Allen Ginsberg’s Indian Journals
by Usman Ahmedani
This event explored Allen Ginsberg’s experiences travelling through India in the early 1960s – a relatively unknown side of the Beat poet. Ginsberg was commonly renowned for his opposition to capitalism and frank depictions of homosexuality in the conformist atmosphere of 1950s America. Each panellist was uniquely qualified to offer their thoughts: Roger Elsgood is currently developing a stage production based on Ginsberg’s Indian Journals, Barry Miles is Ginsberg’s biographer, and Michael Horovitz was a close friend of Ginsberg’s following their joint appearance at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965.
Each panellist started by recalling their personal memories of Ginsberg. Horovitz discovered the Beat poets while at Oxford, and claims to have learnt more about literature from Ginsberg than from the Oxford English Literature syllabus. Meanwhile, Miles recounted an amusing anecdote from Ginsberg’s 39th birthday party, when the poet bumped into John Lennon and Yoko Ono stark naked, but for a pair of underpants over his head and a sign over his privates beseeching, ‘Do Not Disturb.’
Drugs were a major part of Ginsberg’s life in India: part of his attempt to expand the field of consciousness. Death is also everywhere in his poetry, demonstrated in memorable images of ‘burning ghats.’ This preoccupation is explained by Ginsberg’s life: his mother died in a mental hospital, paralysed by schizophrenia, and he was to be diagnosed with liver cancer later, the same disease that killed his father. In a sense, the panel claimed, Ginsberg had been rehearsing his own death for decades. There were among the reasons that caused him to turn to Tibetan Buddhism in 1971, nearly a decade after his trip to India.
One question from the audience asked whether Ginsberg followed in the counter-cultural fashion of Westerners travelling to India as a rite of passage, only to treat it like a supermarket? Perhaps, but Ginsberg’s engagement with India was no mere fad: he had been searching for a guru long beforehand. As Elsgood pointed out, Ginsberg should be remembered for his unique ability to capture fleeting images in his verse—rather like we might do nowadays visually with a phone camera. In this regard, the event argued for a commonality between Ginsberg’s Indian-inspired poetry and his other more famous work.
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