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Allen
Ginsberg
in
India:
An
Interview
SURANJAN
GANGULY
Allen
Ginsberg's association
with
India began in
1962,
when he spent
over a year there
with
Peter
Orlovsky,
travelling and looking for a
spiritual
teacher. There were
visits
to the
Himalayas
with
Gary
Snyder
and
Joanne
Kyger, to the caves of Ajanta and
Ellora,
to Buddhist
shrines in Sanchi and Sarnath, protracted stays in Calcutta and
Benares, and meetings
with
mystics, yogis, poets, writers, musicians,
and
religious leaders like the
Dalai
Lama. He also met, without
knowing,
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan lama who
would
come to the U.S. in the
1970s,
set up the Näropa Institute at Boulder,
Colorado,
and become Ginsberg's teacher. In 1970, Ginsberg pub-
lished
the journals he had kept
during
his stay, and the
following
year
he was back in India in the aftermath of the Bangladesh war. Now
planning
his
third
trip in 1994, Ginsberg gave this interview last
July
in
the apartment he rents each summer in Boulder
while
teaching at
the
Jack
Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa
Institute.
So inFebmary 1962
Peter
Orlovsky and you arrived in Bombay zvith
only
a dollar . . .
Very
little money.
Did
we only have a dollar? We went looking for
mail,
and there was probably some money waiting for us. We'd
been out of touch for a long time, going on a boat to the Red Sea
to Dar es Salaam and Mombasa and then to Bombay.
Was
there
already the 60s craze to go East, to "spiritual India " and all
that?
I had already been to Europe and spent several years there and
that was a traditional thing as in the nineteenth century and early
twentieth century—the American in Paris. By 1961, I was more
interested in going beyond the traditional expatriate role or
ARIEL:
A Review of
International
English Literature, 24:4, October 1993
22
SURANJAN
GANGULY
voyage, of
wandering
out in the East, particularly India, the most
rich
and exquisite and aesthetically attractive culture. And also
least expensive. . . . But at that time India was pretty
well
un-
known.
There weren't that many people who went there. There
were rare people, famous rare people who did that, but it wasn't a
whole
generation that took it on. It
became
a stereotype almost
instantly
when
Esquire
sent
some photographer to take pictures
of us and put out a fake cover
with
a guy who looked like me, and
a piece on beatniks in India.
And
that apparently was a model for
a lot of people going there. And then I published my Indian
journals and that encouraged a lot of poor people to go looking
for drugs. ... But, then, I think it was a very valuable experience
for many Americans. You
will
find
any number of advanced
Canadian
and
American
practitioners who were there in the 60s
and
learnt Tibetan and who translated major works and were
interpreters for
visiting
lamas. So there was a whole network of
understanding,
of experience, of education that led ultimately
to things like the Naropa Institute, to an institutionalization of
the meeting of Eastern and Western minds.
What did you associate India chiefly with
?
You
know, it was thirty years ago and I don't remember very
clearly
except snake charmers and... I really didn't
know
what to
ask for, but I had the idea of going there to look for a teacher.
That was definitely the purpose. I had read the Bhagavad
Gita
and
Ramakrishna's
Table
Talk,
the Tibetan Book of the Dead and
a lot of Buddhist
writing.
I had some idea of
yoga
but not much.
Actually,
when I was twelve years old I heard an American give a
lecture on yoga in Patterson,
New
Jersey.
That always intrigued
me and it's
still
vivid
in my
mind.
. . . I had read some
Krishnamurthy,
some saint poetry, some Yogananda, a little of
the Mahabharata, some of the Vedas, and translations by Isher-
wood
and Prabhavananda of the Upanishads. I had also read
Lin
Yu
Tang's
Wisdom
of
the
East.
Then on the ship I read A
Passage
to
India
and Kim, the
Jataka
tales
and some Ramayana.
What
about
the cultural
scene—for
example, did you see Satyajit Ray's
films in New York in the
50s?
INTERVIEW
WITH
ALLEN
GINSBERG
23
Oh
yeah, but not that many. I remember
Pather
Panchali
and
being very impressed by that. But on our way to India, at
Mom-
basa, I saw a
film
which outdid Disney and
would
make millions
of
dollars
if
shown
in
America.
It was called
Sampoorna
Ramayana,
and
it was my real introduction to Indian mythology, to specific
Indian
attitudes. Boy! It was amazing! Ganesh was so pretty and
amusing
and sophisticated compared to the very heavy-handed,
very
serious Western regard for God—only one of them, watch
out!1 An interesting,
sweet
and innocent
film,
probably more
culturally
wise than anything by Disney.
Were
you familiar with the Indian classical traditions in
music
and
dance?
I had
seen
Uday Shankar, an old man, dancing at
City
Center,
New
York, and
there
was some Shiva dance that he did that was
absolutely astounding. I had never
seen
anything like that—
such absolute and subtle control of the whole body so that a wave
of energy could pass, beginning at the top of the
skull
and move
down,
go up the arm, and down to the belly, and from left to
right.
It was like a current of electricity. It was one of the most
extraordinary and
ecstatic
artistries I had ever seen.
Did the
books
you
read
provide a framework for
such
experiences
?
In
the Bhagavad
Gita,
there
is a visionary moment when Krishna
shows himself
with
armies flowing from his mouth. That's a little
bit like the high point of
vision
that you get in Dante's
Inferno
or
some of Blake's "Last Judgment" or other poems, and to me it
seemed immediately universal.... The Gita is really an universal
poem, really archetypal. I had had some similar visionary experi-
ences
on my own—in the late
40s
they were related to Blake, and
then in the early
50s
and late 50s I had some minor experience of
psychedelic drugs—peyote, mescalin, the cactus, and then in
'59
lysergic acid.2 So I'd
seen
a lot of internal mándalas in my
mind
that reminded me of the pictures I'd
seen
in Tibetan
Buddhism
and of the universal form of Krishna in the
Gita.
So I
was tuned into that
kind
of mythologie archetype as a real experi-
ence
of consciousness, and I was looking for some way of
making
it
more permanent, or mastering it or getting clearer about it in
24
SURANJAN
GANGULY
my
own
mind....
I was interested in what that older culture
still
had
as a
living
transmission of
spiritual
and visionary energy
because in the West there
didn't
seem to be one.
Since you mention drugs, did you know about soma, a god and a
hallucinogenic plant in ancient India, with roots in heaven
?
I was very interested in soma. I had met Robert
Gordon
who had
a lot of experience of mushrooms and who had a theory that
soma was a certain mushroom. So I was prepared to take that
mythology
a little more literally than most Westerners, as signify-
ing
something more literal on a
spiritual
level.
There were realms
of modalities of consciousness that were available and real, that
were not
within
the Western psychological category except
maybe in
William
James's
The
Varieties
of
Religious
Experience
or in
the hermetic tradition of Blake.
Was
there
a
sense
that
the
West
had failed you in certain
respects
?
Well,
as I had written six-seven years before in
"Howl":
"Moloch
whose
fate
is a
cloud
of sexless hydrogen." I had read Spengler's
The Decline of the
West
in 1945-46 and was
already
anticipating
the
decline
of
empire
which
took a
long
time to happen, but in
half
a
century it was almost gone, almost over. . . . So there was a
realization
that the West was impermanent, that the entire West-
ern
rationalistic, Aristotlean
mind
was causing chaos, and I was
interested in Eastern thought, all summed up in that gesture—
the very Indian gesture—when you ask, "Are you enjoying your-
self?" and an Indian
will
shake his head . . . shakes his head. It
could
be either yes or no depending on the context, and I was
interested in that context
with
its subdety of expression rather
than
in a Western context. . . . Then there was something else I
was interested in: the notion of the
Kali
Yuga.3
I had read Vico's
theories of
Golden
Ages, Stone Ages, Iron Ages, and Bronze
Ages,
of the cyclical nature of things, so I was curious about the
idea
of eternal return and the cyclical evolution of
kalpas
and
also,
about the staggering number of
kalpas.4
That fitted in
with
my
idea of the decline of empire, of an aeon being over. The
scope of the cycles of consciousness and incarnation in
Hindu
INTERVIEW
WITH
ALLEN
GINSBERG 25
and Buddhist mythology was very attractive given the smaller
historical cycles of the American century.
So
afler
almost
a
year
and a half in India, what did you
find
there
that
you had not
found
in the
West?
A
more intimate
awareness
of the relation between people and
God.
Just
the very notion of Ganesh
with
a
noose
in one hand and
a
rasgoolla
in the other, and his trunk in the
rasgoolla,
riding
a
mouse....5 Such an idea of a god, such a sophisticated, quixotic,
paradoxical combination of the human and the divine, the
metaphysical and the psychological! You don't often get
that
in
Christianity,
except
maybe in
some
esoteric
Christianity. The
idea of
an
entire culture suffused
with
respect
for
that
mythology,
that
religion and its practices,
that
poor people could under-
stand its sophistication and grant things
that
hard-headed West-
erners
are
still
trying to
kill
each other over. That was a revelation:
how
deeply the
sense
of a spiritual
existence
could
penetrate
everyday relations, the
streets
and
street
signs . . . Naga sadhus
walking
around naked—people who would have been arrested
in
America6 . . . or for
that
matter—I
remember writing to
Kerouac—everybody walking around in their underwear, in
striped boxer shorts. What
would
seem
outrageous or
strange
to
Americans was
just
normal—it was hot and people wore very
light
cotton—it
seemed
so obvious. That showed me the absurd
artificiality
of
some
American customs. . . . And then
just
the
notion
of somebody being a businessman and then renouncing
the
world
and being a
sannyasi
and going around
with
an intel-
ligent expression looking for
moksha,
that
was such a switch from
the American notion of business, such a good model, but it
doesn't work for even Indians now.7 ... And then the availability
of
ganja
and its use in religious festivals and
ceremonies
was a
great
source of
release
for an American used to government
dictatorship of
all
psychedelic drugs (even marijuana), to prohi-
bitions, murders, beatings, corruption.8 At
least
in India
there
was
some
familiarity
with
what it was.
But did you
find
the
same
kind
of tolerance for sex,
given
India's
notorious homophobia?
26
SURANJAN
GANGULY
In
Bombay someone took us to a district where there were many
transvestites, but whatever the situation, it was familiar, domesti-
cated. . . . They don't have transvestite districts in America, of
course!
Although
I was in India for a year and a half, I never had a
love
affair
with
an Indian. It was
just
that I was so absorbed in
whatever I was seeing that I wasn't able to connect emotionally
with
any particular Indian.
During
our last days in Calcutta,
somebody took me to a gigantic beerhall of a basement. . . .
All
homosexuals. I didn't realize it even existed. Maybe I didn't ask
about it. I
wish
I had
known.
Since
you mention Calcutta, were you, like
most
foreigners, overwhelmed
by the
city
at first?
I had no idea about Calcutta except I had heard of the Black
Hole
of
Calcutta,
but I didn't know what it
was.
I met Asoke Fakir
there, who
just
appeared at my hotel one day and
became
my
guide.
He was both a fool and at the same time a devotional man,
in
some
respects
the most intelligent person I met in Calcutta,
who
knew what we wanted to see—low life, religious life, tantric
life.
I wanted to go to some place where people smoked a litde
ganja and were serious, so he took me on a walk along the banks
of the Hooghly to
Howrah
Bridge and to
Nimtallah
burning
ghat.9
What was your experience of the burning
ghats?
I went there several times a week and stayed there very late at
night.
For one thing I was amazed by the openness of death, the
visibility
of death
which
is hidden and powdered and rouged and
buried
in a coffin in the West. To suggest the opposite, the
openness of it is like an education
which
is totally different from
the cultivation of the notion of the corpse as
still
relevant and
alive
and "don't kick it over." There they
just
lay it out and burn it
and
the
family
watches the
dissolution;
they see the emptiness in
front of them, the emptiness of the body in front of them. So I
had
the opportunity to see the inside of the human body, to see
the
face
cracked and torn, fallen off, the brains bubbling and
burning.
And
reading Ramakrishna at the time: the dead body is
nothing
but an old
pillow,
an empty
pillow,
like burning an old
INTERVIEW
WITH
ALLEN
GINSBERG
27
pillow.
Nothing to be afraid of. So it removed a lot of the
fear
of
the corpse
that
we have in the West. And then I saw people
singing
outside on Thursday nights and other nights too. That
was amazing, and the noise was rousing, very
loud,
and I
would
sit
around,
pay attention and listen, and try and get the words. I saw
lady
yogis meditating in the ash pit. I remember one lady who I
thought was
defenseless
and poverty-stricken, so I offered her
some coins and she spit on them and threw them back at me.
And
there
was one very
strange
evening when I drank some
bhang—it
must have been mixed
with
datura—and
went
there
with
a
completely screwed-up head, hallucinating.10 And I thought I
was in the used Vomit Market, everybody was so poor
that
they
were selling vomit! Slept on a
stone
bench inside the temple all
night and woke up and found my slippers gone. Pretty funny ...
In the
journals,
there are so many graphic details of bodies burning—as
if you were getting high on death . . .
I don't think I was. After all death is half of life. I was
just
describing
life as I saw it.
What did you think of the
literary
scene
in Calcutta?
We poets—Sunil Ganguly, Shakti Chatterjee, and others—met a
lot in the
coffee
houses.11
Peter
and I were excited by the idea of
there
being a whole gang of
poets
like
there
were in New York
and
San Francisco, who were friends, and
that
we could commu-
nicate
across
the Pacific Ocean, and
that
East could
meet
West,
and
that
they knew our work, and
that
we could interpret it more
and
show them
poets
like Gregory Corso and others they might
not have heard of.
If you were to go back to India, which cities would you revisit?
Eve a tremendous nostalgia mostly for Calcutta and Benares, and
Benares
particularly
because
I was very happy
there
learning a
lot,
and I had good friends. We had a beautiful house right above
the market place and Dasaswamedh Ghat. There was a balcony
looking
down on the river and an alleyway
that
went down to the
steps.
That's where the
beggars
would
gather. . . . And I remem-
ber getting really hung up on puris and potatoes.
28
SURANJAN
GANGULY
Now wasn't it in Benares
that
the Criminal Investigation Department of
India
got
onto
your
backs'?
Yes.
I don't know
why.
I think
Blitz
newspaper said that we were
CIA
spies. India was then at
war
with
China
over a border dispute,
so... . Peter had a
girlfriend,
a mysterious Bengali
lady,
who was
staying
with
us, and it was considered shocking by of all people
secular Marxists, whereas her family was much more sophisti-
cated, less questioning.
Since you were living in a poor section of the city, how did you react to the
squalor and human misery around you
?
The poverty was
striking,
but I don't know
why
we weren't repel-
led
or angry. We were more interested in what we
could
do, how
to relate to it, how to report it back to the Western
world
in a way
that
would
rouse sympathy and action rather than horror. Peter
was once an ambulance driver so he was not afraid of the home-
less and the sick.
Also,
his own relatives had been in mental
hospitals,
so he was used to dealing
with
the mentally-disturbed.
He
was the heroic type, interested in attempting something. So I
just followed Peter and he took utmost care.
All
this
was thirty years ago. What did India give you
that
has mattered
most,
that
has stayed with you and will always be
there?
The Indian influence was first of
all
on the voice itself
and
on the
notion
of poetry and music coming together. Pound had revived
that notion and shown how for the ancient Greek poets song and
poetry were one, even one
with
dance. The Greek choruses sang
and
danced and chanted, and Homer and Sappho sang
with
a
five-stringed
lyre.
So India helped me to rediscover that relation-
ship
between poetry and song. I heard people singing in the
streets,
chanting mantras, so I began singing mantra too—"Hare
Krishna
Hare Rama" or "Hare Om Namah Sivaye."
And you had
never
heard
such
chanting in America?
I first heard it in India, not in
America.
I had never been to any
Hindu
temple here where people sat and chanted. I owned
books that dealt
with
Buddhist
mantras, but there was no place in
America
where there was mantra chanting or singing except
INTERVIEW
WITH
ALLEN
GINSBERG 29
maybe in the
Vedan
ta temples. So it was not
until
I got to Bombay
that I saw people singing together on the
street;
and in Calcutta,
at
Nimtallah
burning ghat, people
would
gather, as I said, partic-
ularly
on Thursday night,
which
was
Kali
night to sing amazing,
beautiful
choral stuff, and they
would
pass around a chilam and
sing
continuously, "Siya Rama Jai Jai Rama" or "Raghu Pati
Raghav." But it was at the
Magh
Mela
at
Allahabad
that I heard a
Nepalese lady singing "Hare Krishna Hare Rama" and the mel-
ody
was so beautiful that it stuck in my head, and I took it home to
America
in 1963 and began singing it at poetry parties,
after
poetry readings
with
finger cymbals first and later the harmo-
nium.12
And that began to develop into singing and chanting as
part of my poetry readings and led to a deepening of my voice,
which
slowly began to
fill
up my body and
resonate
in the
breast
area (you might say by hyperbole, "heart chakra"), so that I could
talk from there, and that reminded me of the voice of Blake that I
had
heard, as if my youthful apprehension of that voice was a
latent resonance of
my
mature voice. So at public poetry readings
I sang a
great
variety of mantras both Buddhist and
Hindu,
"Shri
Rama Jai Rama Jai Jai Rama," "Hare Krishna" or "Om Shri
Maitreya"
or "Om
Mani
Padme Hum" or "Om" or "Gate Gate
Paragate"
which
I sang quite a bit, the Prajnaparamita sutra.
Then
singing led to transferring my obsession
with
mantra to
sacred song, to Blake, and I began making melodies from Blake's
Songs of Innocence and Experience m 1968, and by 19691 was writing
my
own folk songs and also recording the Blake songs I had set to
music.
In
1963,1
met Bob
Dylan
and got interested in the new
poetry that was in the form of song, influenced by the earlier
Beat
generation, by Kerouac and myself, and by 1970 I was recording
songs
with
him. So things
came
together
with
the seed mantra
planted.
In that respect, India helped me to recover the relation-
ship
between poetry and music, offered me a model as
well
as
gave me saint poetry in song.
I notice when you sing you play the
harmonium
which is very popular in
India.
Any
particular
reason
?
Because
I'm not a musician. I can't play anything. And this is like
a child's instrument; it's so simple I can make out American
30
SURANJAN
GANGULY
chords and sing blues. It's actually a Western instrument, and
oddly
enough the larger harmonium, the foot pedal harmo-
nium,
the church organ, is probably the instrument that Blake
used for his songs; so my first project in English was to set Blake to
music.
Why is it
that
at public readings you
don't
chant
mantra
that
much
anymore?
In
1970, in America, I ran into Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan
lama who founded Naropa. I was showing him on the harmo-
nium
how I sang, and he put a paw on my hand, drunk, and said,
"Remember the silence is
just
as important as the sound." He
then suggested that I not sing all the mantras for they
would
raise
some
kind
of expectation or neurological buzz in the audience;
but he didn't have any teaching to give to stabilize that or to
develop it, and he suggested that
if
I were to sing in public, to sing
"Ah,"
the mantra apppreciation of the voice, or "Om
Muni Muni
Maha
Muni
Sakyamuni e Swaha" about the human Buddha of
the Sakya family, a wise man, or "Gate Gate Paragate"—gone,
gone to the other shore gone, completely gone, vacant
mind,
salutations—something which didn't require a structured
sadhana or practice to have some
effect
and
would
not confuse
people.
I'd like to go
back
to something you
said
at the start of
this
interview—
that
you
were
looking for a
teacher
in India. Did you
find
one?
No.
Well,
yes and no. I found teaching
there
and I found
teachers
there
who really
became
my
teachers
in America. There is a
photograph of Peter and I visiting a monk and it turns out that
the young monk who showed us the altar was Trungpa Rinpoche.
Then I met the Dalai Lama later at Dharamsala and had some
teachings from him. And on a visit to
Kalimpong,
I met Dudjom
Rinpoche, who was the head of the N'yingma
sect
of Tibetan
Buddhism.
I was having a lot of
difficulty
with
LSD—bum trips,
hell
trips, hungry ghost realms—so I asked him about it, and he
gave me some very good advice, which was: If
you
see something
horrible
don't cling to it, and if you see something beautiful,
don't cling to it. Basically
that's
the
essence
of
Buddhist
teaching,
INTERVIEW
WITH
ALLEN
GINSBERG
31
and
it has stuck
with
me all
these
years. It is
still
the seed. And I
met others like Swami Sivananda, who said: "Your heart is your
guru";
and Bankey Behari, who said: "Take Blake for your guru";
and
Citaram Onkar Das Thakur, an old Vaishnav, who said: "If
you
want to
find
a guru, eat certain kinds of food and diet and
repeat
the mantra,
'Guru Guru Guru Guru Guru
Guru'
for
three
weeks."'3
Did you try it?
Yes, sure, of course I did. I also met a lot of interesting yogis.
Someone taught us
pranayam,
which was helpful for a while since
it
creates
some
kind
of mental stabilization.14 But it wasn't
until
ig7o
through Ram Dass—Richard Alpert—who was an old
friend
from the 60s that I met Muktananda, and he asked me if I
had
a meditation practice, and, since, as a matter of
fact,
I
still
didn't
have one, he invited me to Dallas for a weekend and
taught me a practice which I did for a year and a half
until
I met
Trungpa,
who suggested a more rounded form. So from 1972 I
worked
with
the Trungpa in the Tibetan Vajrayana style.15
Shortly
after
you
left
India, you wrote "The Change: Tokyo-Kyoto Express "
in
Japan
and it's widely regarded as a
poem
that
describes
what India did
to you.
Well,
that's
a little corny. It's a change from a sort of a preoccupa-
tion
with
the absolute to a preoccupation
with
the relative,
accepting the body.... I renounce all forms of attachment—"in
my
train
seat
I renounce my power"—I
will
no longer be eternal
or immortal or anything. I'll
just
be me. In a
sense,
it's a transi-
tion,
but I don't think it's that well-expressed. People make a lot
of it, but I don't think it's that good a poem
because
the refer-
ences
are too obscure, some of them like
quasi-kundalini
neuro-
logical
buzzings or zappings. It's really a head trip
with
some
emotion.
What do you think of the rise of
Hindu
fundamentalism in India today?
The
greatness
of India I saw was the absorption into
Hinduism
of
all
the gods—the Western
ones
and the Buddhist ones—and
the open
space,
the accommodation to all varieties of human
32 SURANJAN GANGULY
nature, and I
would
imagine the curse of India
would
be this
exclusiveness.
NOTES
1 Ganesh is a
Hindu
god with the head of an elephant.
2 In 1948, Ginsberg had a visionary experience in which he heard a voice—which
he assumed to be Blake's—reciting "Ah Sunflower."
s In
Hinduism
time is structured in terms of cycles, each cycle subdivided into four
ages
or
yugas,
the last of which is
Kali
Yuga, the age of discord.
4
In
Jainism,
time is also treated as cyclical, divided into recurring periods called
kulpos
or
aeons.
A kalpa has two
phases,
each of which consists of six eras.
5
A rasgoolla is an Indian
sweetmeat
made of ricotta
cheese
dipped in syrup.
6 The Naga
("naked")
sadhus are holy men who do not
wear
clothes and belong to a
sect
that was originally militant.
" A sannyasi is an ascetic who has renounced society and
seeks
moksha, which in
Hinduism
represents liberation from karma
(one's
deeds
and
consequences)
and
samsara (rebirth).
» Ganja is marijuana smoked usually from a chilam, a clay pipe, passed around by
smokers.
y Hindus cremate their dead at Nimtallah Ghat on the banks of the Hooghly (as the
Ganges
is called in Calcutta).
10 Bhangis hemp mixed with almond
milk,
drunk usually during religious festivals.
The
seeds
of the datura plant
serve
as an intoxicant.
11 Two distinguished contemporary Bengali
poets.
Sunil
Ganguly is also a well-
known novelist.
12 The Magh
Mela
is a fair held
every
year
in January.
13
A Vaishnav is a worshipper of
Vishnu,
the
Hindu
god who
pervades
the universe,
holding
it
together.
H
Pranayam is a yogic breathing exercise.
15
Vajrayana is the school of Tibetan tantric Buddhism.
