On the beat!

REVIEW

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…"

- Howl, Allen Ginsberg

The Beat Generation — Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and their bohemian friends who were writing and versifying in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in the 1950s and ’60s — are something of the enfants terrible of literary history. In-your- face deviant, they flouted almost every convention of literature and social behaviour: they did drugs (better, they advocated the use of psychotropic substances, setting off the drugs culture that swept the West in later decades); flaunted, talked and wrote about sexuality (not just the straight man-woman kind, but homosexuality, and even paedophilia), and had more than an academic interest in criminality.

They were also the first to discover India, or more accurately, to journey to India with the idea of experiencing first-hand its ancient wisdom and esoteric spiritual practices, inspiring successive generations of Westerners — the Beatles, Philip Glass, et al — to follow in their wake. It’s a story that’s known, one whose bare-bones have been charted by a succession of Beat scholars. But not entirely fleshed out, as in this book by Deborah Baker.

A Blue Hand is an account of the 15 months that Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky (whom he introduced as “my darling wife”, scandalising his hosts) and (for a brief 12 weeks), fellow Beat poet Gary Snyder and his wife Joanne Kyger spent travelling through India, “from the ashrams of the Himalayan foothills to Delhi opium dens and the burning pyres of Benaras”, in “search for god, for love and for peace”. Their “pilgrimage” culminated in Calcutta where they discovered a group of kindred souls: the “hungry generation” poets like Shakti Chattopadhyay and Sunil Gangopadhyay.

Literary biography is Baker’s forte (the American poets Robert Bly and Laura Riding were the subjects of her earlier books). But the Beats were notoriously screwed up, and any narrative that looks at them as a collective must needs be a tangled skein. In that sense, A Blue Hand is a taxing read — it begins near the end, with Ginsberg taking the train out of Calcutta and builds up the “story” in a kind of free-flowing collage of episodes, snapshots of characters, bits of poetry or quotes from letters, descriptions of hallucinations and exegesis of the Indian gods and goddesses.

But the Beats were also a fascinating lot, and Baker tells their story with much sympathetic insight and also, an insider’s knowledge of what it means to be a white Westerner in India (she moved to Kolkata in 1990, learnt Bengali and is the wife of novelist Amitav Ghosh). To readers now, the story of Ginsberg’s search for a guru will be old hat, but Baker tells it with a snappiness and a delicious sense of irony at the corniness of the East-West encounter. As she has one guru tell Allen: “Silence would be good for America.”

Evidently, Ginsberg and Orlovsky took very well to India, revelling in its poverty and squalor. Oh, there was the odd bout of flu and kidney upsets and they were soon tired of sitting cross-legged, but they seemed to have had a gala time otherwise — traipsing all over burial grounds and smoking ganja with the sadhus who sat meditating there, introducing their Indian poet friends to the wonders of LSD and horrifying hostesses of dinner parties by going into the shower and coming out stark naked.

Sadly, there isn’t much in the book about India’s impact on Ginsberg’s oeuvre, except for a brief bit about how goddess Kali was the inspiration for his poem, On the Statue of Liberty.

It’s a tragic-comic story, even if there are times when you don’t quite find it funny. To be fair to Baker though, she never loses sight of the very real pathos, the agony of the lament that Ginsberg articulates in his notebook: “What’s to be done with my life which has lost its idea?”

A BLUE HAND
The Beats in India
Author: Deborah Baker
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Price: Rs 499
PAGES: 242