Deborah Baker discussed her book on Allen Ginsberg’s travels and experiences in India at the Exide Kolkata Literary Meet.
Ginsberg formed lasting ties with poets in Kolkata, shaping his connection with India.
His visit during the Bangladesh Liberation War inspired the poem September on Jessore Road, later recorded with Bob Dylan.
The western world has always had a stereotypical view about India, as a land of snake charmers, elephants and sadhus. In what way do you think Ginsberg changed how the West looks at the East?
I don't think America thought much about India. India was not as pleasant as the UK. India’s image was mainly painted by the English. How many American poets had come to India before Ginsberg? Very few. India was not in their imagination. That came much later and, maybe, Ginsberg had a part to play with that. In the 60’s the Beatles came, and that really opened up ideas about India. Martin Luther King was deeply engaged with India on how they got their freedom, especially the Gandhian ideologies. With Ginsberg, I think a lot of Indian literature came to America.
Do you think his diaries and notes go beyond the superficial images that western media has about India?
There's not much India in this India Diaries. He is not writing about what he's seeing, he's writing about what he's dreaming…and he is dreaming about his friends in New York.
What kind of legacy does he leave behind in American and Indian literature?
People don't study him in colleges, they find him on their own. And I think it is important to know that…because it's part of his appeal, that he is not fed to them via their professors. Allen was anxious about this, he wanted to be praised by the academic world. Kerouac and Burroughs were outsiders, too. And it is important for young people to discover them on their own. It was also how I discovered Kerouac.
How do you see the relevance of Ginsberg’s work in the world today?
I don't think he had the ambition to be an enduring influence. He was a poet who had a great honesty about himself. He had a great sense of humour. He had a lot of pain, anxiety, and fear, but he was never afraid to own the fact that he was gay. He thought marijuana should be legalised, he was also always trying to figure out what the ‘soma’ (intoxicant names in Vedic texts) was. He had this long correspondence with the mythologist R. Gordon Wassom where he thought he could obtain information about mushrooms. There are many sides to him.
Ginsberg had an extended tryst with spirituality. He claimed to have seen God in 1948. Was there anything other than spirituality and drugs that drove him to this extended India tour?
He wanted love. He wanted a Godman he could love…a guru where there would be real love.
What insights did your research reveal about Kolkata poets’ mutual influence on Ginsberg's development?
They were very secular…communists or socialists. Allen was very keen to talk politics…his father was a communist. He wanted to know about their lives, their struggles. I think they were like a Bengali version of who he had been while at Columbia University.
He was not in good health during his travels. You mentioned his kidney condition, which caused frequent urination. He was also staying in remote places with very limited facilities. How do you think these experiences affected him?
It's interesting. As a Beat poet, he kept himself well maintained. He always went to the barber, carried a pocket handkerchief, and wore a suit. The Beats were very different from the hippies. He came to India and he absorbed the aesthetics of jhola bags, sandals, beads, salwar kameez…and that became the form of the hippies. He came to India and had a physical transformation…he grew out his hair, he started losing hair, he almost looked like a sadhu.
It is also important to say that he spent time with the Gandhians… he was in India when the Indo-China war (1962) broke out. He spent some time on the road, marching with (the Vinoba Bhave-led) Gandhians in a planned journey from Delhi to Beijing (which ended after the Chinese government refused the marchers entry). The idea that politics could be a performance was very impactful for him.
When he returned to America, the country was involved in the Vietnam War, he brought back the power to lead and organise anti-war protest events like the “levitation of Pentagon”. He brought flowers for soldier’s rifles, and he chanted OM in the middle of a riot. So, his takeaway from India included his pro-peace politics.
Hope Savage is a very present and absent character in your book. She is like the archetypal muse… for Corso and Ginsberg. Though Ginsberg wasn’t directly misogynist, he did not seem interested in women and did not write for them or promote them…
I don't think it was his job to do that. He was a poet; he must go where his heart pulls him. His heart led him to Kolkata, he was invested in it, and did what he could for the Kolkata poets. I think it's a mistake to expect everything from a man. He didn't do much for the blacks either, though the poet Amiri Baraka was a close friend of his, he was not directly involved with the civil rights movement.
I am saying this from the perspective of the general beat attitude towards women - objectifying them or not treating them as equal poets.
Yes, in that sense, he was very much a product of that time.
How did you decide the style of writing ‘A Blue Hand’?
My sources were mainly his letters and diaries. He was not a great prose stylist; he was not interested in prose. If you see his journals, you will see how he skipped around… just observing and writing down details. Jessore road is basically one detail after another Also, it's not really a poem; he wrote it as a song. So, I tried to make it as coherent as possible for readers to understand Ginsberg through my writing.
How did you balance the non-fiction narrative and the fictional storytelling style so that people are transported to the 60s with you, in a real way.
Non-fiction can do a lot of storytelling. In India, you may not be as exposed to creative non-fiction. The academic non-fiction is more about ideas, my books are more about people.
Do you think if Howl was published today with its heavily obscene content, would it make the same impact?
I don't know. I think it might be pulled off the shelves today.
What do you think Ginsberg would say about the right wing-ruled India today?
(Laughs) So, you want to get me into trouble? I think he would be very discouraged. The same way he felt when India went all militant against China. Overnight he saw the peaceful, spiritual Indians become raging anti-China demonstrators. He was disillusioned.
What about Ginsberg in America today? I imagine to be a poet like him in this climate of global rise of the right wing would be suffocation.
He would have found a way. I wish we had someone like him now.
Sreemanti Sengupta is a poet and freelance writer
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