Allen Ginsberg in India

Deborah Baker, wife of acclaimed author Amitav Ghosh, explores the iconoclastic American poet’s adventures in India during 1961-62, in her book, A Blue Hand: The Beats In India. A recent New York Times review prompted me to buy the book. I read it quickly, and completed it on my flight back to Mumbai from New York.

I’ve always been interested in travelers' perceptions of India. This book was an opportunity to look at the experiences of an intense, politically charged poet, who came to India with the goal of “finding God through a guru,” he could “love.” When he was in college in the early 1950s, he had a vision in which he saw the hand of god and heard a divine recitation of one of William Blake’s poems. This vision was the beginning of his spiritual yearning, and India was the only place in the world where he could explore the full dimension of this yearning.

He, and his lover, Peter Orlovsky, travel to holy places such as Rishikesh, Benares, Tiruvanamalai and Pondicherry; have dinner with Papul Jaykar in Mumbai; become the heart of a Calcutta poet group; work with lepers as part of Mother Teresa's ashram; and are almost expelled from India on the ridiculous charge of being spies by a paranoid police/government. They travel in 3rd class train compartments, live in filthy rooms, wear local clothes, mix with local people, and almost become one with the streets of India. I was fascinated by the passion, energy and curiosity with which Ginsberg lived in India. He was a man on a mission (however unclear that mission was!). He fell serious sick a number of times, but he never ever thought of going back home. His ultimate lesson was that what he was looking for was not in India, but within himself (sorry if this sounds trite!).

Ironically what interested me the most in the book was the first 40% where the author rummages through Ginsberg’s college career and his friendships with the Beat writers and poets - Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso. All of them were on drugs and alcohol and on the verge of madness. Ginsberg was even sent to a psychiatric institute for a while. The author weaves a realistic picture of their relationships, based on solid research. Each character comes alive, as if one had just met them.

Another highlight of the book is Hope Savage, a teenage beauty, who is fiercely independent, almost anarchic, and is driven by an inexplicable wanderlust to travel the world (which she does). She hated her parents for sending her to an asylum, and spent all her life, trying to bury her familial relationships and memories. The Beat writers and poets were mesmerized by her. Corso was madly in love with her. Ginsberg met her in India a couple of times. But no one had any control of her, and she ultimately disappears and is nowhere to be found, despite the author’s rigorous searches for her whereabouts via the people Hope knew and available documents. She was a lost soul, and I feel for her more than any other character in the book.