Jazz On The Ektara

That Beatsian year—of tantra, drugs, peace and poetry

by Prabodh Parikh

It is while reading William Blake and masturbating dreamily that Allen Ginsberg heard unearthly voices and had a vision of God. After maturing in the company of Beats like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso, the pope of the poets of the Beat generation arrived in India, aged 37, in 1962. Perhaps he came to confirm his divine intoxication without the psychiatrist’s help, or to heal himself of being a poet in America—to find gurus, salvation, cheap ganja, Kalis and fellow poets—or merely to roam ancient cities like Benares and burning ghats such as Neemtola in Calcutta. Or perhaps to be able to return home singing kirtans on the harmonium in the streets of New York and around City Light Bookstore in San Francisco, fulfilling Walt Whitman’s prophecy: Finally shall come the poet worthy of that name,/The true son of God shall come singing his songs.
But he did return home with a compliment from Naboni Das Baul, who said of Ginsberg that "he is a born Baul and will spread the Baul message and, as a result, true peace, friendship and dharma will arrive."
Deborah Baker weaves her story, moving across continents in time and space, entering into oral histories, journals, asylum records, poetry, anecdotes, legends, diaries, interviews, archives and whatever else that allows her to construct and create the story of the poet’s journey. In the process, we get to walk the lanes and bylanes of poets’ lives, and of their families and companions.
The book is written in a manner that resembles a jam session in a jazz club in Greenwich village. It has a free form, beginning in the present and circling back and around, improvising as it flows in and out of episodes and encounters. It mixes inner and outer impulses with the skilful use of collages. As a result, it does full justice to the multiple points of view which is how the book is conceived and formed.
Paragraphs have the crispness of John Coltrane-like saxophone notes. They move between moods, events, journeys, landscapes and family histories, cutting across politics, poetry and persons. When, for example, the woman protagonist Hope Savage arrives in Tehran, "spring had arrived, the roses were in bloom and the air was rife with CIA conspiracy."
Allen Ginsberg’s adventures and explorations in India into different traditions of sadhana included drug-induced peak experiences and midnight forays into tantric rituals (not to mention his constant gay companion, Peter Orlowski). The book effectively describes Ginsberg’s meetings and dialogues with the who’s who of ashrams, both maharishis and contemporary masters in the business of spirituality. The book is full of one-liners that linger in the reader’s mind and reveal the nature of wisdom that the orient has to offer. There is the Dalai Lama, smiling mischievously, asking Ginsberg: "If you take LSD can you see what is there in the briefcase?" And then there is Banke Bihari, a former lawyer and an intimate of Gandhi, Tagore, Krishnamurthi, Ramana Maharishi and Sri Aurobindo, who provides Ginsberg with what comes nearest to an answer to the Beatnik’s search in India for gurus and gods: "Take Willam Blake as your saint", and "Know that it is not God you are seeking but the love he inspires." Ginsberg reports this back home as "the best Oriental wisdom I heard yet. So I got more or less what I came here to find out."
The book also gives us an insight into the evolving aesthetics of Beat poetry. Ginsberg writes, "What we are writing in America today is to create a new prosody, trying to reach out to Red Indians and Jazz for clues." It informs us of arguments between Ginsberg and Snyder on the cult of drugs that illuminates the complex question of poetry and satori.There are stories of self-seeking through friendship, sex, drugs, meditations and flippant, cultivated and outrageous critiques of the bhadralok.
Deborah Baker’s accounts of encounters between Indian poets (mostly Bengali) and Ginsberg are useful. We have Arun Kolatkar translating Ginsberg into Marathi and various manifestos coming out in different Indian languages which sounded like Ginsberg.
The book is as much about Beatniks as about their women companions. The nerve centre of the book is the story of Hope Savage, the femme enfant and saint, forever wandering, roaming the streets of Calcutta with an air of mystery. She emerges as the unfathomable "other" of the Beat generation. Unlike Ginsberg, she is "free as birds in the air". As Baker writes, "The very first articles she set aside in her packing was any notion of home, unlike Ginsberg who carried his past everywhere."