THE HIPPY’S DISCOVERY OF INDIA
A new documentary shows how poet Allen Ginsberg kickstarted the backpacker revolution
The 1950s saw filmmakers like Jean Renoir and Roberto Rossellini coming to India, but it was really from the beginning of the 1960s that a certain kind of cultural tourism by well-known western intellectuals really took off. When American poet Allen Ginsberg arrived in India in 1962 with his partner Peter Orlovsky, he wasn’t the first gay, celebrated or controversial poet from the West to visit—Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini had already accompanied his friends, novelist couple Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, for a trip in 1961. Neither were Ginsberg and Orlovsky the last famous couple from the ‘New York scene’ to come over—avantgarde composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham followed in the mid-1960s. Nor was he the last to tangle with Calcutta in that period—Günter Grass first visited in 1975, lambasted the locals for writing self-indulgent rubbish, called the city a pile of shit defecated upon earth by God, but kept returning. What made Ginsberg’s first visit to India different is that he abandoned the fastidious distance maintained by other visiting westerners. He and Orlovsky stayed in a bug-infested ‘hotel’ in north Kolkata, spent a lot of time at Nimtolla cremation ghat and then at the ghats in Banaras, they travelled third class in trains and ate whatever they came across. They met people in high society but mostly hung out with bohemian poets and vagabond sadhus on the street. The director of Ginsberg’s Karma, Ram Devineni, calls Ginsberg ‘America’s first hippy’, which would likely make the poet the world’s first hippy. Thanks to Ginsberg and his Indian experience, four somewhat posher hippies followed him to India a few years later. By the time the Beatles arrived in 1968, the Hippy Trail had already coalesced across the midriff of the planet, from Marrakesh to Rishikesh, from Goa to Pattaya. Before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq-Iran closed down the route, the road trip from Europe to India and Nepal was probably the most epic overland journey possible in contemporary history. As Ginsberg’s Karma tells us, Allen and Peter and a few others were responsible for the start of the whole ‘backpacker’ travel phenomenon. Devineni’s documentary is fascinating to watch, not least because Ginsberg, who was also a talented and copious photographer, came to India at a time when the use of 35mm film for still cameras as well as 8mm and Super-8 film cameras had become fairly common. The mobility provided by those formats give the archival images in the film an immediacy, as though the pictures were made yesterday, even as you find yourself startled by how different cities and villages looked in those days. Harsho Mohan Chattoraj’s illustrations deployed with basic animation also help move the story along. For a properly detailed and insightful account of that Ginsberg trip, one needs to read A Blue Hand: The Beats in India by Deborah Baker, who is also interviewed in the film.
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Ginsberg’s Karma director, Ram Devineni, calls poet Allen Ginsberg ‘America’s first hippy’