanguine. This is best captured in Kyger’s outburst to a friend, detailing why Indians were “vile and bad-tempered beyond Belief”. Baker’s ironic analysis of Joanne’s confession that it was real attention she missed extends into a commentary on the small self-absorbed world they all mistook for a whole universe: “While Joanne studied her crow’s-feet in the guesthouse mirror, Allen was listening to Gary chant ‘the Sutra of the Perfection of the Diamond that Cuts Through Illusion’ into the cool darkness of an ancient Buddhist prayer hall at Ellora.”
The sordid truths of the Indian experience are redeemed by India’s undeniable strengths, the self-indulgent excesses of the Beats by their compassion for the destitute and the ailing. Calcutta coffee house stalwarts like Sunil Gangopadhyay and Shakti Chattopadhyay are as much a part of the book as the cow and Krishna brigade, giving the Beat presence a more tangible, purposeful reality. There are bonds forged here that are as intimate as those Ginsberg had felt for his compatriots and they last through numerous transcontinental journeys.
Baker’s large canvas can be confusing, her shifts through time and continents dizzying. Her ultimate triumph is her unembellished yet fascinating depiction of an era not easily dismissed or forgotten.
The reviewer is former head, department of English, University of Bombay.
