A multilayered spiritual odyssey
M. S. NAGARAJAN
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The Beats’ passage to India in search of God and their encounter with its poets, saints and charlatans
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A BLUE HAND: Deborah Baker; Penguin/ Viking, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Enclave, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 499.
During his undergraduate days in Columbia University, in the summer of 1948, Irwin Allen Ginsberg (1925-97) had an auditory hallucination. He believed that, while rereading William Blake, he had a vision of God seen outside the window of his Harlem tenement. It may sound crazy, but this epiphanic moment fuelled his unconquerable hope of an enquiry into the meaning of life. The Beats (William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, being the other two prominent members of this cohort)
looked up to India for widening human consciousness and spiritual elevation. No wonder, then, young Allen and his homosexual companion Peter Orlovsky set out for India on March 23, 1961 with a divine longing for the holy pursuit of God!
Deborah Baker, writer Amitav Ghosh’s wife, is a biographer of no mean repute. Her passion for serious research before planning a book can only be matched — if at all — by her husband’s. Her recent biography A Blue Hand chronicles this journey of Ginsberg, the icon of the ‘Beat (short for beatitude) Generation’ and a Bohemian scholar, while navigating the “exotic” country India during his 15-month pilgrimage in 1962-63, seeking spiritual succour and esoteric wisdom.
Various strands
The book interlocks various strands in its narration of the arduous and hazardous journey — by train, in third class — through the subcontinent. There is a long account of Gary Snyder and his newly wed wife Joanne Kyger’s sojourn and trials to learn Tantric yoga, Zen Buddhism; explore the highways and byways of the working of the Mind and reach a mental precipice. Their itinerary included visits to Pondicherry, Ramana Ashram, Bhubaneswar, Bodh Gaya, Nalanda, Patna and Nepal. Snyder found Ramana Maharshi’s “straightforward and minimalist” teaching most worthy of study and emulation. The visit of Jacqueline Kennedy to India, at the invitation of the Nehru administration, and the aftermath of Chinese aggression form a short section of the narration. Occurring as a signature tune or what might be called a subtext, there is the story/saga of three generations of Nagendra Nath’s family and the tales of their derring-do. For Nagendra, who became a sadhu, “the most intense experience of human love was the love that exists between couples who are absolutely free from the material, legal, and social considerations of marriage.”
Exciting journey
Part III that narrates the exciting journey of Ginsberg forms the crux of the book. The delta city on the Bay of Bengal, Calcutta (now Kolkata), and more particularly the College Street Coffee House, next to Calcutta University, where the Bengali intellectuals with their “johla bags and kolhapuri sandals” hobnob with one another, remained his familiar haunt. Some of them could not understand the purpose of his visit. His attire, his stay in cheap hotels, his penchant for ganja, bhang and LSD puzzled them. Was he, like some sadhus, embracing a world of sensory experience? Or was he an unauthentic phoney? Or a CIA agent? He was about to be arrested under the Howrah bridge on charges of felony: luckily for him the letter of introduction from the then Vice President Lyndon Johnson that he happened to carry in his pocket rescued him.
Ginsberg learnt many things from his contacts and conversations. He sought clarification on the use of drugs as inducements or stimulants, and genuine religious experience leading to mystical bliss or nirvana. Papul Jayakar cautioned him against the use of drugs. They were not the sure path to truth: they only helped sustaining illusions spiritual wisdom has no use for.
Oriental wisdom
The Dalai Lama, to whom he wanted to recite his poem “Howl” by which every beatnik swears, told him that “drugs themselves were a distraction, doing little to address the central problem of the ego, the source of all spiritual anguish and ignorance.” Swami Shivananda at Rishikesh directed him to look within: “Your own heart is your guru.”
A lady saint in Brindavan, Mathura, suggested to him that William Blake, his favourite poet, could serve him as well as any living human guru or God to worship. “It is not the question of seeking Krishna but seeking the love he inspires!” This was, perhaps, the best oriental wisdom Ginsberg acquired. Sitting under the Bo tree in Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha attained illumination, he sang Blake’s poem “Ah! Sunflower” in full-throated ease.
Whether Ginsberg, the pilgrim, reached ‘the celestial city’ or not, one can never be sure about. The end result, in Baker’s observation: “What held Allen Ginsberg and would hold him for the rest of his life was the sweetness and sympathy he found in the company of India’s sadhus, charlatans, poets and saints. They sang to him and they held his hand… The blue hand he grasped was not necessarily that of the pied piper Krishna, the ashen Shiva, or the mad and motherly Kali and Tara. The blue hand was something far more ineffable, delicate, and tender…Allen realized that he would not, after all, return to America with nothing. He would bring India with him.”
Deborah Baker has left no stone unturned in securing all her material from various Ginsberg archives. A Blue Hand is the result of committed and dedicated scholarship.
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