401

 Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
Philosophische Fakultät
Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften


1
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... 1
Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 2
1. “Drawing Wisdom” from India .................................................................................. 8
1.1 Ills of the West and the Cures of the East: Orientalism as Counterculture .................... 8
1.2.The Post-War Indomania and the Search for the “New Consciousness” ..................... 12
2. Homecoming of Orientalism: Counterculture in India .......................................... 18
2.1. From Textualization to Transnational History ............................................................ 19
2.2. Swamis and “Pop Gurus” ............................................................................................ 25
3. Scent of India .............................................................................................................. 31
3.1.Attuning to India’s Rhythm .......................................................................................... 31
3.2.Western Hero’s Journey and Mother India’s Bosom ................................................... 35
4. Westerners and Modern India .................................................................................. 42
4.1. Modernity and Authenticity ........................................................................................ 42
4.2. Poverty and Privilege .................................................................................................. 47
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 51
Primary Sources ............................................................................................................... 55
Secondary Sources ............................................................................................................ 56
2
Introduction
The three post-war decades constituted a period of unprecedented economic growth and
progress that had invoked universal optimism in different corners of the world which had then
been divided up along their macro-economic commitments and their level of industrialization.
At the heart of this “Golden Age”1 laid the 1960s with their rather peculiar aesthetic which
allows today`s observers to distinguish them from the preceding decade characterized by the
trauma and devastation of the Second World War and the threat of a potentially catastrophic
escalation of the Cold War, as well as from the succeeding turbulent years characterized by
inflation, oil shocks and social unrest. During this time of economic prosperity and relative
peace following the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the social and cultural life
of Western societies was simultaneously being shaken by the post-war baby boomer
generation alongside their senior “prophets” or “mentors”. In an era of economic prosperity
and optimism enchanting their parents, the post-war generation had turned their back on all
then-prevalent social conventions and immersed themselves in a parallel culture of drugs, free
love, and communalism. Theodore Roszak who had coined the term “counterculture” while
contemplating the phenomenon in 1969 declared that they had been revolting against the
Technocracy which he considered the hallmark of a post-industrial era concerning its presence
on both sides of the Cold War2.
. Not least the fight against Technocracy has also been augmented with an interest in
concepts coming from the “Orient” which had long been despised for its supposed
“backwardness” in relation to the modern West. Unlike previous Western seekers confined
predominantly to those with elite backgrounds, the post-war counterculture would unleash a
mass movement of people between the West and India as well as other parts of Asia. The
“Orient” had become accessible to Western youths from virtually all class backgrounds by the
1960s3 and this mass movement of people had been preceded by the Eastward journeys of
“trendsetting” elites of a milieu referred to as beatniks, hippies or the counterculture.
Although it had not only been them who beat these paths as there had been an overall surge in
ways and modes of travel in the post-war context, their journeys had particularly proven
influential4.
1 Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, repr (London, 2011).
2 Cf. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on a Technocratic Society and Its Youthful
Opposition (Garden City, New York, 1969), 18-19.
3 Cf. Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland, The Hippie Trail: A History, 1st ed. (Manchester, 2017),
https://doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781526114624.001.000.
4 Gemie and Ireland, 101-102.
3
Well-known Westerners who had visited India during the period were plenty5. One can
easily get the impression by looking at their long list that a countercultural or avant-garde
“colonization” of India must have been underway during the 1960s as the immediate
successor of actual colonization that had come to an end as recently as 1947. However, postwar
Indomania also had to do with the Westward journeys of South Asians as much as it had
done with the Eastward movement of Westerners. Many South Asians, most but not all of
whom had been spiritual leaders, would travel to and even settle in the West to disseminate
their creed and practices throughout the period. This process would not unfold in a uniform
fashion of a mere response to commercial Western demand, but in many cases out of South
Asians’ convictions for the necessity and/or plausibility to evangelize a Western public. They
would ultimately find the ready recipients of their teachings in the blossoming countercultural
or “hippie” milieu6.
Moreover, post-war Indomania had not been limited to matters of religion and spirituality.
The “raga rock” genre incorporating Indian tunes into rock songs of British Invasion bands
would develop independently of the countercultural interest in Indian spiritual traditions,
555 Martin Luther King would visit the country of his idol Gandhi in 1959 (Martin Luther King, ‘My Trip to the
Land of Gandhi’, The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, 28 July 2014, Accessed 9 April
2023. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/my-trip-land-gandhi.), one year after Italian
neorealist director Roberto Rossellini directed his documentary fiction „India, Mother Earth“; another Italian
director (Giuseppe Flora, ‘India as a Wonderland: International Outlook and Counterculture’, in Voices of
Freedom: Society, Culture and Ideas in the 70th Year of India’s Independence (Ed. Tiziana Lorenzetti) (Roma,
2022), 115–51, 116.). Pier Paolo Pasolini would visit twice in 1960-1 and 1967-8 (Silvia Mazzini, ‘Pasolini and
India: De- and Re-Construction of a Myth’, in Cultural Inquiry, ed. Luca Di Blasi, Manuele Gragnolati, and
Christoph F. E. Holzhey, vol. 6 (Vienna, 2012), 135–50, https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-06_08., 135, 138). Beat poet
Gary Snyder and his partner Joanne Kyger would spend four months there in 1962 from January to April and be
joined there by Allen Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky in February who both would in turn leave the
country as late as May 1963 (Joanne Kyger, The Japan and India Journals 1960-1964 (Bolinas, CA, 1981), 156,
176-177, 198. ; Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg, Expanded edition
(Minneapolis, 2016), 369, 372 390.; The Beatles would visit twice in 1966 and 1968, their Indophile member
George Harrison himself would additionally do so in 1967 and 1974 (George Harrison, I, Me, Mine (New York,
1981), 50-53, 57.); Richard Alpert, a former Harvard psychology professor who had been famous for his
experimentation with LSD would visit the country likewise in 1967 eventually to become „Ram Dass“, the most
famous countercultural „guru“ (Ram Dass, ed., Remember, Now Be Here, Now Here Be, Now Be Nowhere, Now
Be Here, Now Be Here (New York, 1978), Ch. "Environmental Changes". There is no indication of page number
in the introductory section including Ram Dass' autobiographical account in the original publication, so
henceforth only the name of the chapter will be indicated instead of the page number.).; and lastly, the French
New Wave director Louis Malle would shoot his self-declared masterpiece „Phantom India“ also in India during
1967 and 1968 (Ludovic Cortade, ‘Absorption and Reflexivity in Phantom India’, in The Cinema of Louis Malle:
Transatlantic Auteur (New York Chichester, West Sussex, 2018), 174.).
6 Against this background, Bengali Chinmoy Kumar Ghose who had moved to New York in 1964 would be
followed by A. C. S. Bhaktivedanta whose visit in the following year would lead to the inauguration of the
„temples“ of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in New York (1966) and San Francisco (1967);
Swami Satchidananda who „beatified“ the Woodstock Festival in 1969 would arrive in 19666; Tibetan teachers
Chögyam Trungpa and Kalu Rinpoche, in turn, would respectively arrive in 1970 and 1971, the former founding
in 1974 the still active Buddhist institution by the name of „Naropa University“ in Colorado. See: Paul Oliver,
Hinduism and the 1960s: The Rise of a Counter-Culture (London ; New York, 2014), 13, 39-40, 75-76, 133.
James William Coleman, The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition, 1. issued as
paperback (Oxford, 2002), 73, 75.
4
although an identification with them would later prove to be inevitable7. Attempts of fusion
would also take place in the genre of jazz at the hands of artists like John Coltrane, Alice
Coltrane, John McLaughlin, and John Mayer8, while a still-active academy dedicated to North
Indian classical music would be founded in Berkeley, California by one of the genre’s most
prominent performers, Ali Akbar Khan, in 19679. In the long run, post-war Indomania had led
to the creation of exquisite musical fusions, Western and global adoption of yoga as both a
secular and a spiritual “technique”10, and the emergence of a whole strand of new
religious/spiritual movements with Western audiences.
Against this background, I hypothesize the post-war Indomania to have been an instance
of “renaissance” in the sense the term has been used by Jack Goody. In his book
“Renaissances: the one or the many?”, Goody pleas for the relativization and historicization
of the European Renaissance11 through the acknowledgement that it had displayed a rather
familiar pattern of “literate cultures” looking “back” (at their past)12 and “around” (at other
cultures)13– examples of which could also be seen in instances like the Song Renaissance in
China14 or even the more recent Jewish Emancipation15 or the Bengal Renaissance16. In other
words, all “renaissances” or “golden ages” must inevitably have to do with “textual
representations” because an “unmediated” experience of both the past and other cultures is not
possible. This is quite an important point since the supposedly problematic nature of “textual
representations” lies at the core of debates around Orientalism.
Edward Said put all Western representations (be they scientific, philosophical, artistic or
otherwise) of the Orient that have ever existed under scrutiny when he pointed out in his
influential 1978 book Orientalism17 that there existed a peculiar Western mode and tradition
of „knowing the Orient“ where the East would be rendered into the substantialized Other of a
Western self-image through time honoured intellectual procedures amounting to
objectification and ahistoricization. The Orient which is the product of such procedures is fit
7 Jonathan Bellman, ‘Indian Resonances in the British Invasion, 1965-1968’, The Journal of Musicology 15, no.
1 (1997): 116–36, https://doi.org/10.2307/763906.
8 Carl John Clements, ‘John Coltrane and the Integration of Indian Concepts in Jazz Improvisation’, Jazz
Research Journal 2, no. 2 (15 May 2009): 155–75, https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.v2i2.155.
9 ‘The School | Ali Akbar College of Music | Classical Music of North India Classes in San Rafael CA’, Ali
Akbar College of Music, accessed 11 April 2023, https://aacm.org/ali-akbar-college-of-music-classical-musicof-
north-india-classes-sitar-sarode-tabla-vocal-san-rafael-2/.
10 Oliver, Hinduism and the 1960s,136-139.
11 Cf. Jack Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge, UK; New York, 2010), 5.
12 Cf. Goody, 5.
13 Cf. Goody, 251.
14 Cf. Goody, 5.
15 Cf. Goody, 145–60.
16 Cf. Goody, 190.
17 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1st Vintage Books ed (New York, 1979).
5
for Western manipulation and had provided the epistemological basis of colonial projects18.
This leads me to my second hypothesis: Although post-war Indomania intellectually owes to a
history of Western „textualization“ of the East that had accompanied colonialism, I contend
that the spontaneous, reciprocal and heterogenous nature of 1960s Indomania characterized by
individual, unorganized and largely unregulated fluxes of people, concepts and practices
stands in marked contrast to the history of “affirmative” orientalisms which had to rely on
more or less one-sided textualizations – themselves depending on colonial networks.
Indophile Westerners of the 1960s similarly had a “text” through which to make sense of
India and things Indian, though physical and emotional encounters with India and the Indians
actively challenged this “text” and modified it in a constant process of dialogue. Throughout
my thesis, I will strive to provide as many examples of such processes of negotiation as
possible and will ultimately conceive of post-war Indomania as a “transnational history”
standing out within the history of Western Orientalism.
The existing lack of works drawing on such conceptualizations and viewing post-war
Indomania as a multi-faceted, multi-spatial and multi-actor process of cultural dissemination
seems to stem in part from the post-colonialist conviction pioneered by Said that Western
attempts at “knowing” the Orient must inherently be complying with agendas of domination.
In terms of 1960s Indomania, the debate has particularly been extended to include a supposed
capitalist Western “commercialization” of Oriental concepts and practices. Julie Stephens
asserts in the chapter titled “Consuming India” of her book “Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties
Radicalism and Postmodernism” that 1960s Indomania had been distinguished from its
orientalist predecessors by its augmentation of the pre-existing textualization with a novel
framework of consumption in which elements and aspects of Indian culture had been rendered
into commercial goods like never before19. In a similar vein, the non-scholarly book of Gita
Mehta by the name of Karma Cola compiles absurd stories of Western adoption of Indian
concepts and practices during the 1960s20. My objection to the argumentation behind these
works stems from the fact that, in a rather ironic way, it substantializes the Western “actor” or
“imagination” at the expense of denying Indians their agency in the process. In that respect, I
think in a similar vein with Vivek Chibber who claims the post-colonial criticism to have
18 Cf. Said, 7–8.
19 Julie Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism (Cambridge, 1998), 48–72,
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511552168.005.
20 Gita Mehta, Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East, 1st Vintage International ed (New York, 1994).
6
paradoxically reproduced Orientalism which it had originally intended to replace and
substantialized the Orient once again under labels like “subaltern”21.
At the other end of the spectrum, “The Hippie Trail” by Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland22,
although pointing out that a transcultural exchange had taken place and stressing the
“spontaneity” marking the process throughout, falls short of properly coming to terms with
the Western biases that had influenced the thought schemes and behaviours of the travellers.
Paul Oliver, in his book Hinduism and the 1960s, also takes an optimistic stance and provides
a decent historical overview, though he also does not very much balance his narrative with a
critical reflection on the problems of “cultural translation” inherent to the process and
presupposes a substantialized “Hinduism” as an object of Western inquiry23. Another
important historical overview is Giuseppe Flora’s article “India as a Wonderland:
International Outlook and Counterculture” where he handles the countercultural Indomania
within the wider context of post-Independence Nehru government promoting Western
intellectual and artistic involvement in India which had ranged from cinema to architecture
and urban design as well as attracted the avantgarde milieu to the country24.
The framework employed by Somak Biswas in his PhD thesis by the name of “Passages
Through India” comes close to my approach in conceptualizing the process as a “transnational
history”, though the work has an exclusive focus on the relationship of Indian gurus and their
Western disciples in the period between 1890 and 194025. There have also been attempts to
conceptualize countercultural spirituality as an authentic religiosity and/or religious
movement, which include works such as those by Johnston26, Shipley27 and Prothero28. Harry
Oldmeadow similarly stresses the “sui generity” of religious experiences and makes a
committed case against accusations of “orientalism” thrown at Western converts of Eastern
religions and spiritualities, though I find his tone to be overly anti-modernist in his accusation
of Edward Said to have been a Eurocentrist due to his secularist outlook29.
21 Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London, 2013), 288-289.
22 Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail.
23 Oliver, Hinduism and the 1960s.
24 Flora, ‘India as a Wonderland: International Outlook and Counterculture’.
25 Somak Biswas, ‘Passages through India : Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia 1890-
1940’ (phd, University of Warwick, 2020), http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3467997~S15.
26 P. J. Johnston, ‘Dharma Bums: The Beat Generation and the Making of Countercultural Pilgrimage’,
Buddhist-Christian Studies 33 (2013): 165–79.
27 Morgan Shipley, ‘Hippies and the Mystic Way: Dropping Out, Unitive Experiences, and Communal
Utopianism’, Utopian Studies 24, no. 2 (2013): 232–63, https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.24.2.0232.
28 Stephen Prothero, ‘On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest’, The Harvard Theological
Review 84, no. 2 (1991): 205–22.
29 Harry Oldmeadow, Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religious Traditions, The
Library of Perennial Philosophy (Bloomington, Ind, 2004), 11.
7
My thesis will be divided into four main chapters. In the first chapter, I will grasp the
notion of “affirmative orientalism” and how it had been used to instrumentalize the “Orient”
in very different contexts as answers to different problems of the West. Then I will explore the
context of the 1960s in which India had been posited as a “cure” or an “answer”. The second
chapter will deal with the “transnationality” of 1960s Indomania as a distinguishing aspect of
it in relation to its “textual” predecessors. I will first provide an overview of “countercultural
geopolitics” and discuss the extent it owed itself to the political context of the period as well
as to the advancements in transportation. Then I will focus on the movements of individual
Westerners and South Asians Eastwards and Westwards as well as on the roles they had
assumed in their relationships as masters, disciples, and companions of each other. The third
chapter will put the “Eastward” journeys of Westerners and how they interacted with India as
a physical space under the spotlight. I will first explore the motifs crosscutting the many
Western accounts of India, then I will attempt to conceive of India in the countercultural
experience as a space akin to what Campbell describes as the “extraordinary world” in his
“The Hero with a Thousand Faces”30. Finally, in the last chapter, I will turn my focus to how
Western Indophiles had reacted to what had been perceived to be the “pressing problems” of
India as well as to “reminders” of Modernity “haunting” them in that country. I will open the
chapter with the prevalent portrayals of India in opposition to (Western) Modernity, then I will
provide a discussion on Westerners’ relationship with “empirical” India, covering issues such
as the seeming contrast of Western “privilege” with local poverty as well as humanitarian
involvement in “problems” of India.
As sources, I will mainly refer to the numerous travelogues and memoirs published by
“Indophiles” of the period, many of whom had also been influential and “trendsetting”
members of the counterculture. These works include the “Indian Journals”31 by Allen
Ginsberg, “Passage Through India”32 by Gary Snyder, “The Japan and India Journals”33 by
Joanne Kyger, “I, me, mine”34 by George Harrison, “Be Here Now”35 by Ram Dass, “It’s
Here Now (Are You?)”36 by Bhagavan Das and “Chants of a Lifetime”37 by Krishna Das.
30 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Commemorative ed, Bollingen Series 17 (Princeton, NJ,
2004).
31 Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals, March 1962-May 1963: Notebooks, Diary, Blank Pages, Writings, 1st Grove
Press ed (New York: Emeryville, CA, 1996).
32 Gary Snyder, Passage through India (San Francisco: Eugene, OR, 1983).
33 Kyger, The Japan and India Journals 1960-1964.
34 Harrison, I, Me, Mine.
35 Ram Dass, Remember, Now Be Here, Now Here Be, Now Be Nowhere, Now Be Here, Now Be Here.
36 Bhagavan Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?): A Spiritual Memoir, Scribd ed. (New York, 1997),
https://de.scribd.com/document/544421084/It-s-Here-Now-Are-You-1997-Bhagavan-Das# (Retrieved
14.04.2023).
8
“The Making of a Counterculture” by historian and thinker Theodore Roszak is also an
important text from 1969 which I will often cite throughout my thesis as it stands out as a
comprehensive document of the reception of counterculture by its contemporaries. I will also
refer to interviews and even songs from the period as well as to documentaries shot by three
renowned European filmmakers: Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Louis Malle,
who shot “India, Mother Earth”38, “Notes for a Film on India”39 and “Phantom India”40
respectively. I will also refer to the travelogue by Pier Paolo Pasolini by the name of “The
Scent of India”41 documenting his travel to the country in 1960-1.
1. “Drawing Wisdom” from India
Everything—yes, everything without
exception—has its origin in India42
Friedrich Schlegel
1.2. Ills of the West and the Cures of the East: Orientalism as Counterculture
Widespread pejorative usage of the term “orientalism” in scholarly circles is guilty of
concealing one of its originally intended implications: a fascination with cultures of the
Orient. Out of such a regret, David Kopf claims Edward Said to have misnamed his object of
inquiry by echoing a habit peculiar to scholars obsessed with hermeneutics (as opposed to
history): An impetuous generalization of observations in time and space due to a general
disregard for history at the expense of “textual analysis”43. He argues that the “Orientalists”
exposed in Said’s work had been the “anti-Orientalists” of their context where a dispute
within the British Colonial Service had been the case regarding whether there should have
been any place reserved for “Indian studies” in the curriculum intended for prospective
members of the service. “Anti-Orientalists” -or “Orientalists” as Said had called them- Kopf
claims, had been the ones who had strictly opposed the idea because Indian culture was
37 Krishna Das, Chants of a Lifetime: Searching for a Heart of Gold (Carlsbad, CA, 2010).
38 India, Matri Bhumi, 1959, accessed 18 May 2023,
https://www.rai.it/dl/RaiTV/programmi/media/ContentItem-a301e891-3083-46d5-b7cf-e183fa3a4fbccinema.
html.
39 Appunti per Un Film Sull’India, 1968.
40 L’Inde Fantôme: Reflexions Sur Un Voyage, 1969.
41 Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Scent of India, Kindle ed. (London, 1984). Before being compiled into a book, his
travel accounts had first been published as a feuilleton in an Italian newspaper. See: Silvia Valisa, ‘Corpi
Estranei and Moving Stereotypes: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Trauma of the Other in L’odore Dell’ India’, MLN
124, no. 1 (2009): 269–92, 272.
42 Cited in: Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, 65.
43 Cf. Kopf, ‘Hermeneutics versus History’, 498-499.
9
inherently inferior to that of the British and the latter had nothing valuable to learn from the
former44.
Kopf makes a point that becomes doubly interesting considering that Edward Said had
been an admirer of Raymond Schwab, the French author of the book “Oriental Renaissance”
first published in 1950. Schwab had asserted that a so-called “Oriental Renaissance” drawing
on a systematic translation of Oriental canons had taken place around the late 18th to early
19th centuries and made the bold claim that this process had been no less influential in the
formation of Western identity than the “original” Renaissance45. It might even be the case that
Schwab’s book had been the namesake of Said’s, as Said’s 1978 Orientalism would be
published just two years after a review by him of the intellectual legacy of Schwab with a
particular focus on his Oriental Renaissance, where he had also articulated many if not nearly
all the points he would raise in his own magnum opus. Said expresses great admiration for
Schwab’s work only to note the surprising neglect Schwab had shown for the colonial
framework of the encounters he described46. For Said, Schwab’s meticulous historianship
made the book a perfect supplement to Michel Foucault’s “The Order of Things” where the
latter had pointed out an epistemic shift marked by a conception of History (with a capital
“h”) as the paradigmatic framework of knowledge production47 around about the same period
Schwab had described as the time of the Oriental Renaissance48.
J. J. Clarke offers an alternative reading of Orientalism in his book “Oriental
Enlightenment” when he argues the West has had a much more ambiguous relationship with
the “Orient”. According to him, orientalism as a unique mode of Western engagement with the
“Orient” had been tied to a sense of dislocation caused by the advent of Modernity and
“Orient” served as a paradoxical mirror-image of the West that could use both to reaffirm and
negate its self-image49. As much as the West could celebrate its achievements through the
perception of a difference between itself and the Orient, it could also view the “Orient” as an
abode of alternatives whenever it needed these50. Although I am sceptical of Clarke’s claim
that there is a Western “break” from Tradition in favour of Modernity taking place as early as
the Renaissance eventually culminating in Orientalism as a unique mode of “ordering the
44 Cf. Kopf, 503.
45 Cf. Raymond Schwab, Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880 (New
York, 1984), 11.
46 Cf. Edward W. Said, ‘Raymond Schwab and the Romance of Ideas’, Daedalus 105, no. 1 (1976): 164.
47 Cf. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 2nd ed (Hoboken, 2012), 237.
48 Cf. Said, ‘Raymond Schwab and the Romance of Ideas’, 161.
49 Cf. Clarke, 32.
50 Cf. Clarke, 32.
10
world” not found elsewhere in human history51, I find Clarke’s understanding of the term to
be a great departure point for conceptualizing post-war Indomania as it had directly been tied
to a context where many Westerners had been hungry for “alternatives” to replace the
conventions of their own “civilization”.
There has been a plurality of orientalisms going back to the time of the Romantics who,
unlike Enlightenment thinkers, had drawn on the theory of a divided human nature and
associated different nations of the world with different mental “faculties”52 – a scheme
suggesting cultural particularism, humanism, and interdependence at the same time. Friedrich
Schlegel would associate Egypt with Understanding, Hebrews with Will, China with Reason,
and India with Imagination53. The absence of Greco-Roman civilization in his scheme can be
noticed in an instant and it should also strike the contemporary reader that Reason is
associated here not with one of the civilizations that had borne direct genealogical ties to the
Western one but instead with China. The association of India with Imagination is another
point to take note of, which shall remain important throughout my inquiry into post-war
Western constructions of India. For now, the case with China provides a fitting departure point
for the broader discussion I intend in this sub-chapter.
Gemie and Ireland make their case about studying the hippie trail of the 1960s and 1970s
that may well be seen as a “minority experience”, by reminding that the Enlightenment which
is generally taken so constitutive an epoque for the formation of European identity had also
been a “minority experience”54. This certainly well-made case could also be supplemented by
51 Many works have been critical of the notion of a European “leap” towards Modernity asserted by Western
historiography to have taken place as early as the Renaissance. Jack Goody, in his book “Theft of History”,
argues that the Western historiographical narrative of a linear advancement of Western civilization had the
function of denying any meaningful non-Western contribution to world history, although what has been narrated
as European History has inherently been shaped by breaks, ruptures, contingencies and, most importantly,
exchange with the outside world. He claims that the only meaningful “break” that has ever occurred to generate a
Western “differentiation” or “deviation” from the rest of the world is the Industrial Revolution. See: Jack Goody,
The Theft of History (Cambridge ; New York, 2006).
John M. Hobson is also very critical of “the myth of Western ingenuity” and asserts that not only has the
Western World not meaningfully differentiated from the rest of the world until the 19th Century, but most if not
all of its “Early Modern” achievements had owed themselves to the adoption of technologies developed
elsewhere in the world, notably China. See: John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation
(Cambridge, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511489013.
Janet Abu-Lughod, in turn, in her book “Before European Hegemony”, puts under scrutiny the Wallersteinian
notion of an Early Modern “world system” as a unique Western achievement, arguing that there had been an
ancient as well a medieval “world system”, the latter centred around the Indian Ocean and ceased to exist due to
the Black Death in the 14th Century. See: Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System
A. D. 1250 - 1350, First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback (New York Oxford, 1991). As for
Clarke’s claim that there has been no equivalent of Orientalism elsewhere in world history, Ronald Inden points
out in his book “Imagining India” to a medieval Islamic account narrating “how the Chinese and Indians
classified the world”. See: Inden, Imagining India, 213-214.
52 Inden, Imagining India, 93.
53 Inden, Imagining India, 68.
54 Cf. Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail, 6-7.
11
the fact that the Enlightenment milieu had not been any less “countercultural” than their
hippie “successors” in their objections to the conventions of their time and culture. Both
milieus had been unified in their rejection of Western social norms as well as of organized
Christianity and, in each case, Westerners disenchanted by their own “civilization” had
believed that another one embodied their ideals: India in the case of hippies and China in the
case of Enlightenment thinkers55.
It can be argued that there has been a persistent “countercultural” strand from the
Enlightenment onwards that sought a cultural revolution or reform in Western culture and saw
its ideals embodied by a society or tradition elsewhere. Whereas this had been China for the
Enlightenment, it had been India for the Romantics, (Theravada) Buddhism during the Late
Victorian Period56, and finally Zen Buddhism and once again India as well as Hinduism for
beatniks and hippies of the post-war years. It should be noted that each of the affirmative
orientalist streams had emerged in yet another influential contributor to Western civilization:
France, Germany, England, and the United States, respectively. In each case – although less so
in the last one as I will argue throughout my thesis – however, the traditions championed by
alternative-minded Westerners had been selective textual reconstructions that explained more
about their Western proponents than about the “objects” of inquiry they had been attempts at
grasping.
Enlightenment fascination with “Chinese intellect” would be replaced by the Romantic
fascination (and American Transcendentalist one in the 19th Century57) with “Indian
imagination” in the latter half of the 18th Century. As much as thinkers of Enlightenment and
Romanticism had differed in their outlooks, so had their ideas on what China and India
respectively embodied and why they had thought each civilization had been a cultural
paragon. Whereas Enlightenment China had been a rationalistic utopia, the Romantics had
reconstructed India as the locus of primitive wisdom58. By the early 19th Century, Hegel’s
“Philosophy of World History” would temporalize the particularities of various world nations
and declare both China and India to lay “outside of history”59. The Romantic image of India
underlining authenticity and cultural holism would give way to portrayals suggesting a
primitive cognition and an almost vegetative state of existence culminating in a post-tribal
society60. After Hegel had done away with the contemporaneous and supplementary co-
55 Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, 43.
56 See: J. Jeffrey Franklin, The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire (Ithaca, 2008).
57 Oldmeadow, Journeys East, 24–28.
58 Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, 60.
59 Inden, 53.
60 Inden, 71-72, 83.
12
existence of world nations Western and “Oriental” alike, affirmative Orientalism would have
to wait until the last quarter of the century to be able to haunt the Western public realm once
again in the form of Buddhism boom.
When Romantics had rhetorized about “Indian imagination”, what they meant had
certainly not been “primitive cognitive capabilities”. Similarly, when Schlegel had associated
China with Reason, what he meant had not been a quantitative superiority of the “cognitive
capabilities” of the Chinese, but rather “intellect” as but one of the four simultaneously
indispensable mental faculties. The Romantic “ordering-of-the-world” had been arranged as a
literal “concert of nations” if one ignores its outright lack of authenticity and denial of selfrepresentation
to the non-Westerner. In a similar vein, later affirmative orientalists like those
from the post-war counterculture had not equated the “Oriental” with the “irrational” but had
found in the Orient an alternative “rationality” or alternative ways of making sense of the
world, if not the objective scientific (or religious) truth as they had sometimes claimed to have
found itself. It had instead been their conservative opponents who had seen the Orient as an
abode of irrationality, intemperance as well as lack of civility and caricatured affirmative
orientalists similarly61. In his otherwise impartial account of the counterculture, even
Theodore Roszak can’t hide his excitement about the countercultural interest in Oriental
traditions for the insights it could potentially bring to the West, although he also warns of
sloppy appropriation – a topic I will deal with in the following:
But while a good deal of our contemporary youth culture takes off in the direction of strenuous
frenzy and simulated mindlessness, there also moves through the scene a very different and
much more mature conception of what it means to investigate the non-intellective
consciousness. This emerges primarily from the strong influence upon the young of Eastern
religion, with its heritage of gentle, tranquil, and thoroughly civilized contemplativeness. Here
we have a tradition that calls radically into question the validity of the scientific world view, the
supremacy of cerebral cognition, the value of technological prowess; but does so in the most
quiet and measured of tones, with humor, with tenderness, even with a deal of cunning
argumentation62.
1.2. The Post-War Counterculture and the Search for the “New Consciousness”
The post-war counterculture, like its predecessors, viewed certain Oriental traditions as the
embodiments of its longings and as alternative rationalities through which to make sense of
the world. The Western “ill” had this time been declared by Roszak to have been that of
Technocracy, and he would go as far as claiming this “ill” to have eluded conventional
61 Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, 198.
62 Cf. Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on a Technocratic Society and Its Youthful
Opposition, 82.
13
Western consciousness because Technocracy had been so embedded in Western everyday
language that it had practically become immune to critical scrutiny and objectification. It
similarly eluded all existing political jargon right- and left-wing alike63. At this point, it had
been almost inevitable for youths to turn elsewhere to make sense of their discontent and
Roszak even considered the American youths luckier than their European counterparts
because left-wing radicalism in the United States had been too weak that they could start a
new form of radicalism from scratch without having to waste their time to confront existing
orthodoxies64. Ginsberg himself had flirted with Marxism when he was first introduced to
Buddhist sutras by Jack Kerouac65.
To grasp and expose Technocracy, one needed first to get out of its confines. Roszak had
even likened the countercultural preoccupation with non-Western spiritualities to the Early
Christian movement taking root in Roman Empire’s margins and would express his
anticipation of a similar fate for 20th Century Western civilization (highlights by the author):
One can flippantly construe this exodus as the contemporary version of running off with the
circus; but the more apt parallel might be with the quest of third-century Christians (a similarly
scruffy, uncouth, and often half-mad lot) for escape from the corruptions of Hellenistic society:
it is much more a flight from than toward66.
It had initially indeed been much more a flight from than toward as attested by Kerouac’s
hallmark Beat manifesto, On the Road67. He would offer the plain experience of “being on the
road” as an antidote to sedentary assimilation into the rationale of mainstream society. “Being
on the road” stood for the search for a “pure” experience unmediated by any conventional
categories. This “pure” experience would be kept unnamed as the “it” searched after by the
protagonists of On the Road68. That unnamed “it” would soon be discovered by Kerouac in
the books he read about Zen Buddhism69, particularly in the tradition’s concept of “satori”70.
Impressed by perceived affinity to their ideas which they had hitherto been unable to “name”,
Beats would be quick to integrate Zen Buddhist terminology into their poetics celebrating
spontaneity and underclasses. The monumental work of “Beat Zen”, Kerouac’s “The Dharma
Bums”71, documented the duo’s acquaintance of Gary Snyder and Alan Watts in San
63 Cf. Roszak, 8.
64 Cf. Roszak, 4.
65 Oldmeadow, Journeys East, 252.
66 Cf. Roszak, 34.
67 Written in 1951, published in 1957.
68 Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail, 14.
69 Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on a Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition,
134–35.
70 Coleman, The New Buddhism, 62.
71 Written in 1956, published in 1958.
14
Francisco, both of whom had been experts on Buddhism by their differing backgrounds.
Snyder had not only been a leading poet of the “San Francisco Renaissance”; he also had a
profound interest in Asian religious, philosophical, and literary traditions and would go to
Japan in 1956 on a scholarship to receive a formal monastic education on Zen Buddhism for
ten years72. Alan Watts, on the other hand, was a young British writer on Oriental philosophies
who was then teaching at the city’s School of Asian Studies73.
For the most part, Beat Zen had also been a textual endeavour like their predecessors’
interpretations of Oriental traditions they had championed74. This initial textual encounter of
Beats with Buddhism in the form of Zen would be followed by an actual trip to the birthplace
of the creed and it had been this trip that would prove to be the turning point for a whole new
chapter of Western Orientalism in general. Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger who had arrived in
India from Japan by boat in January 1962 would meet there with Allen Ginsberg and Peter
Orlovsky in the following month, who both would not leave until May 1963. This trip had
especially proven a turning point in the sense that the “flight from” would finally turn into a
“flight toward”. The “empirical” India would have a profound influence, especially on Allen
Ginsberg as attested by his letters from there to Kerouac75, and through him also on the rest of
the counterculture’s “elite” and followers. Ginsberg exercised a profound influence on his
mostly young readership, among whom had for instance been Kermit Michael Riggs76, who
would arrive in India in the same year Ginsberg had left77 and leave the country as late as
197178 as metamorphosed into Bhagavan Das79.
Meanwhile, another “flight” was being explored in a less physical domain. In 1954, Aldous
Huxley published his “Doors of Perception” where he reflected upon his experiences with the
mind-altering substance of mescaline obtained from the peyote cactus growing in Mexico.
The experience had struck Huxley as a “shortcut” for obtaining a sense of the world that had
been wholly different from what had hitherto been presented by Western common sense as the
objective reality. Huxley would argue in his book that his experience with mescaline had been
the same as the one described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead (known as “Bardo Thodol” in
Tibetan, translated into English by Walter Evans-Wentz in 1927) and further argued that “it”
72 Oldmeadow, Journeys East, 55.
73 Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on a Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition,
131.
74 In an essay titled “Beat Zen, Square Zen and, Zen” published in the same year as The Dharma Bums, even
Alan Watts himself would bash the “Beat Zen” for its inauthenticity. See: Roszak, 136.
75 Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 369–70.
76 Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 198.
77 Das, 6.
78 Das, 187-188.
79 Servant of God, a name given to him by his Indian guru, Neem Karoli Baba.
15
had not been anything else, but the “mystical” experience commonly articulated in different
religious traditions80. In 1964 Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert, all Harvard
psychologists conducting research with psychedelics would take Huxley’s claim even a step
further and write “The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the
Dead”. Both “Doors of Perception”81 and “The Psychedelic Experience”82 would remain
influential books in the countercultural “canon”83.
Huxley’s bold claim to have discovered the “shortcut” to the mystical gave impulse to
debates among scholars of religion. In his 1957 work “Mysticism, Sacred and Profane”, R. C.
Zaehner would acknowledge that what Huxley had experienced did amount to a mystical
experience but argued that it had been only one form of mystical experience available out
there84. A 1960 work by Walter Stace would go further than Zaehner and declare that there
had been two types (“introvertive” and “extravertive”) of mystical experiences and the
various descriptions of the “mystical” in different traditions had been nothing but culturally
bound “post-experience” reflections on the experience85. A paradigm shift86 regarding the
scholarly understanding of “mysticism” would be led by a 1978 article by Steven Katz
criticizing both Stace’s and Zaehner’s claims and pleading for a “recognition of differences”
because: 1 - There could be no experience unbound by “culture”, 2- Different religious
traditions described very different experiences as “mystical” and had clear definitions of
mystical experience as well as clear instructions on how to attain it87.
The pre-Katzian academic “bias” of treating the supposedly “culture-bound” aspects of
religious traditions as irrelevant or tangential to the actual “essence” of religion can also be
observed to have been quite a strong stream within the countercultural thought. In an
interesting inversion of the affirmative orientalist discourse, such convictions could translate
80 Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘the Mystic East’ (London : New
York, 1999), 165.
81 The book is also the namesake of the psychedelic rock band “The Doors”. See: Oliver, Hinduism and the
1960s, 73.
82 A 1966 song by the Beatles in “raga rock” style, “Tomorrow Never Knows” had been influenced by “The
Psychedelic Experience”. See: Oliver, 64.; Tomorrow Never Knows - Remastered 2009, 1966,
https://open.spotify.com/intl-de/track/00oZhqZIQfL9P5CjOP6JsO.
83 Huxley had already been a proponent of the non-dualist Vedanta school of Indian philosophy and an affiliate
of the Vedanta Society of Southern California founded by Swami Prabhavananda in 1930, the third such branch
to be founded as an outcome of Swami Vivekananda’s efforts to spread Vedanta in the West upon his positive
reception in 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. In 1945, Huxley would also publish “The Perennial
Philosophy” where he would argue of a common truth to underlie all religious traditions and try to ground his
claim with myriad passages from scriptures of various traditions. See: Oldmeadow, Journeys East, 81. King,
Orientalism and Religion, 162–63.
84 King, Orientalism and Religion, 164.
85 King, 164–65.
86 King, 169.
87 Cf. Steven T. Katz, ‘Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism’, in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, ed.
Steven T. Katz (Oxford, 1978), 22--74; 25, 57, 62.
16
into “indifferent” or even “dismissive” attitudes in the face of the home cultures of traditions
valued by the counterculture. In such cases, such traditions would be reduced to otherwise
universally available “techniques” supposed to be only “better preserved” by the cultures in
question (thus also stressing the Oriental’s “primordiality” and Westerner’s “forgetfulness”,
locating both in a temporal rather than a spatial continuum).
I think such an attitude is best displayed in the writings of Gary Snyder, who displays
dismissive attitudes towards both Japanese and Indian cultures. He expresses his apathy -if
not outright antipathy- for both cultures and societies due to different reasons. His comparison
of both cultures at the end of his travelogue is as follows:
The public manners of Indians are much noisier and more argumentative than the Japanese too
(and Japanese public manners are lots worse than private manners). Dishonesty, cheating,
hostility, rudeness, loudness, thoughtlessness, etc., on all sides in India. Again perhaps part of
being a country overrun by so many aggressors, and full of so many groups constantly
confronting each other. Yet there is a kind of honesty in India which is ultimately lacking in
Japan; straightforwardness though rude, and a general refusal to play roles. (…) There’s nothing
phony there (even the phony holy men are really doing ascetic practices, really celibate, really
vegetarian; their phoniness is that their understanding may not be as great as people or their own
literature ascribes to them)88.
In a patronizing fashion rather unexpected from his countercultural background, he even
goes on to declare:
(…) They (Indians) don’t figure they have much to learn from the West outside of
engineering and science89.
Snyder is being consistent in such statements. In an essay titled “Why Tribe” in his 1969
collection of essays, Earth House Hold, he elaborates on a “discovery” of the counterculture
that the answer did not lay in contemporary Oriental societies that had also been corrupt in
their ways, but instead in the “Tribe” as the universal organizing principle of pre-civilized”
societies90:
In the course of these studies it became evident that the “truth” in Buddhism and Hinduism is
not dependent in any sense on Indian or Chinese culture; and that “India” and “China” —as
societies—are as burdensome to human beings as any others; perhaps more so. It became clear
that “Hinduism” and “Buddhism” as social institutions had long been accomplices of the State
in burdening and binding people, rather than serving to liberate them. Just like the other Great
Religions91.
88 Cf. Snyder, Passage through India, 96.
89 Cf. Snyder, 97.
90 Cf. Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold: Technical Notes & Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries, 17.
printing, New Directions Paperbooks 267 (New York, NY, 2007), 115-116.
91 Cf. Snyder, 114.
17
He then goes on to argue that all “progressive” strands (like Ch’an, Tantra or European
peasant witchcraft) collectively termed by him as “The Great Subculture” found across
various cultural traditions had been nothing but the remaining fragments of original tribal
wisdom92. This tribal wisdom was easily recallable by modern men and women, as it did not
lay somewhere “out there” but was hidden within every individual93. An intense study of
individual traditions was therefore not an absolute requirement. In fact:
The traditional cultures are in any case doomed, and rather than cling to their good aspects
hopelessly it should be remembered that whatever is or ever was in any other culture can be
reconstructed from the unconscious, through meditation94.
Allen Ginsberg’s unwillingness to take on the rigorous discipline required by the many
Hindu gurus he had met in India or his insistent questioning of the Dalai Lama on whether
meditation had been necessary while one could simply take LSD can be taken as other
examples of such an attitude. Joanne Kyger had seen the latter instance as yet another of the
myriad manifestations of Ginsberg’s “know-it-all” attitude and in her journal entry we also get
to find out more about Snyder’s “priorities”:
I was trying very hard to say witty things to him through the interpreter, but Allen Ginsberg kept
hogging the conversation by describing his experiments on drugs and asking the Dalai Lama if
he would like to take some magic mushroom pills and were his drug experiences of a religious
nature until Gary said really Allen the inside of your mind is just as boring and just the same as
everyone else's is it necessary to go on; and that little trauma was eased over by Gary and the
Dalai talking guru to guru like about which positions to take when doing meditation and how to
breathe and what to do with your hands, yes yes that's right says the Dalai Lama. (…) He (Allen
Ginsberg) came to India to find a spiritual teacher. But I think he actually believes he knows it
all, but just wishes he Felt better about it95.
Though it is also noteworthy that Ginsberg quoted Dalai Lama’s response in his dedication
of Indian Journals to him alongside many others:
Dedicated to — (…) the Dalai Lama who asked “If you take LSD can you see what’s in that
Briefcase?”96
Counterculture had taken off with a diagnosis of “Western ills” and stumbled upon Oriental
concepts which could initially be taken out of their contexts. However, the next chapter of
countercultural Orientalism would witness it distinguish itself from its predecessors by going
beyond merely textual engagement with the Orient. India would become the “testing field” of
Orientalist prejudgments and flaws up to that day whereas the “abstract” and the “universal”
92 Cf. Snyder, Earth House Hold, 115.
93 Cf. Snyder, Earth House Hold, 115.
94 Cf. Snyder, 92-93.
95 Cf. Kyger, The Japan and India Journals 1960-1964, 194.
96 Cf. Ginsberg, Indian Journals, March 1962-May 1963, 3.
18
would increasingly give way to the “tangible” and the “particular”. Ginsberg had visited India
to “become a saint”97 and although he had failed to do so, his consciousness had still been
transformed by the insights he had gained there. Curious to find out the “truth” behind his
LSD trips, Richard Alpert could think to himself by 1966 that he could at least give the
“Eastward” journey a try. Though he had also been aware that it might not have provided him
with the answers:
Tim had gone to India, Ralph had gone to India, Allen Ginsberg had gone to India. I checked
with everybody when they came back. There was Tim, being Tim and there was Ralph, being
Ralph, and there was Allen, being Allen—and I realized that they had all had lovely experiences
and seen a beautiful country and so on, but they were not finished looking for something98.
In a way, the 1970s would constitute a “landing” for the counterculture. Rigorous
experimentation would give way to more disciplined learning while common
misconceptions would be corrected by “Easterners” themselves. Many if not most of the
prominent figures of counterculture would eventually end up in the Naropa Institute in
Boulder, Colorado as students of the Tibetan lama Chögyam Trungpa99. This process of
“landing” or “settling down” is perhaps best exemplified by the depression gone through
by Richard Alpert following his aggressive experimentation with LSD. He would be
introduced to a saint named Neem Karoli Baba in India and eventually get metamorphosed
into Ram Dass or the “Servant of Rama”, the most influential of the countercultural “pop
gurus” ever:
In these few years we had gotten over the feeling that one experience was going to make you
enlightened forever. We saw that it wasn’t going to be that simple. And for five years I dealt
with the matter of “coming down.” The coming down matter is what led me to the next chapter
of this drama. Because after six year, I realized that no matter how ingenious my experimental
designs were, and how high I got, I came down. (…) And it was a terribly frustrating
experience, as if you came into the kingdom of heaven and you saw how it all was and you felt
these new states of awareness, and then you got cast out again, and after 2 or 300 times of this,
began to feel an extraordinary kind of depression set in—a very gentle depression that whatever
I knew still wasn’t enough100!
2. Homecoming of Orientalism: Counterculture in India
to Cummings, Why? — to literature, with a capital Me. Pound.
They never did see India — glad I got here I thought by road.
97 Cf. Ginsberg, 11.
98 Cf. Ram Dass, Remember, Now Be Here, Now Here Be, Now Be Nowhere, Now Be Here, Now Be Here, Ch.
"Environmental Changes".
99 Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 220.
100 Cf. Ram Dass, Remember, Now Be Here, Now Here Be, Now Be Nowhere, Now Be Here, Now Be Here, Ch.
"Coming Down".
19
Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals101
2.1.From Textualization to Transnational History
There had been a comparatively puny but regardless constant flux of seekers from the West to
the Indian Subcontinent at least since the “Buddhism boom” of the Late Victorian Period. The
Beats themselves had spent a fair share of their stay In India meeting Westerners who had
settled in the country and in some cases been followers of local spiritual movements102. One
such person of Western descent they had encountered had even been a spiritual leader herself:
Mirra Alfassa, known by her followers as “The Mother”. She had originally been one of the
many Western seekers who had made their way to the Subcontinent while it had still been
under British control (or respectively Portuguese and French in the case of the port colonies of
Goa and Pondicherry) and had succeeded her spiritual master Aurobindo Ghose as the leader
of his movement103104.
In the example of Alfassa and her followers of mixed ethnic origins, we see an unfolding
“transnational history”, the beginning of which can – in a very orthodox manner – be dated
back to the arrival of the founders of Theosophical Society, Helena P. Blavatsky, and Henry
S. Olcott, in Sri Lanka and their official “taking refuge” as Buddhists105 in 1880. A prominent
representative of Buddhism in Britain and the West during the first half of the 20th Century,
Edward Conze, would describe the significance of this event as follows:
Rather suddenly and unexpectedly [a] few members of the dominant race, white men and
women from Russia, America and England, Theosophists, appeared among Hindus and
Ceylonese to proclaim their admiration for the ancient wisdom of the East106.
Upon setting foot on the Subcontinent that had been the birthplace of the tradition their
movement had drawn its main inspiration from, and upon getting official recognition from
the Sri Lankan Buddhist community in addition to gaining many locals to their ranks,
Blavatsky and Olcott had moved the headquarters of Theosophical Society from New York
to the Southern Indian port city of Madras (also known as Chennai) in 1882107. The Madras
offshoot of the Theosophical Society kept playing an important role in the local cultural
101 Cf. Ginsberg, Indian Journals, March 1962-May 1963, 102.
102 Kyger, The Japan and India Journals 1960-1964, 159-160, 162, 169, 173.
103 Kyger, 158.
104 In 1968, just in time for countercultural Indomania, she would also lead the design of a whole utopian
settlement by the name of Auroville on the outskirts of Pondicherry (where Aurobindo’s movement had been
centred). See: Oliver, Hinduism and the 1960s, 110.
105 Buddhists declare that they have taken refuge in the Three Jewels, the Buddha, the Dharma (Doctrine) and the
Sangha (Community).
106 Cited in: Oldmeadow, Journeys East, 65.
107 Oldmeadow, 65.
20
scene by 1968 when its heydays had already been a memory of the past108. They trained
local youths and children to become professional Bharatanatyam and Kathakali
performers109 while Louis Malle was shooting his masterpiece “Phantom India”110.
However, almost all these pre-WWII makers of transnational history between the West
and the Subcontinent had been people of relatively elite backgrounds. The post-war
counterculture would be seminal in leading to making transnational history on a mass level
for the first time. But it would not have been possible, had the conditions not already been
met and a particularly important one had been the great diversification of ways of travel in
the post-war years. Sea travel, air travel and overland travel had all been at travellers’
disposal by the 1960s. Air travel can be assumed to have been the most revolutionary one
among these, as it had remarkably shortened distances and helped intensify transnational
interaction as a result.
Snyder, Kyger, Ginsberg and Orlovsky had all arrived in India by sea travel111 while
The Beatles had flown in112. Ram Dass and Bhagavan Das113, on the other hand, had both
entered the country from land114. In any case, the possibility of “flying back home” must
have provided a sense of security for many, and many overland travelers had also taken the
“shortcut” via plane instead of the long way home115. Louis Malle and his shooting crew
interview a French “hippie” duo as they stumbled upon them twice, once at the Konarak
Temple in Odisha, and then in Madras. While they both make extremely sympathetic
statements about India in their first interview, one of them had gotten fed up with the
108 It had been a gigantic network in its heydays, consisting by 1920 of over 1500 lodges and 45,000 members
worldwide. It had influential affiliates both among European Modernists like Kandinsky, Klee and Yeats, and
among the Indian National Movement like Gandhi himself. Annie Besant, who had assumed the leadership of
the movement in 1907 upon Olcott’s death, had herself even led the Indian National Congress -itself founded by
a Theosophist- and actively fought for India’s independence as a British woman among the ranks of Indians. A
loss of reputation had not least been the consequence of the confessions by Krishnamurti in 1929, who, as a
young Indian boy, had been “prophesized” to be a messianic figure and adopted by Society’s then leader Annie
Besant to be raised as a spiritual leader, but would later reject the role imposed on him. See: Oldmeadow, 66-69.
As a speaker for Indian philosophy, Krishnamurti would spend the rest of his life trying to educate people on the
dangers of blind indoctrination by an attachment to spiritual leaders and gurus. See: Oliver, Hinduism and the
1960s, 109-110.
109 Respectively a dance and a mime tradition both peculiar to Southern India.
110 ‘Phantom India’, Things Seen in Madras, 1969,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsGmgqyzfL8&list=PLGWCePdgnqHxg6dQJTSby5SmSLv28UnX2&index
=2. Accessed 16 May 2023, 27:47.
111 Snyder, Passage through India, 1, 15.; Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 368–69.
112 Harrison, I, Me, Mine, 53.
113 Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 7.
114 Ram Dass by a Land Rover and Bhagavan Das by a train to Amritsar. See: Ram Dass, Remember, Now Be
Here, Now Here Be, Now Be Nowhere, Now Be Here, Now Be Here, Ch. "Environmental Changes". Das, It’s
Here Now (Are You?, 7.
115 Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail, 206. Allen Ginsberg had also been among those who had flown to
Bangkok, Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and Tokyo respectively. He would visit Snyder and Kyger in Japan
before going back to the United States. See: Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 390–91.
21
country and been missing his home by the second one so he tells the director that he had
asked his parents in Paris to buy him his ticket for the flight back home116. Such
convenience must have not existed in the time of Alfassa and it must have surely made a
difference in the post-war counterculture.
However, the form of travel that deserves the most credit for its cultural impact had also
been the least comfortable one, overland travel. Commercial overland travel between
Britain and India had been possible earliest since 1957117 which as a matter of coincidence
also happens to be the year when Kerouac’s On the Road had come out. In its early years,
the opportunity had been inclined less toward those with recreational purposes and
responded rather to the needs of people such as South Asian immigrants as well as
Australians and New Zealanders in the UK118. Contrary to the Victorian Period when
South Asians living in Britain had been on a neglectable level and India had been a distant
colony in the eyes of the wider British public119, the 1950s and the 1960s had seen a
significant surge in South Asian immigration to the country, made particularly easy by
laws allowing immigration from Commonwealth nations until 1962120. As a result, by the
1960s large South Asian communities in Britain constituted a wholly independent source
for the British counterculture concerning the dissemination of concepts, practices, and
artefacts from the Subcontinent.
Bellmann argues in his essay that the “raga rock” style fusing Indian tunes and musical
techniques with the rock music of British Invasion bands had developed independently as
mere musical experimentation and an association of the style with countercultural themes
like meditation and drugs had not been the case in its early beginnings121. The development
of the style had not owed itself to an American countercultural influence but instead seems
to have been the result of a “direct” encounter with Indian music through South Asian
migrant communities living in Britain122. The Beatle George Harrison would be the central
figure in the introduction of Ravi Shankar and Indian Classical Music to countercultural
116 ‘Phantom India’, The Impossible Camera, 1969,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFGO8oL0RLk&t=207s, Accessed 16 May 2023, 38:52.
117 Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail, 11–12.
118 Gemie and Ireland, 12.
119 RICHARD T. SCHAEFER, ‘INDIANS IN GREAT BRITAIN’, International Review of Modern Sociology 6,
no. 2 (1976): 305–7.
120 RICHARD T. SCHAEFER, ‘INDIANS IN GREAT BRITAIN’, International Review of Modern Sociology 6,
no. 2 (1976): 305–27, 311, 317.
121 Cf. Bellman, ‘Indian Resonances in the British Invasion, 1965-1968’, 123–25.
122 Their manager had hired two Indian performers of sitar and tabla to accompany the band Yardbirds in their
first recording session of “Heart Full of Soul”. Band member Jim McCarty had later remarked upon recalling the
occasion that the performers must have been from an Indian restaurant where they had had lunch earlier. Cited
in: Bellman, 123–24.
22
audiences123. His overall interest in India had been preceded by an interest in Indian music
and even the first arrival of The Beatles in India would be for Harrison to buy a sitar. The
recount of this trip in Harrison’s “I, me, mine” is also a reminder of the importance of air
travel in intensifying transnational interaction in the post-war context (highlights by me):
The funny thing about that trip (to Philippines) is that when we planned it I had decided that I
was going to go to India on the way back, to have a look and to pick up a sitar. Neil said he
would come with me. I had bought earlier a crummy sitar in London and played the Norwegian
Wood. That wasn’t the point. I did want to go to India124.
As can be seen, the story of countercultural Indomania had also been a “transnational”
history in the sense that it relied on a complex web of influences coming through various
actors from different countries not limited to the United States and India. This web had
largely been shaped by post-war geopolitics. The legacy of British colonialism and
transnational movements such as Theosophy had turned India and Sri Lanka into relatively
“accessible” countries for Westerners. Not only did many Indians speak English, but
Western visitors could also rely on networks formed through earlier contacts to
accommodate their needs as seen in the example of Beats’ journey. Moreover, India had
also been an accessible country for Westerners in the political context of the Cold War125.
The importance of geopolitics in the formation of webs of influence on which the
counterculture had relied is perhaps best displayed by Bhagavan Das’ failure to enter
Tibet:
SURYA AND I decided to walk to Tibet. We'd heard the Chinese were building a new road
through the mountain passes. So we headed for Tibet with our clothes and our blankets. During
the entire trip we slept outside. We were so cold that we barely slept—we just shivered. We had
been begging for food all along the way. Close to our destination we came up over a bend in the
road. We could see the whole night sky lit up with lights like a city, and we were both thinking,
"Oh boy, tea! Biscuits! Food!" Then we came over the hill and there was a huge, fifty-foot-high
picture of Mao Tse-tung, with hundreds of lightbulbs around it and generators running the show
in the middle of the mountains. (…) The Chinese military informed us in a very serious tone
that we shouldn't go any farther. They gave us tea, and we again slept outside. I didn't get to go
to Tibet, but I didn't mind because I had God126.
123 ‘I Was Lucky to Have Been Born in a Musical Family: Ravi Shankar’, India Today, accessed 11 April 2023,
https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/interview/story/19800430-ravi-shankar-jawaharlal-nehru-george-harrisonallen-
ginsberg-timothy-leary-806624-2014-02-01.
124 Cf. Harrison, I, Me, Mine, 52.
125 An accessibility akin to Japan’s, which had been “opened” to both American influence and American
travellers as a consequence of WWII. This had also been the case with countries through which the so-called
“Hippie Trail” passed through: Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. All these countries along the route
connecting Europe to India were similarly being ruled by “Western-friendly” regimes throughout the period, and
both Iran and Afghanistan would become virtually inaccessible by the 1980s and remain largely “unattractive”
for Westerners until today.
126 Cf. Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 95–96.
23
It is also noteworthy that Bhagavan Das conceived the idea of going to India when he
had heard some “Indian music” during his first “pot” experience in London127. Britain had
been the beginning of the so-called “hippie trail” he must have taken, which connected
Europe to India and Nepal by passing through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
The “trail” had materialized Kerouac’s “teaching” in “On the Road” and his anticipation of
a “rucksack revolution”128. It had now been a defined road with a particular physical
destination, India129. The Kerouacian “philosophy” behind the formation of the hippie trail
is attested by the very fact that the “trailers” had almost strictly distinguished themselves
from the “tourists” of their day130. Theirs had been the attempt at an “unmediated” and
“authentic” experience of India and the other countries on the way. This also suggested the
making of transnational history by the means of rather “spontaneous” indulgence in local
surroundings, practices, and lifestyles - in many cases leading to memorable friendships
with the locals131. The hippie trail, as Gemie and Ireland also argue, can also be seen as
analogous to earlier trends such as Alpinism132, but on the contrary to “Nature” or the
“Alps”, India had been a historically particular space “alive” with inhabitants capable of
self-representation as well as confrontation, manipulation, and re-orientation of the selfseeking
Western subject.
India’s rise to prominence as the prime destination for countercultural “pilgrimage”
owed itself to the direct influence of individual trendsetting journeys133 and the first such
journey had been that of the Beats. By the so-called “Summer of Love” of 1967, Indian
concepts, practices and artefacts were to be found everywhere in counterculture’s epicentre
127 Das, 16–17.
128 Johnston, ‘Dharma Bums: The Beat Generation and the Making of Countercultural Pilgrimage’, 175.
129 Although Afghanistan and Nepal had also been attractive “destinations” in their own right.
130 Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail, 25.
131 Gemie and Ireland, 121–23.
132 Cf. Gemie and Ireland, 11.
133 Though India had not turned into “the” destination of the Counterculture in an instant. In 1954, the famous
Beat poet William Burroughs had for instance not moved to India or another Asian country but to Morocco,
which had also been the original “beatnik” destination preceding the “hippie trail” countries as well as existing
simultaneously with them. See: Oliver, Hinduism and the 1960s, 10. Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail, 9-10.
Mexico had also been another destination, not least due to the popularity of a mind-altering mushroom that had
become popular. See: ‘Hippies Flocking to. Mexico for Mushroom “Trips”’, The New York Times, 23 July 1970,
sec. Archives, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/23/archives/hippies-flocking-to-mexico-for-mushroomtrips.
html. Japan would attract the seekers of the “Zen boom” of the 1970s but would well develop into a
countercultural destination after Snyder’s example, who would also assist the semination of a Japanese
countercultural community himself – yet another example of the movement’s utterly “transnational” character.
See: Gary Snyder and William Scott McLean, The Real Work: Interviews & Talks, 1964-1979 (New York, 1980),
7-14. Kermit Michael Riggs, now Bhagavan Das, would also visit Japan upon his return to the United States
from India with the hope of meeting Snyder and ending up in one of the communes of that Japanese
countercultural community instead (where other Westerners had also been to find). See: Das, It’s Here Now (Are
You?), 190–92.
24
San Francisco134. Ginsberg’s role both as an India returnee and a charismatic youth leader
would be central to this process. His sweeping influence on broader audiences had also
been attested by Roszak as follows:
It is, at the very least, a fascinating Odyssey of the contemporary spirit that takes a young
Jewish poet from Paterson, New Jersey, to the banks of the Ganges in order to make of him
America's greatest Hindu guru. (…) Even more important is the social fact: Ginsberg the
mantra-chanting Hindu does not finish as an isolated eccentricy but rather as one of the
foremost spokesmen of our younger generation. Following Ginsberg, the young don cowbells,
tuck flowers behind their ears, and listen entranced to the chants. And through these attentive
listeners Ginsberg claims a greater audience among our dissenting youth than any Christian or
Jewish clergyman could hope to reach or stir135.
Ginsberg is particularly credited with spreading the practice of mantra-chanting and
popularizing India as a country where “drugs” and “religion” could go together136 – a
coupling hitherto unseen in the West. The basis for this latter conclusion had been his
encounter with ganja137-smoking sadhus138 in Calcutta. Contrasting Stephens’ pessimistic
assertion that a “commodification” of India had been the consequence of these “journeys”,
Chandarlapaty views the process, in the case of Ginsberg, instead as one of active
“learning” (highlights by me):
India is both a modern “waste land” and an earned metaphor for historical-political
reorganizations of modern man’s ethical possibility. India is not an escapist paradise that faces
total annihilation, as did Kerouac’s Mexico, but a continuous site of learned cognition and mass
proselytization for hipsters back in America. (…) Yet hippie critique, ethics, and social
performativity all appear to stem from his unique and nuanced encounter with India, and his
approval of her vast and complete social independence from American materialism139.
The other “trendsetting” journeys would be those of The Beatles (1968) and Richard
Alpert (1967). The Beatles’ highly publicized appearance in Rishikesh as students of
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi must have helped make India further attractive to Western youths
who would go on to travel along the hippie trail in mass numbers in the years to follow140.
By the 1970s, there already were several commercial bus companies that had been
designed to operate along the trail and cater for the demand of people ranging from young
134 Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism, 48–49.
135 Cf. Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on a Technocratic Society and Its Youthful
Opposition, 138.
136As an example, see: Harry Monroe, ‘Bom Bom Mahadev - A Mantra for Marijuana’, The City of San
Francisco Oracle, February 1967.
137 Hindi for marijuana.
138 Wandering Hindu ascetics who renounce mundane duties to dedicate their lives to “sadhana”, spiritual
practice. They are provided for by local communities in exchange for their spiritual guidance.
139 Cf. Chandarlapaty, 137.
140 Oliver, Hinduism and the 1960s, 144. The band had also been influential in “hippie” fashion by popularizing
Indian clothes and fabrics. See: Oliver, 63.
25
dropouts to newlyweds and retirees who wished to live through the “experience”141.
Richard Alpert, on the other hand, had already been famous for his LSD experiments with
Timothy Leary and his transformation from a successful but disillusioned Harvard
psychology professor into a “guru” had made India even more interesting, especially to
people attracted to the idea of spiritual enlightenment. Despite the request of his Indian
guru Neem Karoli Baba that he not disclose his whereabouts to anyone back in the
States142, many Westerners would still manage to find their way into Neem Karoli Baba’s
ashram to become his disciples. Jeffrey Kagel, who is now a famous kirtan143 performer by
the name of Krishna Das (Servant of Krishna) had been one of such people who had hit the
way to India in 1970 after Alpert’s pioneering example and witnessed many others doing
the same:
After some time, more Westerners arrived. The “Journey to the East” was a popular adventure
in those days, and the Westerners who found their way to Maharaj-ji came from all parts of
America and various European countries. People came and went according to their individual
desires and visa requirements. In the early days, there were maybe 20 or 25 of us staying at the
hotel in Nainital at any given time (later, in other settings, the group of Westerners almost
doubled)144.
People like Ram Dass, Bhagavan Das and Krishna Das had been able to assert
considerable influence within the countercultural milieu as people who had not only made
the countercultural “pilgrimage” to India but also made “discoveries” of local “scenes” (in
a sense almost reminiscent of Vasco de Gama of the 15th Century) and possibly also made
appearances as “gurus” upon their return. The countercultural relationship with India can
indeed be seen as a process of active “learning”, but this process of learning would also
have the simultaneous function of reorganizing the power hierarchies at home. Thus, it had
not only been the “knowledge” but also social, cultural, and symbolic capital in the
Bourdieusian sense that the Western seekers had harnessed from India. I will deal with this
aspect of countercultural Indomania in the following.
2.2.Swamis and Pop Gurus
When Bhagavan Das made his way back to the States in 1971 after spending many years in
India and Nepal, he had already turned into a celebrity thanks to the publication of “Be Here
Now” by Ram Dass145, where the latter had introduced him as the American “yogi” who had
141 Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail, 73, 111–14.
142 Das, Chants of a Lifetime, 19.
143 Traditional Hindu chants praising gods.
144 Cf. Das, Chants of a Lifetime, 31.
145 Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 195.
26
initiated him and eventually taken him to his guru Neem Karoli Baba146. Bhagavan Das had
initially been overwhelmed by all the attention he had received but would soon begin to enjoy
all the rewards of his fame. He would get to drive a Mercedes and live in nice dwellings
although he did not have a regular job, he would get to befriend many countercultural
“celebrities” like Alan Watts and Allen Ginsberg147 (whose writings had been an influence on
him before he had made his journey to India), make a deal with Jimi Hendrix’s manager to
turn him into a rockstar148, tour the country to make stage appearances in countercultural
gatherings and have almost limitless access to sex149.
Ram Dass, on the other hand, would be much less hesitant to build a career out of his
transformation and go on to set up a hermitage in an estate owned by his father in New
Hampshire. He would regularly receive seekers, publish books as well as organize lectures
and retreats150. A New York Times interview from 1977 reveals that his material success as a
pioneering American guru had well surpassed his past one as a Harvard psychologist when he
had also been financially quite well-off:
Very much in tune with the times, Ram Dass had turned himself into a kind of psychicspiritual
Whole Earth Catalog in the flesh. By 1975 he was traveling with a road manager and a group of
backup musicians for the chanting and the holy songs: “Things got so tight I had to hire a
booking agent to schedule it all,” he told me. (Ram Dass says that lecturing to 6,000 people at
the Masonic Hall, in Los Angeles, and charging $3 a head, he could net $10,000 in one night.
Most of his earnings go to the Hanuman Foundation, which supports or at least seeds various of
his projects, such as teaching meditation and yoga in the prisons via cassette tapes. “My
personal living expenses, on which I pay taxes, come to about $10,000 a year,”151
Whereas the Western “guru” had not initially asked for the rewards but enjoyed them
regardless in the first example, the “rewards” enjoyed by the second guru had been the
“harvest” of his conscious efforts. Although it is important not to be quick to attribute a
Weberian “practical rationality” to people like Ram Dass and Bhagavan Das who had
claimed to have had intense religious experiences152, as King points out, it is different to
point out at religion as nothing but an instrument of power relations and to acknowledge
146 Cf. Ram Dass, Remember, Now Be Here, Now Here Be, Now Be Nowhere, Now Be Here, Now Be Here, Ch.
"Bhagwan Dass".
147 Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 197–201.
148 The latter would die in a plane crash before they could realize their deal. Das, 203.
149 Das, 224–25.
150 Colette Dowling, ‘CONFESSIONS OF AN AMERICAN GURU’, The New York Times, 4 December 1977,
sec. Archives, Accessed 12 May 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/04/archives/confessions-of-anamerican-
guru-ram-dass.html.
151 Dowling.
152 A similar case is made by Oldmeadow regarding the Orientalism debate and Western adherents of Oriental
religious traditions. He underlines that religious phenomena shall be taken as sui generis. Cf. Oldmeadow,
Journeys East, 15.
27
that religion is a field where power relations can be found operating153. It is therefore not
the “sincerity” of Western gurus that I put under scrutiny when I point out that “politics”
had always been at play in their relationship with each other and with their followers as
well as with the broader counterculture. One such example can be taken from the remarks
made by Bhagavan Das concerning the supposed “jealousy” between him and Ram Dass:
There was this jealousy between him and me because of my spiritual relationship with the
Divine Mother. He could never do Divine Mother because, being bisexual, he was sexually
conflicted. But he felt now that he was going to get the real, secret, super-duper tantric teachings
that I hadn't given him. Hari Das Baba and I had given him only the kindergarten stuff. Now he
was in graduate school, and he was excited!154
Having been to India and having had an Indian guru functioned as symbolic capital in
the case of Bhagavan Das and Ram Dass. Additionally, their connections to fellow
ashramites and their Indian guru amounted to social capital155, while the knowledge they
had acquired there –like the “real, secret, super-duper tantric teachings” mentioned by
Bhagavan Das– functioned as “cultural capital” that could be monetized. However, the
descriptions of Western gurus concerning their relationships with their Indian gurus, at
least in the case of Neem Karoli Baba and his disciples, do not suggest the slightest bit of
an “ulterior motive” underlying their immense enchantment by him. This enchantment is
translated by our three Western gurus into a “love” relationship “unequal” at the expense of
their own “power”. This power imbalance was particularly underlined by Neem Karoli
Baba’s supposed ability to read through their minds156, which leaves them in a state of total
non-resistance. Krishna Das remarks:
Maharaj-ji was always pushing our buttons and stretching our emotions, bringing everything to
the surface and then dissolving it in love. Even so, there was never any feeling of being
manipulated, no power tripping. Everything he did was out of love and compassion and
designed to help us be free of the things that caused us pain. I was sitting there looking at all of
the love in the universe: the light, the beauty, the love, the sweetness . . . everything was right
there. He was so irresistible. All of the beauty of the universe was wrapped up in that blanket157.
The attachment to the Indian guru had then not been a malicious posture instrumentalized
in the quest to acquire knowledge, but an intimate relationship expressed in the language of
unconditional familial love. This would also imply a relationship with India as a space that
153 Cf. King, Orientalism and Religion, 1.
154 Cf. Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 231–32.
155 For instance Krishna Das was only accepted to Neem Karoli Baba’s ashram because a fellow ashramite of
Ram Dass had convinced Neem Karoli Baba (otherwise unwilling to have any further American disciples) out of
his willingness to help a friend of Ram Dass. Cf. Das, Chants of a Lifetime, 19–22.
156 Das, 30.; Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 101.
157 Cf. Das, Chants of a Lifetime, 41.
28
was not being mediated by “intellect”. Means of “transnational interaction” could well be
transformed from the “intellectual” to the “emotional” and cultural boundaries would cease
to exist in the unifying experience of love:
SO AT THE Kumbha Mela158 I got my spiritual dad and mom. I got Dad first, Neem Karoli
Baba, when he initiated me. Mom, Anandamayi Ma, was the living embodiment of my deity, the
Divine Mother159.
In the relationship between the Indian guru and the American disciple, the deeds of the
latter could also translate into those of a naughty child awaiting the compassionate father to
either discipline or tolerate him/her. The perception of this relationship as such also
functioned as the excuse for the Western disciple’s lack of spirituality and cultural
inclination towards materialism:
I didn't know that Maharaji had purposely brought me to Major Rikki to show me my shadow
side, because he knew in time I'd drink, take drugs, and have lots of sex if given the chance. I
was an American, not an Indian. To become a part of the American culture again was my karma.
But could I maintain my devotion, actualize tantra, after I returned to the material world?
Maharaji said, "You're ready. You can't become any more of an Indian. Be devoted from
America."160
Overall, the authority of the guru could “haunt” the countercultural “disciple-hood”
back in the United States as well since many Indian gurus would make their way to the
West themselves. An interview with Chinmayananda Saraswati published in the October
1967 issue of the countercultural underground magazine The City of San Francisco Oracle
suggests that the conventions of these traditions would be soon to strike back at what had
initially been overly “liberal” interpretations of them by countercultural Westerners who
had especially not been willing to strictly abide by prescriptions of celibacy or sobriety.
Chinmayananda is subjected to an insistent line of questioning on the value of the body
and senses by the countercultural interviewer. The most striking of Chinmayananda’s
answers, in my opinion, is the one for a remark from the interviewer regarding the
“virtues” of drugs:
Oracle: You see we don’t consider it a danger because what we see from it is people getting
interested in spiritual subjects, dancing more, singing more, learning things more, reading more,
we see people dressing more colorfully, smiling more, apparently loving more because they
have been taking this drug which had opened up an experience or a vision to them.
158 A Hindu festival celebrated every 6 or 12 years with a crowded gathering of wandering ascetics (sadhus) from
around India.
159 Cf. Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 63.
160 Cf. Das, 113–14.
29
Chinmaya: You mean to say the saints and the sages were dancing with each other? Which saint
and which climate condition or religion have been wearing such colored clothes, please. Now,
which religion says that the saints, sages and spiritual seekers must hug each other? Do you
know that my teacher never allows his students even to touch each other. Even when they go
near each other he says “Why are you rubbing each other. That is a sense pleasure—don’t!” In
the cold and snowy peaks of the Himalayas we were not allowed to go near a fire he says:
“Sitting near a fire is a sensuous enjoyment—don’t allow it—remain in a blanket.” I will not
consider the present wave of apparent love, tenderness, affection as marks of spirituality. I will
not consider the new tendency of more dance and more laughter as an expression of the spiritual
unfolding. The colorful dressing I will not consider it. (…)161
Contrary to the widespread assumption, spirituality and meditation had in many cases
been not the accompaniment but the replacement of drugs. This had for instance been the
case with The Beatles who had decided to quit drugs and try the Transcendental Meditation
of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi following their attendance at a talk of the latter at a London
hotel in 1967162. Promoting meditation as a replacement for drug dependence had in turn
constituted the backbone of the PR campaign of Maharishi, who, unlike Neem Karoli
Baba, had actively been seeking out Western seekers to proselytize and even theorized his
meditation as the “scientifically grounded” gateway to the world peace longed by the
counterculture. A 1968 promotional book by the name of “Maharishi, The Guru: An
International Symposium” includes eighteen chapters comprised of essays and reports on
the impact of Transcendental Meditation as well as interviews with Maharishi and The
Beatles. The nineteenth chapter to be found is an essay by Maharishi named “Toward
World Peace”. Just behind the cover of the book, on the other hand, is a page that reads
(highlights by me):
BEYOND POT AND LSD is the title of a chapter in this fascinating book. In it, the California
hippies tell how they gave up drugs in favor of Maharishi’s non-drug turn-on, a trend that can be
seen in more and more of the psychedelic generation – and among men and women from all
walks of life – as Maharishi tours the U.S. with his message of spiritual regeneration. (…)
Maharishi teaches a simple modern technique taken from ancient practice of meditation,
especially adapted to the jet age. He believes that if only ten percent of mankind would practice
Transcendental Meditation, permanent world peace would be assured163.
Maharishi’s pseudo-scientific discourse had been given great publicity by The Beatles who
would spend February 1968 in his ashram in Rishikesh. Though the case of Maharishi and his
followers stands in marked contrast to that of Neem Karoli Baba and his Western disciples.
Whereas these had claimed to have had emotionally intense personal relationships with their
161 Cf. ‘Chinmayananda’, The City of San Francisco Oracle, October 1967, 7.
162 Oliver, Hinduism and the 1960s, 63.
163 Cf. Martin Ebon, Maharishi, the Guru; an International Symposium (New York, 1968),
http://archive.org/details/maharishiguruint00ebon, backcover.
30
guru who had barely even bothered to evangelize them164, the focus had rather been on a
secularized “technique” or “theory” that could be grasped intellectually in the case of
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and many other gurus. At around just the same time, in 1968, an
Indian academic by the name of Eknath Easwaran who had arrived in the West had recently
begun offering a meditation course at the University of California, Berkeley on what he had
termed “Passage Meditation”165. Also in the same year, the Cultural Integration Fellowship
founded by Haridas Chaudhuri, a disciple of Aurobindo Ghose, would become the California
Institute of Asian Studies which would later be renamed as the California Institute of Integral
Studies dedicated to the study of Ghose’s “Integral Yoga”. Chaudhuri had initially been
suggested by Ghose to Alan Watts and Steven Spiegelberg, a Stanford professor, who had
been willing to establish a higher education institution devoted to the study of Asian religions
in 1950166. As can be seen, in many of these cases, the evangelical pursuits of Indian gurus
had intersected with or been deliberately reframed to match Western expectations167.
However, alongside these figures who had “approved” of the “secular application” of
practices otherwise embedded in Indian spiritual traditions, there had also been the case of
Ravi Shankar, who had been a bit sceptical of the same when it came to Indian Classical
Music. He had already been a globally famous sitar performer168 before his introduction to
countercultural audiences through his friendship with George Harrison. Shankar would
repeatedly express his irritation at the association of sitar tune with sex and drugs in Western
pop culture169170. In a 2012 interview, he would recall the unease he had felt on stage at
various hippie gatherings as well as his initial regret for having been “made famous” by
Harrison:
(…) And then what happened was that I became a pop star all of a sudden. All young people,
bearded, long hair, wearing beads and not normal. They would behave like Naga sanyasis if
they were permitted. And I was not happy at all. I would tell George, "What have you done?"
And I started speaking out. And then Montreal Pop Festival was the first place where I had this
platform. They wanted me to play between The Who and another pop group. I said no, I am not
164 Das, Chants of a Lifetime, 32–33.
165 Oliver, Hinduism and the 1960s, 163.
166 Oliver, 110- 111.
167 B.K.S. Iyengar who had written the influential book Light On Yoga (1966) and Swami Rama who had
founded the Himalayan Institute for Yoga Science and Philosophy (1971) are other important Indian figures who
preached a “secularized” yoga to Western audiences in this period. Oliver, 138, 162.
168 Made a duet with violinist Yehudi Menuhin in 1966 and influenced the jazzist John Coltrane to the extent that
the latter would name his son “Ravi”, who would also go on to become one of the prominent performers of the
jazz – Indian fusion like his mother Alice Coltrane, aka Swamini Turiyasangitananda, a disciple of Swami
Satchidananda who is famous for his opening of the Woodstock Festival in 1969. Clements, ‘John Coltrane and
the Integration of Indian Concepts in Jazz Improvisation’, 165–66.
169 Cf. Ravi Shankar on The Sitar’s Association With Drugs | The Dick Cavett Show, 2019, accessed 17 May
2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HRYbPVOMWY, 0:28.
170 Cf. ‘I Was Lucky to Have Been Born in a Musical Family’.
31
going to play. Because I saw them kicking the instruments, burning the guitars and doing
obscene things171.
But Shankar must have still believed in genuine transcultural exchange since he also
tells in the same interview that he had deliberately tried to make Indian music “intelligible”
to unfamiliar Western audiences even though it had been an endeavour leading to
accusations by his colleagues that he was “distorting” the music172.
Overall, countercultural Westerners had interacted with their Indian gurus (or “tutor” in
the sense of Harrison and Shankar) and their teachings both through emotion and intellect
depending on the context. But what about their relationships with India as a country or a
historically particular space? I will embark on an investigation of this question in the
following.
3. Scent of India
Engine drones like a tamboura
Passage to India on LSD airlines
Temporary flight of ecstatic insanity
into its own glittering terminals pulsing with light
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Temporary Flight173
3.1.Attuning to India’s Rhythm
In his influential work “Imagining India”, Ronald Inden claims the “Indological discourse” to
have substantialized India by basing every understanding of it on four supposed “pillars” of
Indian civilization: caste system, Hinduism, village, and divine kingship174. All these pillars,
Inden argues, helped an essentialistic image of India to prevail both in scholarly and lay
imagination, ultimately leading to a lack of recognition for the Indian agency175. He
additionally claims the tropes of “jungle” and “sponge” to be central to the Indological
discourse. Both tropes refer to the “ability” of India to absorb outside input and render it
dormant in its numbing “feminine” rhythm176. The image of India one is left with at the end of
the day is one that includes suggestions of an apathetic “vegetative” state of existence177, a
“feminine” imaginativeness178 as well as a “jungle-like” cohabitation of components not
171 Cf. ‘“At Woodstock, Who Was Listening to Music? They Were All Stoned” - Indian Express’, accessed 11
April 2023, http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/-at-woodstock-who-was-listening-to-music--they-were-allstoned-/
553737/0.
172 Cf. ‘“At Woodstock, Who Was Listening to Music? They Were All Stoned” - Indian Express’.
173 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, ‘Temporary Flight’, The City of San Francisco Oracle, October 1967.
174 Cf. Inden, Imagining India, 4–5.
175 Cf. Inden, 5.
176 Cf. Inden, 86.
177 Cf. Inden, 116.
178 Cf. Inden, 88.
32
leading to a dialectic process but to a fixed and “disorderly” plurality of parallel
communities179. Despite all their engagement with “empirical” India at the expense of a
“textual” one, countercultural Indophiles had also reproduced these tropes, but more
distinctively in an “affirmative” fashion.
I have already argued that the counterculture had conceived of its Technocratic enemy as
the child of industrialization that had not been properly scrutinized by any of the major
political ideologies in the context of the Cold War. The counterculture valued the “tribal” or
the “primordial” over the “modern” and tended to view industrialization or “modernization”
as a deviation akin to “forgetting” rather than as progress. In their understanding, this process
had been nothing but one of gradually increased control, limitation, and mechanization at the
expense of an organic or holistic life experience that would have allowed humans to fulfil
their natural potential180. Against this background, the counterculture could view the “journey
to India” as a “flight” leading to freedom from the yoke of Technocracy. India’s lack of
organization and centralization as well as its perceived rejection of “material” progress in
favour of a “spiritual” one181 had proven to be the perfect match for this pursuit. “Indological”
narratives related to these notions had frequently been used by Snyder to express his
admiration for India (highlights by me):
I honor India for many things: those neolithic cattle breeders who sang daily songs of love to
God and Cow, as a family, and whose singing is echoed even today in the recitation of the Vedas
and the sutra-chanting of Los Angeles and Japan. The finest love poetry and love sculpture on
earth. Exhaustive meditations on mind and evocation of all the archetypes and images. Peerless
music and dance. But most, the spectacle of a high civilization that accomplished art, literature
and ceremony without imposing a narrow version of itself on every tribe and village.
Civilization without centralization or monoculture182.
In many countercultural recounts of experiences in (and of) India, “America” as a
historical and political entity seems to be much more present than India as such and the latter
often seems to function as nothing but an idealized destination of flight. Bhagavan Das draws
a line between America and India by declaring the former “Karma Bhumi” (Land of Action)
179 Cf. Inden, 179, 184.
180 A perfect expression for the sentiment that the “progress” had actually been “dehumanization” is found in the
lyrics of a 1969 song called “In The Year 2525”180 by Zager and Evans: In the year 2525, if man is still alive / If
woman can survive, they may find / In the year 3535 /Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies/ Everything
you think, do and say / Is in the pill you took today (…) In the year 9595 / I'm kinda wonderin' if man is gonna
be alive /He's taken everything this old earth can give /And he ain't put back nothing. In the Year 2525 (Exordium
& Terminus), 1969, https://open.spotify.com/track/5UVsbUV0Kh033cqsZ5sLQi. The song notably goes in the
same direction as the two hallmark dystopic novels both written after WWII: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and
Huxley’s Brave New World. It is no coincidence that the latter had also been a seminal figure in the
counterculture.
181 ‘Chinmayananda’, 8.
182 Cf. Snyder, Passage through India, x.
33
and the latter “Dharma Bhumi” (Land of Religion)183. In a letter from India, Ginsberg tells
Kerouac he had no idea how much “gentleness” he had been missing back in the
“Machineryland”184 and his Journals are packed with poetry pieces that ridicule America and
its politics185 whereas India rarely pops up as a political entity except when Ginsberg is
stopped by the Indian police for a few consecutive times. After he is reminded that the
increased police controls had been due to the recent Himalayan crisis, Ginsberg would ask
himself whether India may have been “changing already”186.
In this context, India functioned as an isolated space that almost had its own rules of
physics – a “wonderland”187 if one applies the term used by Flora188. Forms mould and got
distorted in this wonderland just like they would have in a jungle. Even India’s perceived
“squalor” had been rendered into an aesthetic that stood witness less to the country’s problem
of wealth inequality and widespread poverty and more to a supposed Indian essence. India’s
crowds, squalor and various kinds of “bizarre” sights bombarded the senses to the point that
they were no longer supposed to be made sense of through intellect at all. Such is India in
Ginsberg’s Journals throughout. He is almost always intoxicated with drugs while touring the
country and the sights and smells just come and go as do feelings and thoughts. Journal
entries are scattered between poetry sketches, records of dreams and notes on the itinerary.
Reality gets almost indistinguishable from dreams or hallucinations. After all, India stands for
freedom from the yoke of Technocracy and not least this freedom manifests itself in the
toleration and widespread consumption of various natural drugs in settings unimaginable in
the West. Ginsberg had shared smokes with young Indians in the streets but more memorably
with sadhus on a Calcutta ghat at the sight of a burning corpse:
The lady in Puri on the sands, carried round & round the wood pyre, a meager one so they lay
her face down sleeping on her arm extended out of the broken wood bed pile — and the fire
begins crackling under her chest & head — hair burning — by the big oceanside near the local
beach — a few dhoti’d saddhus plain looking workers sitting in wall-shade talking & smoking
— red pipes — we lit ganja-cigarettes & smoked189.
The perceived adjacency of life and death, like that of dream and reality, had also been
central to India’s construction as an isolated space with its own rules and rhythm akin to the
183 Cf. Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 187.
184 Cited in: Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 378.
185 For an example by the name of “H*Y*M*N* T*O* U*S*”, see: Ginsberg, Indian Journals, March 1962-May
1963, 16-20.
186 Cf. Ginsberg, 107.
187 India’s perception as a “wonderland” is further underlined by the “colorful” idols and spectacles of Hinduism.
Ginsberg had called it “a cartoon religion with Disney gods”. Cf. Ginsberg, 64.
188 Flora, ‘India as a Wonderland: International Outlook and Counterculture’.
189 Cf. Ginsberg, Indian Journals, March 1962-May 1963, 113.
34
hidden Himalayan paradise of Shangri-La in James Hilton’s best-selling novel “The Lost
Horizon” where Tibetan monks had discovered immortality. The cremation rituals of Hindus
had found themselves in almost all Western portrayals of India from the period and been
presented as a spectacle to Western eyes that were used to the artificial compartmentalization
of the otherwise holistic phenomenon of life. Just like Ginsberg had shared smokes with
sadhus, Bhagavan Das would similarly meditate for more than ten days in front of funeral
pyres to face Kali, the goddess of death and destruction190. Pasolini’s most memorable
experience in India similarly included an immersion in the local cremation rituals in a fashion
unimaginable during the observance of Western funerary rituals:
Since the air is cold Moravia and I instinctively approach the pyres, and as we approach we
soon realize that we have the pleasant sensation of people who stand around a winter fire, with
their fingers numbed, and who enjoy standing there, together with a group of casual friends, on
whose faces, on whose clothes, the flame placidly paints its laboured agony. And so, comforted
by the warmth, we look from close up at the poor dead who burn there without upsetting
anyone. Never, in any place, at any time, in any act, during our whole Indian stay, did we feel
such a profound sense of communion, of tranquility and -almost- of joy191.
Animals had also featured quite often in the Western portrayals of the country (and
underlined a “naturgemäß” existence) as well. Vultures and crows both of which
symbolized death had been the most prominent ones among these. Vultures are found in
the cinematic portrayals of Rossellini, Pasolini and Malle alike192. Malle’s lengthy
sequence of them tearing up a dead buffalo in the first episode of his documentary series is
also followed by a reflection of the auteur on the unique Indian rhythm and mindset:
When I see this scene again today, I realize we reacted in terms of our own culture. Around us,
the landscape reminded us of Greece, bathed in some austere grandeur that lent an air of
mysterious sacrifice. To us it was a tragedy, a drama in several acts. For our Indian companion,
it was an everyday scene: a glimpse of life and death and their calm alternation. It was nothing
worth filming, nothing extraordinary193.
It is noticeable that Malle had compared India not to his contemporary French culture
but to his “imagined” Greece of a distant epic past. His whole Orientalist masterpiece gives
the impression of a lament to the unbridgeable or irreconcilable “gap” or “difference”
between India and the West194 and it rendered the former distinct from the latter in a dual
fashion. India represented a mentality radically different from a timeless Western mentality,
190 Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 169–71. Soon he would witness a sadhu belonging to a minority heterodox
sect perform a cannibalistic ritual on the pyres. His collecting of the ashes to make use of the shakti in them
would later lead to a sanction on Bhagavan Das by Hindus who would no longer communicate with them. Das,
It’s Here Now (Are You?), 172–73, 176-177.
191 Pasolini, The Scent of India, 77.
192 Appunti per Un Film Sull’India, 29:29.; India, Matri Bhumi, 01:13:13.
193 Cf. ‘Phantom India’, The Impossible Camera, 1969, 23:00.
194 For a similar observation, see: Cortade, ‘Absorption and Reflexivity in Phantom India’, 175.
35
but it was contemporaneous with distant Ancient Greece and not 20th Century Western
cultures. This notion had not been unique to Malle, as “journey to India” had often featured
as “time travel” in accounts countercultural or otherwise. Bhagavan Das would remark that
he had been “extremely happy with living in the 7th Century in India”195 and Ginsberg had
written to Kerouac as follows (highlight by me):
Everybody in India is religious. It's weird, everybody ON to some sadhana (method), and has
family guru or Brahmin priest and knows all about how the universe is a big illusion; it's totally
unlike the West—it really is another dimension of time-history here196.
India, above all, functioned as the epitome of the pre-industrial world in the very
context of post-war years. Portrayals of the country by Rossellini, Pasolini and Malle all
dealt in different ways with the tension between India’s timeless tradition and modern
future. However, “modern” India seems to have barely had anything attractive to Western
seekers. Commonalities like the availability of Western goods –although not unwelcome–
had not been expected before embarking on the hippie trail197 and it had been the
difference and “strangeness” of India that had attracted Westerners. The trail, in a way,
connected the West to the “anti-West” (both in a temporal and cultural sense) and the route
would see the gradual diminishment of the reminders of a “Western mindset”. The
authoritarian communist states of Eastern Europe and culturally conservative countries of
the Middle East seem to have been less attractive than India as destinations in themselves
because they must have reminded the trailers of the Technocratic control at home, whereas
India stood for its total antidote. Not least did the attainment of this “freedom” resemble a
“rite of passage” or a “hero’s journey”, which I will explore in the following.
3.2. The Western Hero’s Journey and Mother India’s Bosom
The countercultural “passage to India” had a dual meaning. It had well been the journey to a
historically particular country that was conceived –due to the particularities of its social and
cultural norms– as a place of refuge from Western Technocracy. However, the same journey
also implied an “inward” one towards a hidden truth beneath one’s feelings and thoughts.
Thus, a country arguably culturally and physically farthest away from the actual “home” had
paradoxically been the place where many Westerners had felt themselves emotionally most at
195 Bhagavan Das’ Story of Ram Das’ Spiritual Adventure with Him in India #2, 2022, accessed 17 May 2023,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Iw3vdM8zmA, 28:24.
196 Cited in: Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 370.
197 Harrison had similarly not expected before entering the country on the way back from the Philippines that
people in India would not have known The Beatles at all. Cf. Harrison, I, Me, Mine, 53.
36
home. Ginsberg would express his contentment for having arrived in India by referring to the
country as his “promised land”198 and it had been common for hippie trailers to describe their
feelings upon arrival similarly to “coming home”199. Ram Dass would feel “at home” upon
meeting his guru Neem Karoli Baba200 and Krishna Das would feel the same way at the very
moment of his arrival in India:
When I first arrived in India, the moment my foot touched the ground on the runway of the
Bombay airport, I was overwhelmed by the feeling of being home for the first time in my life! I
realized that I’d never felt like that before, not in any place I’d ever lived, not even in the house
I’d grown up in. (…) As the old Ambassador taxi labored up hills and coasted down on bald
tires, we saw the white buildings of Kainchi nestled in the valley below. A thrill ran through my
body, and I kept hearing I’m home, I’m home running through my head201.
The intense emotional experiences the phrase “coming home” described in these cases
aside, the same phrase also implied a sense of comfort and ease. The perceived social and
cultural acceptability in India of the use of various drugs had been but one of the factors that
must have contributed to this sense of “ease”. After all India, Nepal and Afghanistan which
had been the top three “favourite” countries of hippie trailers202 had also been known as
countries renowned for their social and cultural acceptance towards drugs203. A contemporary
account had described the sight of Westerners whose sole purpose of travel had been that of
drug consumption topped up in a horrendously dirty hotel by the name “Quo Vadis” in
Kathmandu204. Many Westerners also smuggled drugs, conducted drug trade205, and even
faced occasional persecution, particularly at the Iranian border, leading the British Embassy in
New Delhi to ask the Tehran Embassy for pictures of the executions206 by Iranian officials to
be put up in one of the waiting rooms to warn their fellow countrymen about the potential
consequences of their actions involving drugs207. Countries could even refuse entry to some
Westerners looking like “hippies” out of stigmatization, which would urge others to disguise
themselves as “proper tourists”208.
Of course, not all trailers had been drug consumers let alone drug abusers, and many did
not even use any drugs but had beaten the Eastward path out of either spiritual or recreational
198 Cf. Ginsberg, Indian Journals, March 1962-May 1963, 5.
199 Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail, 156.
200 Cf. Ram Dass, Remember, Now Be Here, Now Here Be, Now Be Nowhere, Now Be Here, Now Be Here,
Ch."Bhagwan Dass".
201 Cf. Das, Chants of a Lifetime, 23–24.
202 Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail, 4-5.
203 For Afghanistan, see: Gemie and Ireland, 5.
204 Gemie and Ireland, 33.
205 Gemie and Ireland, 51–52.
206 Foreigners had never been executed for violation of drug laws. See: Gemie and Ireland, 47.
207 Gemie and Ireland, 47.
208 Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail, 104, 107.
37
purposes209. However, India’s reconstruction and popularization as an “alternate universe” of
freedoms had intrinsically been linked to a fascination with the overall social and cultural
acceptance towards drugs in the country. Before he had undergone the “spiritual adventure”
that would transform him into Bhagavan Das, the initial plans of Kermit Michael Riggs
regarding his visit to India had been as follows:
I MADE MY way to London and stayed with some people from New Zealand. There I smoked
pot for the first time. Stoned, I swayed with the Indian music that was playing. I really
connected with it. I knew then that I had to go to India. The consciousness of the sitar was
pulling me there. I was a musician following the muse, and the drug. My plan was to go to
India, buy as much hashish as I wanted, and then take a train to Kashmir and rent a houseboat. I
imagined floating around all day while the hashish smoke billowed out of my ears210.
Kathmandu in Nepal and Goa in India had both emerged as “hippie colonies” that would
serve as extensions of the hippie sociability back in the West where one had been eligible to
carry out a living akin to the one described above by Bhagavan Das. He would meet Ram
Dass –then Richard Alpert– in a “hippie restaurant” by the name of “Blue Tibetan” in
Kathmandu211 and there had also been a business by the name of “Eden Hashish Store”
downtown where “people could choose from fifty kinds of hashish and twenty kinds of
marijuana”212. The former Portuguese colony of Goa, on the other hand, had been
“discovered” by an American hippie known by the nickname of “Eight Finger Eddie” around
1965213. In a country otherwise perceived to be “chaotic”, the less densely populated coasts of
the state could provide Westerners with the opportunity for a break from their tiresome
“adventures” in India. Goa had been the first place along the hippie trail where they could
have access to homely privacy on its vast picturesque beaches and it had strikingly been a
place with considerably more reminders of Western culture than the rest of India (like
Christianity and colonial architecture)214, leading Gemie and Ireland to remark that:
The hippie trailers felt at home on Goa’s beaches. Nude sunbathing and nude swimming became
normal; such behaviour really would have caused a riot in almost any other part of the trail215216.
209 Gemie and Ireland, 54.
210 Cf. Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 16–17.
211 Cf. Ram Dass, Remember, Now Be Here, Now Here Be, Now Be Nowhere, Now Be Here, Now Be Here, Ch.
"Environmental Changes", "Bhagwan Dass".
212 Cf. Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 93.
213 ‘Goa Mourns Death of Hippie Godfather “Eight Finger Eddie”’, The Independent, 26 October 2010.
Accessed 12 May 2023. https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/goa-mourns-death-of-hippiegodfather-
eight-finger-eddie-2117747.html.
214 Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail, 88-89.
215 Cf. Gemie and Ireland, 89.
216 Malle’s documentary also featured an Italian nudist wandering the beaches of Goa. ‘Phantom India’, The
Impossible Camera, 1969, 40:33.
38
As for the potential financial obstacles, things could have barely been any better for
Westerners. Not only did they often have very few occasions to spend money as they
preferred minimalist accommodations like tents and sleeping bags –or ashrams in the case of
those like Bhagavan Das– but even when they did, the cost of living in both India and Nepal
had been considerably cheap compared to Western standards to make prolonged stays
possible217. Bhagavan Das would remark as follows upon visiting Kathmandu in 1968
(highlights by me):
IN 1968, KATHMANDU was where the hippie scene was happening. While the whole town
was filled with thousands of temples with continuous Hindu prayer and worship (with a
Buddhist overlay), hippies from all over world migrated there, with their loud music and long
hair, to buy drugs. For $200 a month you could live like a king. This included buying all the
drugs you wanted and renting a nice house. (…) It was an ongoing party. I stayed as far away
from all the international hippie chaos as possible. Everywhere I looked, people were tripping
on LSD. Amazing numbers of young people were there. The atmosphere created by it all was
very intense. (…) There was no better backdrop for drug tripping and sex than the picturesque
medieval town of Kathmandu surrounded by the gorgeous Himalayan Mountains, the mountains
of eternal snow218.
The comparable affordability of South Asia seems to have been so significant a factor
attracting Westerners that Bhagavan Das, after spending seven years touring almost the
entirety of India as well as Nepal and Sri Lanka by joining sadhus, staying in ashrams as well
as taking occasional breaks among hippies and indulging himself in sex and drugs, would fall
into severe financial difficulties after just a few years upon his return to the United States and
when his unexpected initial fame as a pop guru had finally faded out. These difficulties would
eventually force him to abandon his Bhagavan Das persona to transform into a successful
salesman219. It had been a conscious decision on his part to wander the country on his own by
joining either rank of sadhus or ashram communities where he would be the only Westerner to
be found220.
Ashrams and sadhus certainly stand out as the two other historical particularities of India
that had attracted countercultural Westerners due to the perceived alignment of these
institutions or practices with their values and agendas. Ginsberg had asked Kerouac to
imagine the former’s retired father “wandering around New Jersey in orange robes”221. Both
social institutions also provided Westerners with an opportunity to bypass the money
217 Westerners had also discovered alternative sources of income to finance their lives in India and Nepal, most
notably the drug trade. Some Westerners would acquire drugs for cheap in Afghanistan and then sell them for
much higher prices down in Goa. See: Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail, 40,51,88.
218 Cf. Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 92–93.
219 Cf. Das, 257.
220 Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?)
221 Cf. Ginsberg, Indian Journals, March 1962-May 1963, 64.
39
economy to meet their needs by performing either community work or service to their Indian
gurus instead222. Accessibility of Hindu, as well as Buddhist religious institutions and training
facilities to Westerners, seems to have functioned as yet another particularity of India (as well
as of Nepal and Sri Lanka) since there is no mention in the account of Bhagavan Das or those
of the Western seekers after him that their presence had been countered by the locals in these
communities with any kind of visible hostility. On the very contrary, throughout his
wanderings as a sadhu in India, Bhagavan Das had received the local treatment as one –
including the respect and veneration that would have come with it223.
In short, the occasions for Westerners visiting India to prolong their stays and remain
mobile had been plenty, ranging from cheap prices and friendly environments to opportunities
posed by particular social institutions. However, choices still seem to have been limited
greatly by gender. Not only had the number of (solo) female travellers been significantly
lower than male ones as indicated by the data compiled by Gemie and Ireland during their
research224, but especially the overland trip to India had been seen as “men’s stuff” due to its
physically demanding nature. There had even been a commonly given “advice” among male
hippie trailers in the late 1960s to „leave the chicks in Istanbul”. After all, the challenges of
the journey were also seen as part of its appeal as its perception by Westerners bore a clear
resemblance to that of a “rite of passage”225 and women were seen as physically unfit for the
journey. There had been a prevalent notion among male travellers that female travel
companions would have considerably limited their mobility and put them under the pressure
of taking someone else’s responsibility226. Previous experiences had also shown that certain
social environments could display unwelcoming attitudes towards Western couples and
women and especially women had in many cases been subjected to harassment by the
locals227.
The mobility of women seems to still have been considerably limited even in India where
Western women are reported to have faced fewer such difficulties228. It appears that people
who had embarked on “adventures” in India and “discovered” local scenes for their Western
222 Oliver, Hinduism and the 1960s, 37-39, 107-108.
223 Ram Dass, Remember, Now Be Here, Now Here Be, Now Be Nowhere, Now Be Here, Now Be Here, Ch.
"Bhagwan Dass".
224 Cf. Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail, 73.
225 Gemie and Ireland, 83.
226 Gemie and Ireland, The Hippie Trail, 84.
227 Gemie and Ireland, 73.
228 The most publicized of the harassment experiences of female travellers/seekers had been when Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi had been alleged of making inappropriate advancements towards Mia Farrow while she stayed in
his ashram alongside The Beatles in 1968. Oliver, Hinduism and the 1960s, 63. Krishna Das also notes that
Neem Karoli Baba had to dismiss some Indian chanters from his ashram because one of them had made an
inappropriate advancement against one of the Western female devotees. Cf. Das, Chants of a Lifetime, 51.
40
peers –people like Bhagavan Das and Allen Ginsberg– must have made use of a certain male
privilege allowing them to be mobile and giving the upper hand over their female peers in the
countercultural “race” for the acquisition of cultural, social, and symbolic capital. The very
narrative structure of Bhagavan Das’s memoir suggests a conquest of female forces of nature
by a male hero as he displays an obsession with Nature as a feminine entity which he refers to
as the “Divine Mother”. Moreover, this “Divine Mother” is very often eroticized in a manner
presented by both Bhagavan Das and Allen Ginsberg as if acceptable within Hinduism.
Particularly Kali, the Goddess of death and destruction, is subjected to aggressive Western
male phantasies a particularly telling example of which is the vulgar language of a 1966 poem
by Ginsberg found in his Indian Journals:
Fuck Kali / Fuck all Hindu Goddesses / Because they are all prostitutes [I like to Fuck] / All
Hindu Goddesses / are Prostitutes / Fuck Ma Kali229 / Mary is not a prostitute because / she was
a virgin / Christians don’t / Worship prostitutes / like the Hindus / Fuck ma Kali / Fuck Fuck all
Hindu Goddesses / Kali Because they are all prostitutes / Durga / Laxmi / I like to Fuck all
Hindu Goddesses230
Be the male-centred or not, the narrative structure of Western journeys to India had a
general alignment with Joseph Campbell’s template of the “hero’s journey”. Campbell
suggested a narrative structure which he referred to as the “monomyth” to have been at work
in myths from different cultural traditions. In the sense of the monomyth, the “hero” is
someone who –upon a “call to adventure”– embarks on an unusual journey towards an
unknown or “extraordinary” world where he or she must pass through several “trials” and
face an ultimate challenge to acquire a trophy and return transformed231. Campbell considers
the narrative structure of the monomyth to be a manifestation of human psychology and
ultimately analogous to the life cycle232. Whereas the ordinary world is nothing but an
analogy for the level of conscious, the unknown or extraordinary world –which is often
presented as a distant land, a forest, or the like233– is one for the “unconscious”234. The
journey often also includes a “mentor”, a meeting with a goddess (a manifestation of the
mother), a challenge of a material temptation potentially leading the hero to abandon the
journey mid-way, an atonement with the “father” and a “refusal of return” to the ordinary
229 Hindi for “Mother Kali”.
230 Cf. Ginsberg, Indian Journals, March 1962-May 1963, 80.
231 The Campbellian „journey“ comprises a total of seventeen stages which are not necessarily present in all
renditions. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, vii-viii.
232 Cf. Campbell, 241.
233 “This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented as a distant land, a forest, a
kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound
dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments,
superhuman deeds, and impossible delight.” Cf. Campbell, 53.
234 Cf. Campbell, 16, 48.
41
world when the time has come to do so. Upon his or her return, the hero has become a “master
of two worlds” by having brought balance to a world in crisis.
The known or ordinary world had certainly been the Western world, or –mostly–
the United States, in the case of countercultural Westerners. There is also no doubt that the
unknown or the extraordinary world had been India, a strange “wonderland” with its own
rules of physics to “explore” on the one hand, and a strangely familiar domain akin to one’s
home on the other. In case they had been a part of the story, the mentors (manifestations of
one’s inner wisdom) had been the gurus who could as well function as the demanding
“fathers” one needed to “atone” with. Goddesses could be met in the form of either the
“Divine Mother” or in that of actual spiritual women like Anandamayi Ma whom Bhagavan
Das had referred to as his spiritual mother and the living embodiment of the “Divine Mother”.
The many trials could either be the challenges of the hippie trail (India in this case being akin
to the “ultimate boon”) or those posed by the guru during his training of the Western disciple
and the “ultimate boon” could take the form of the different answers depressed and drugweary
Richard Alpert and Allen Ginsberg would get to their questions. “Refusal of return”
must have been the case with many hippies who had wished to prolong their stays, including
Bhagavan Das who would desperately insist on not leaving India after seven years although
he had already received a “Quit India” notice from the government235. It would take a while
for him to become a “master of the two worlds”, but it had been much easy in the case of Ram
Dass as an iconic pop guru.
The unfamiliarity and the many challenges of India must have posed an “adventure” for
all these Westerners. In the case that they had brought this adventure to fruition, they had
been successful in rendering the unfamiliar into the familiar and acquired a trophy commonly
in the form of a certain wisdom. In the process, they had been initiated both by India as a
historically particular space and by their inner selves, leading to a “homely” image of India
prevailing in their recounts. However, some had also abandoned this adventure mid-way due
to their repulsion and exhaustion from what they had experienced in India. Joanne Kyger had
written to a friend that she –because of their untidy looks due to the lack of sufficient
sanitation in their dwellings– had been “embarrassed to death whenever she saw other
Americans” and “thoroughly middle class at heart”236. Although India’s lack of modern
amenities had been a source of disappointment for her, it had been the very appeal of it for
235 Das, 181–82.
236 Cf. Kyger, The Japan and India Journals 1960-1964, 194-195.
42
many to the extent that they had displayed a considerably cynical attitude towards Indian
modernization. I will deal with this crucial topic in the following last chapter of my thesis.
4. Westerners and the Modern Face of India
But the great Hunger of the
Undeveloped Nations. Give China your Wheat and
Machines, America. But how ever recreate India?
Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals237
4.1.Modernity and Authenticity
Rossellini’s 1959 documentary fiction “India, Mother Earth” commissioned by the Nehru
government238 is divided into four different episodes. The first one begins with the love affair
between a young elephant tamer and a girl from his village leading to a marriage239. A young
married couple with relationship difficulties replaces them in the second story where the main
protagonist is a dam worker this time240. The third story, in turn, follows an elderly peasant
couple that leads a simple but happy life in their village where the husband spends most of his
time meditating in the adjacent jungle and his peace is eventually disturbed by the tiger hunts
carried out by mine seekers who have recently arrived in the area241. Finally, the fourth story
includes a monkey and his tamer where the latter dies amid an arid area swarmed by vultures
and the monkey frees himself first to immerse itself unnoticed in the bursting street life of
India and then to be picked up by a new master and “start a new life”242 – a plot implying
reincarnation. As can be noticed through a brief look at its four episodes, the film is ultimately
dedicated to the tension between Indian modernization and its unique rhythm - in other words
to the “dangers” and “challenges” of the former, a theme that is also central to Pasolini’s
“Notes for a Film on India”.
Pasolini’s 1968 film is a self-declared sketch for a film he planned to shoot in India which
would have drawn its inspiration from an Indian story where a maharaja fed his own body to a
bunch of starving tigers and their cubs out of mercy243. Whereas Rossellini had drawn an
overall optimistic picture of Indian modernization, particularly by stressing the country’s
237 Cf. Ginsberg, Indian Journals, March 1962-May 1963, 193.
238 Flora, ‘India as a Wonderland: International Outlook and Counterculture’, 116.
239 India, Matri Bhumi, 26:02.
240 India, Matri Bhumi, 40:22.
241 India, Matri Bhumi, 59:21.
242 India, Matri Bhumi, 01:11:46.
243 Appunti per Un Film Sull’India, 4:37.
43
unexampled tradition of toleration towards differences as a potential strength in this pursuit244,
Pasolini had rather been interested in the question of whether India would have lost its
identity in the process. He spares a fair share of the film for the opinions of Indians and the
film is mostly comprised of interviews on issues such as untouchability245, problems of
workers and farmers246 as well as whether India could modernize without giving up its
traditional identity247 – the central question posed by Pasolini as indicated by the proposed
plot of the film he intended to shoot. In Pasolini’s rendering of the story, after the maharaja
has “sacrificed” himself to the tigers, his wife and children must leave their palace and
wander India pennilessly, eventually dying of hunger248. The story, as also declared by
himself, is nothing but an analogy for Indian modernization through which an epic and
“cyclical” history indicated in the story of the maharaja would have given way to a mundane
and linear one indicated by the fate of his wife and children249.
For Pasolini, like many of his post-war contemporaries, India had been an epitome of the
Third World or pre-industrial world(view) manifesting itself in an international “subproletariat”
250. This exact period also correlated with the replacement of what Inden calls the
“Anglo-French imperial formation” by what he calls the “US-USSR imperial formation”.
According to him, the macropolitical, as well as macroeconomic shifts that this change of
global hegemonic powers suggested, had also correlated with a marked change in the
structure of the prevailing Orientalist and “Indological” discourses. Through these shifts,
former pseudoscientific racism utilized to support the idea that “Orientals” needed to be ruled
over by European powers would give its way to the notion that modern states of the Third
World had to make rearrangements in their indigenous cultural and social institutions per the
“metaculture” of global economy resting on a developmental paradigm251.
Developmentalist paradigm of the post-war context had established parameters by which
“national achievements” could be quantified without reference to nations’ respective historical
and cultural particularities 252 and these particularities could now merely be viewed as
potential “instruments” or “obstacles” in the global race for development – a case observed
when Rossellini praises Indian “tradition” of tolerance. However, it had been much more
244 India, Matri Bhumi, 03:05.
245 Appunti per Un Film Sull’India, 10:43.
246 Appunti per Un Film Sull’India, 20:51.
247 Appunti per Un Film Sull’India, 23:33.
248 Appunti per Un Film Sull’India, 17:45, 29:25.
249 Appunti per Un Film Sull’India, 18:51.
250 Mazzini, ‘Pasolini and India’, 142.
251 Cf. Inden, Imagining India, 200–201.
252 Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, Fourth edition (London;
New York, 2014), 73–75.
44
common to point out to weaknesses rather than strengths of non-Western nations in this
pursuit, not least due to the prevalent Weberian idea that the historical development of
capitalism had intrinsically been linked to a certain Protestant cultural outlook. An example of
the application of this notion in terms of India is a 1967 article by Samuel N. Eisenstadt where
he revisits the Weberian thesis to present a comparative analysis of the economic implications
of Protestant, Catholic, Islamic, Hindu, and Confucian outlooks253. According to Eisenstadt,
India’s intense social stratification, coupled with “otherworldly” Hinduism’s “failure” in
motivating its followers to adopt new “secular roles”, might have led to the country’s failure
to modernize254.
It would not be wrong to say that Third World nations had generally been expected either
also to Westernize while they modernized, or simply to fail in joining the ranks of developed
nations. Both sentiments can be found -as biases- in contemporary Western accounts of India,
countercultural or otherwise. Such biases are implied by the very fact that the counterculture
had predominantly embraced India as an antidote to a West defined through Modernity. In his
1970 song “Awaiting On You All” where he urges listeners to chant Lord’s names255 to “be
free”, George Harrison considers even the Catholic Church to suffer from the Western ill of
“modern capitalism”:
And while the Pope owns fifty one percent of General Motors
And the stock exchange is the only thing he's qualified to quote us
The Lord is awaiting on you all to awaken and see
By chanting the names of the Lord and you'll be free256
For Ginsberg, on the other hand, India had been a whole nation culturally and socially
embodying the existential state of the “fellaheen” or the “subterraneans” Kerouac and he had
artistically been attracted to and found epitomized by the “spontaneous” lifestyle of those like
the hoboes, junkies, jazzmen, and criminals backs in the US257. As Chandarlapaty remarks,
“Hindu India materially crystallized Ginsberg’s understanding of a liberal international
possibility”258 and the nation would indeed barely pop up as a restrictive modern political
entity in Ginsberg’s Journals. A notable experience in this regard had been when he was
confronted by a group of communist-leaning Indian students at Benares Hindu University
253 Samuel N. Eisenstadt, ‘The Protestant Ethic Thesis in Analytical and Comparative Context’, Diogenes 15, no.
59 (1 September 1967): 25–46, https://doi.org/10.1177/039219216701505902.
254 Cf. Eisenstadt, 34–35.
255 Harrison himself states that the lyrics are about the “japa yoga” meditation. Cf. Harrison, I, Me, Mine, 200.
256 George Harrison, Awaiting on You All - 2014 Remaster, 1970,
https://open.spotify.com/track/0b65WkrBrg2qOkzQeDtQ9d.
257 Prothero, ‘On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest’, 212.
258 Cf. Chandarlapaty, ‘Indian Journals and Allen Ginsberg’s Revival as Prophet of Social Revolution’, 114.
45
who had been angered by the disrespect he had supposedly shown for their professor who had
called Ginsberg’s poetry vulgar. The students had appealed to the Criminal Investigation
Department to expel Ginsberg and Orlovsky from the country and the two would be subjected
to consecutive police investigations following their appeal259. In any case, the experience
exemplified an instance where Ginsberg had been “struck back” by the modern political
culture of India he had not given any credit to.
Bhagavan Das had been much more pronounced in his take on India as an antidote to a
characteristically “modern” West. For him, India had not only been “different” from the West,
but the two had not even been contemporaries. He would repeatedly refer to his experiences
in India and Nepal as “living in the 7th Century” as well as consciously avoid reminders of
“Modernity” while in India, most notably in the form of the polluted and traffic-ridden
metropolis of Delhi (highlighted by me):
Delhi was a huge, wild, crazy city with traffic signs and cows in the street (not that anyone paid
more attention to the traffic signs than they did to the cows). And everybody wore pants. I was
living in my mythological world and found this Westernized version of India very distasteful. I
was a sadhu, a holy man, so of course I carried deep resentment toward "worldly" people—in
other words, towards everybody else. I wanted to live only with holy people in a holy
environment. And here I was in smelly, dirty Delhi with millions of cow-dung-burning campfires.
260.
He had been sent to the city by his guru to stay with an Indian army officer by the name of
Major Rikki, also a disciple of Neem Karoli Baba. Major Rikki maintained a highly
Westernized lifestyle which would be referred to by Bhagavan Das as “degenerate”. He was a
heavy drinker and a smoking addict as well as possessed Playboy magazines at his home, the
sight of which would initially disturb Bhagavan Das whereas he would be quite fast to adjust
to the environment – seen by him as “relapsing” back into Western lifestyle261. The
condemnation of the “decadent ways” of Indian middle and upper classes had not been unique
to Bhagavan Das. They had often been presented as hopeless imitators in Western accounts of
India. Malle for instance would open his Phantom India with scenes featuring Indians
expressing their opinions in English. Not only would their opinions be talked over and left
untranslated by the French auteur, but he would also declare them categorically uninteresting
because these Anglophone Indians had been educated to think as Malle’s “civilization” did
and thus been alienated towards their own country262.
259 Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 386.
260 Cf. Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 110.
261 Cf. Das, 110–11.
262 Cf. ‘Phantom India’, The Impossible Camera, 1969, 1:09; 2:15.
46
Malle considered the “%2 of the Indian population that could speak English” to “talk a lot
in the name of the rest” without really addressing the real questions263 and instead expressing
“tattered ideas” with “worn-out phrases exhausted from flying like Nietzsche’s birds”264. In
other words, he did not consider Anglophone Indians as legitimate spokespersons for India
only because they had ceased to be “authentic” or “real” Indians by becoming “Westernized”.
In a similar vein, Pasolini would display a rather pitying attitude towards the Indian middle
class in his travelogue. For him, India’s problems had been too great to ever be coped with
and the recognition of this grim reality had left the Indian middle class in a state of near
paralysis and urged them to stick to the private company of their families instead of making
public appearances265.
Although Pasolini did interact with the Indian intelligentsia266, both Malle and him had
been more interested in interacting with “ordinary Indians” than either the intellectuals or the
middle class. For Malle, the “authentic” world of the ordinary Indian is an intellectually
ungraspable, aesthetic phenomenon alluring the voyeuristic gaze of the filmmaker. This is
especially well exemplified by a long sequence where he films a haggle between a group of
local fishermen and a wholesale dealer taking place on a picturesque Southern Indian beach.
Their untranslated conversations in the local language are accompanied by nothing but natural
acoustics, only to be occasionally talked over by the auteur to express his philosophical
aphorisms267. In Pasolini’s case, on the other hand, the “search for the authentic” manifested
itself in his obsession to be in the presence of “ordinary” Indians to the extent to spy on them
while they sang or carried out a religious ritual268.
In all of these cases, the India that had been of interest to Westerners had largely been
confined to an India frozen in its “pre-modern” or “non-modern” authenticity. The “modern”
face of India suggesting political contingencies, social change, and cultural hybridization, in
turn, had either been ignored or dismissed. This neglect must have especially been risky since
it might have led to the construction of India as an apolitical space, thus preventing a proper
Western self-reflection on actions undertaken in the country. However, it would prove
particularly hard for one aspect of “modern” India to evade the Western gaze and it had been
that of widespread poverty. I will deal with how Westerners reacted to it in the following.
263 Cf. ‘Phantom India’, 1:47.
264 Cf. ‘Phantom India’, 2:34.
265 Cf. Pasolini, The Scent of India, 48.
266 Pasolini, 59.
267 Cf. ‘Phantom India’, The Impossible Camera, 1969, 46:30.
268 Pasolini, The Scent of India, 9, 18.
47
4.2. Poverty vs. Privilege
Theodore Roszak disagrees with accusations of apoliticism thrown at the counterculture by
pointing out that they had been allies with the post-war New Left in the fight against their
common enemy of Technocracy from the very beginning269. This affinity is also attested by
the San Francisco Oracle interview with Chinmayananda Saraswati which I had quoted earlier
where the latter is asked to comment not only on depoliticized yoga and spirituality with
individualistic underpinnings but also on matters such as the Vietnam War, atomic bomb as
well as overpopulation270. In other words, spirituality did not function as an escape from
politics but had instead been the very language counterculture employed to achieve political
ends. However, as Aleksandra Boss points out, reference to spiritual and religious concepts
derived from Oriental traditions could also have the consequence of overlooking historically
specific structures and institutions that had been favouring them in the given socioeconomic
and sociopolitical setting as predominantly white, male, and privileged American youths. The
distortive “spiritualistic” lens through which the countercultural milieu viewed politics could
then also function as nothing but the means of avoiding proper self-reflection on privilege and
individual responsibility. An example given by Boss in this regard is the countercultural
“condemnation” of the occasional violence employed by black activism by referring to a
concept such as “karma”271.
Not unexpectedly, the countercultural call to “drop out” did not have a universal appeal.
After all, many of their contemporaries like blacks, Native Americans and peoples of the
Third World were instead fighting to get their rightfully deserved share in the system rather
than to overthrow it altogether and the “voluntary simplicity” advocated by the counterculture
had been in stark contrast with the material hardships experienced by many communities due
to circumstances outside their control. This “dead end” of the politics of dropping out had
been explained by Roszak as follows:
If Allen Ginsberg's Howl stands as a founding document of the counter culture, we must
remember what the poet had to tell the world: "I have burned all my money in a wastebasket."
Will it be a victory, then, or a defeat for the counter culture when the black man has at last
fought his way clear of desperate expedients and wrings from the Great Society the white man's
269 Cf. Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on a Technocratic Society and Its Youthful
Opposition, 56.
270 Cf. ‘Chinmayananda’, 8–9.
271 Cf. Aleksandra Boss, ‘Between Protest and Privilege’, Südasien-Chronik - South Asia Chronicle, 2018, 326,
https://doi.org/10.18452/18777.
48
legal equivalent of looting: a steady job, a secure income, easy credit, free access to all the local
emporiums, and his own home to pile the merchandise in?272
The contrast must have been felt to be even more stark in India, as in this case, the struggle
had been that of an entire nation to get its fair share of wealth among the nations of the world.
The widespread poverty and suffering appear to have been so visible as pressing problems of
the young nation, that it must have been practically impossible for Western visitors to ignore
them altogether. Kyger and Snyder almost regularly note being approached by and giving
money to beggars273 and these people also find themselves in Ginsberg’s Journals which often
describe them as part of the overall scenery while passing by274. Perhaps the most cynical
description of beggars, however, is the following remarks made by Snyder:
A line up of beggars; faces screw into samadhi of misery; they make this their lives, refusing to
be human, and that is their real tragedy – fingerless, legless, eyeless (there are something like
two million blind in India) (…)275
An even more striking example of a “naturalization” of Indian suffering can be found in
the biography of Bhagavan Das, which also testifies to a general countercultural illusion that
India had been a living confirmation of the viability of their values around “dropping out”276.
Upon seeing the Golden Temple in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar which had been the
beginning of his itinerary of India, he had asked himself (highlights by me):
How could one of the poorest countries in the world afford a temple of solid gold? The irony
didn't seem to bother these people; all their energy was directed toward the temple, while people
were dying in the streets. This made no sense to me277.
Seen through the reasoning of those like Bhagavan Das, Indian poverty and suffering did
not even amount to the pressing problems they had appeared to be at first sight, as wealth and
material comfort had not been the priorities of Indians in the first place. They had instead
been a spiritually oriented people and their deliberate disregard for their material well-being
had been akin to their countercultural pursuits. This notion is also echoed in the quotation
from Ginsberg’s Journals at the beginning of Chapter 4 where he asks, “How ever re-create
India?”. The same notion also found its way into the San Francisco Oracle interview with
272 Cf. Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on a Technocratic Society and Its Youthful
Opposition, 67.
273 Kyger, The Japan and India Journals 1960-1964, 161, 163, 172, 189.; Snyder, Passage through India, 9, 57-
58.
274 For an example, see: Ginsberg, Indian Journals, March 1962-May 1963, 35.
275 Snyder, Passage through India, 50.
276Another example can be found in one of the sequences of Phantom India with the French hippie duo where
they remark that the Indians never wanted more than what had been enough to feed themselves so they would
have never worked more than they needed to – thus attributing to Indians a strikingly “un-Protestant” attitude in
the Weberian sense. Cf. ‘Phantom India’, The Impossible Camera, 1969, 36:34.
277 Cf. Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 8.
49
Chinmayananda Saraswati:Oracle: A lot of Americans have a feeling that India’s
concentration upon the spiritual wholeness of man has resulted in the deterioration of India’s
material concern for man.
Chinmaya: Yes, that is true, what you are saying is really true. We have even the world history
that proves it to be true. That India in the name of spiritualism started becoming introverted to
the complete exclusion of looking after the social and political interests of the country and
therefore, India deteriorated. In the West, completely divorced from spirituality, mere
materialism has brought them today the affluent societies of the world, but they too are
deteriorated because there is no internal inner mental balance. So it has been proved to the hilt.
In the history of mankind, that either of them to the exclusion of the other, is a danger278.
However, despite their essentialistic ideas regarding the cultural distinction between India
and the West through which they could “naturalize” the poverty and suffering in India as
consequences of Indians’ spiritualistic orientations as well as dismiss developmentalism
prioritizing the “material” as a misinformed Western concept, the countercultural Indophiles
could still be concerned about human development in India. After all, Chinmayananda himself
had pointed out in the following part of the interview quoted above that the Bhagavad-Gita as
a holy Hindu scripture clearly described the solutions for material human problems as well as
addressing the “political man”. The idea articulated in the scripture, he posited, had been that
“there could not be any peace unless the spiritual values of the heart and the material alertness
of the body were not “integrated”279.
By adopting a similar reasoning, Western spiritual seekers could also reflect upon their
inherited “material” privilege as a supporting column of their spiritual pursuits. Krishna Das
for instance would witness Indians hired by Neem Karoli Baba to chant mantras getting fired
one by one due to stealing from the donation box and Neem Karoli Baba being unable to “find
anyone who would not steal”280. He would also ask an Indian fellow ashramite why they had
been “born in America” and the latter would only reply with the letters “F-a-s-t-e-r” by
writing on the palm of his hand281. It is upon recalling this memory that Krishna Das makes
the following remarks in his spiritual biography:
The West is a good place to do sadhana, spiritual practice, because most of us have our basic
requirements met. Most of us have places to live and enough to eat. It’s not that way with the
majority of people in this world, who don’t have the time or opportunity to practice a path in the
ways we can. People are looking for food. They’re dodging bombs or running away from
invading armies282.
278 Cf. ‘Chinmayananda’, 8.
279 Cf. ‘Chinmayananda’, 8.
280 Cf. Das, Chants of a Lifetime, 69.
281 Cf. Das, 45.
282 Cf. Das, 45.
50
Two other Western disciples of Neem Karoli Baba would go a step further than a mere selfreflection
and roll up their sleeves to actively work for human development in India. These
had been Ram Dass and Dr Larry Brilliant – the latter another disciple of Neem Karoli Baba
and an epidemiologist who had cooperated with the World Health Organization in the
successful eradication of smallpox in India in the 1970s. Larry Brilliant and his wife would
recount their experiences (first as spiritual seekers and then as smallpox fighters) in a 1978
article titled “Death of a Killer Disease” the publicity of which would leave them with an
initial 20,000$ sum of donations, a quarter of which would arrive from the not-yet-famous
Steve Jobs. The couple would then gather a group including the WHO affiliate Dr. Nicole
Grasset as well as Ram Dass to brainstorm about how to make use of the donations and the
former would introduce the group to a retired Indian eye surgeon known by the name of “Dr.
V.” who had the vision of making cataract surgery accessible to the poor and soon a
partnership with his eye care clinic would follow. The Seva Foundation arose out of this initial
cooperation and now claims to “have helped 50 million see again”283284. The emblem of the
Seva Foundation notably features a “third eye” as a clear reference to its co-founders’
“spiritual” backgrounds and it had been no one else than Neem Karoli Baba who had urged
Brilliant to embark on the WHO mission285.
By 1971, another South Asian country, Bangladesh was suffering a severe humanitarian
crisis during its struggle for independence against Pakistan and would attract considerable
humanitarian attention from the West, especially through the efforts of another countercultural
Indophile, George Harrison. Like Neem Karoli Baba urging Larry Brilliant to join the fight
against smallpox, Harrison's help had been asked for by his own –if I may say– “guru" and
lifelong friend Ravi Shankar. Harrison would help organize the "Concert for Bangla Desh" in
Madison Square Garden in NYC where Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston,
Leon Russell, and the band Badfinger would appear on stage alongside Harrison and Shankar
themselves286. Not only would the concert (the revenue of which would be sent to
Bangladeshi refugees via UNICEF) prove a great success leading to a second one being
organized, but it would especially prove seminal in attracting attention to the events in the
283 ‘History - Seva Foundation’, accessed 7 May 2023,
https://www.seva.org/site/SPageServer/?pagename=about/history.
284 The name of the foundation is the Sanskrit word for “selfless service to others”. ‘Seva’s Mission - To Restore
Sight and Prevent Blindness - Seva Foundation’, accessed 17 May 2023,
https://www.seva.org/site/SPageServer/?pagename=about/mission.
285 Ram Dass, Miracle of Love: Stories about Neem Karoli Baba, 1st ed (New York, 1979), 163–65.
286 Oliver, Hinduism and the 1960s, 66–67.
51
media and among the public287. Allen Ginsberg, who had also visited India once again in the
same year, would also dedicate a poem by name of “September on Jessore Road” to the
tragedy288.
The organized, large-scale humanitarian efforts described above aside, countercultural
Indophiles had also made individual gestures of “benevolence” towards Indians in distress.
While in Benares, Ginsberg would help a solitary and seemingly dying man whom he had
spotted lying on a street to reunite with his family upon finding out that he had been tortured
and his tongue had been cut out by a gang289. While in Bodh Gaya, Bhagavan Das would find
out that local villagers were somehow being exploited by the local headman and decide to
confront the latter out of a sudden burst of heroism and confidence. This confrontation would
immediately lead to a “Quit India” notice290 due to which he could only maintain his travels
illegally from that point on and eventually be forced to leave India. However, good intentions
aside, his attitude had also been problematically patronizing:
What's the point of having spiritual power if you don't use it to defend the poor and oppressed?
(…) I was full of self-righteous fury, and my new role as defender of the downtrodden felt good.
Thrilled with myself, I headed back to the temple and continued my prayers at the Bodhi tree291.
As can be seen in these examples, the "tangible" connections established between the
counterculture and India had not only facilitated a genuine transcultural semination of
concepts, practices and objects but had also led to displays of empathy and solidarity for
hardships and tragedies of South Asians. Albeit the countercultural interest in India had been
focused on an "authentic" India frozen in history, it had not altogether resulted in a "turning a
blind eye" to the material hardships Indians experienced. After all, the countercultural
encounter with India had not been limited to an intellectual one but also included physical
and emotional ones of equal importance.
5. Conclusion
I contend that the contributions made by post-war Indomania to the formation of modern
Western cultural identities have not been well researched due to the prevalence of a certain
post-colonialist scepticism regarding Western adoption of non-Western cultural elements.
287 Harrison, I, Me, Mine, 60–61.
288 Oliver, Hinduism and the 1960s, 13.
289 Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 388.
290 Das, It’s Here Now (Are You?), 144.
291 Cf. Das, 143–44.
52
Clarke would have also added to these factors the Western belief in the uniqueness of its
civilization and its hesitation to acknowledge “Oriental” contributions to it292. Goody goes
even a step further to claim that it has been systematic on the part of the West to deny such
contributions and refers to this process as “theft of history”293. However, when one looks back
at formative époques of Western cultural history such as the Renaissance or the
Enlightenment, one finds processes of “looking around” as much as one finds those of
“looking at the past”. Not only do both deeds imply processes ridden with flaws and
shortcomings, but they also form the basis of all “renaissances” and “golden ages” as argued
by Goody and taken by me as the basis of my argumentation throughout my thesis.
My other conviction has been that post-war Indomania marked a peculiar instance of
transnationality both in terms of actors and physical spaces and like had never been the case
in past instances of penetration of the Western cultural sphere by Oriental concepts, practices,
and artefacts. Post-war Indomania coincided with a time of increased globalization and
cultural hybridization. While elements of Indian culture were swarming the American cultural
sphere, the latter was also exerting an unprecedented influence on the rest of the world. It is of
course fully justified to ask whether the process of globalization had really brought about
cultural democratization or instead increased homogenization in favour of a handful of
Western centres of influence and their priorities. I have therefore tried to provide a nuanced
overview, supporting neither notion to the full extent. The process had been characterized by
largely unregulated fluxes and the mass movement of a greatly diverse range of people, thus
creating more occasions for self-reflexivity and critical scrutiny than former contexts defined
by stricter colonial frameworks had. However, it is also important to note that this process had
also not been played on a completely equal field but bestowed certain privileged actors (like
privileged white Western males and high-caste Indians) with more “Spielraum” and
representation. I have tried to account for these unequal frameworks whenever I observed
them.
In the first chapter, I have first discussed how post-war Indomania had not emerged in a
historical vacuum but could be located within a historiography of Western affirmative
orientalisms finding alternatives to and models for the Western ones. Post-war Indomania had
similarly emerged simultaneously with opposition to mainstream values of post-war American
society as well as to Western political language and organized religion. Post-war Indophiles
had been "dropouts" in search of a new consciousness and had initially discovered both
292 Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, 18.
293 Goody, The Theft of History.
53
Buddhism and drugs as the potential keys to this consciousness. It had however been the
following discovery of India as the locus of a culture embodying consciousness that had
proven to mark the beginning of a multifaceted transnational history.
In the second chapter, I first tried to elaborate on the historically specific conditions that
had gone into the making of the transnational history I have described. One of these had been
the increase in modes of travel including the emergence of an overland travel route between
Europe and Asia as well as the emergence of commercial air travel that had made mass
movement of people between faraway places as well as simultaneous transnational interaction
possible. Another important condition had been that of post-war geopolitics that had made
Western interaction with certain nations and cultures more sustainable than others. All these
factors contributed to a largely unregulated and spontaneous movement of concepts, practices,
artefacts and people between India and the Western world. This movement had also included
the Westward journeys of both lay Indians and Indian spiritual leaders who acted as mediators
between the conventions of their traditions and the rather liberal approaches and expectations
of their countercultural Western audiences. The relationships of these figures with their
Western audiences had however not been confined to a single fashion and could take the form
of either an intellectual or an emotional one. Alternatively, the mere fact of having been
initiated by an indigenous guru in India could also function as an “asset” for the Westerner to
capitalize on.
In the third chapter, I have delved into the matter of how countercultural Westerners had
interacted with India as a physical space and argued that the country had primarily been
conceived of as an “alternate universe of freedoms”. This had to do both with a conceptual
idealization of India as an antidote to Western Technocracy but also with certain historical and
cultural particularities of the country like its acceptance towards various drugs. Many
historically specific factors must be accounted for in this process, including the affordability
of South Asian countries and the openness of their religious institutions and teaching facilities
to Westerners. A gender imbalance could also be observed among Western accounts of the
country, ultimately accounting for the prevalent feminine objectification of India for the
desires of a self-seeking Western male subjectivity.
Finally, in the last chapter, I tried to come to terms with the question of how Westerners
had interacted with and reacted to the "modern face" of India. I have argued that particularly
the countercultural Westerners but also others like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Louis Malle had
favoured an “authentic” India frozen in history over an India characterized by political
contingencies, hybridity, and heterogeneity. This had manifested itself above all in their
54
imagination of India as an apolitical, ahistorical, and homogenous space as well as in their
cynical attitudes towards Indian “middle classes”. Not least did this situation have to do with
an inherent paradox of the countercultural call to “drop out” as it had been the product of a
milieu composed largely of privileged white American males who had been able to “afford” it
in the first place. However, the focus on an “authentic” India had still not prevented many
Westerners like Larry Brilliant, Ram Dass and George Harrison from humanitarian
involvement in South Asian countries. Humanitarianism could also be urged by narratives
underlining material well-being as a supporting column of spiritual development.
Overall, I contend the post-war Indomania to have been a complex and multifaceted
instance of both a "renaissance" characterized by “looking around” at another culture and a
“transnational history” driven by an unregulated, spontaneous, and reciprocal movement of
people both Eastwards and Westwards. In my opinion, it represents a unique break in the
history of Western (affirmative) Orientalism above all due to its inherent transnationality
drawing on a centrality of historically specific places, people, institutions, practices, and
artefacts to the “Orientalist” experience on a scale unseen in previous “orientalist” encounters
which must have had less room for critical scrutinization of the validity of Western textual
constructs. Also crucially important a marker had been the mass scale and heterogeneity of
people involved in the experience, covering those from different class and gender
backgrounds as well as those with expectations as varying as drug consumption, unique travel
experiences and spiritual enlightenment. This heterogeneity of actors accounts for a very
multi-faceted phenomenon that evades attempts at establishing monolithic narratives of
countercultural Indomania.
In my opinion, more attention on modern cultural époques such as countercultural
Indomania could eventually provide us with novel narratives of modern and contemporary
history that would be more enduring in the face of the tendency to automatically equate
“modern” with “Western” and more sensitive towards spontaneity, self-reflexivity and
transcultural fluxes as potential concepts on which to base our understanding of Modernity – a
hard-to-explain phenomenon that has often been understood and presented as a “Western text”
that had been nothing but imposed on the rest of the world. It seems to me even that this
notion ironically unites the “civilizing mission” of colonialism with post-colonialist narratives
pleading more for recognition of differences than for an exploration of intellectual and
emotional common grounds between what are perceived as “civilizations” in a timeless
“clash”.
55
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