During 1962 and 1963,the American poet Allen Ginsberg lived, worked and traveled in India, inadvertently blazing a trail for many other like-minded spirits who would make similar journeys there throughout the Sixties in search of alternative enlightenment.

Ginsberg kept a journal – an often chaotic, haphazard document which, after five years of transcription was published as his ‘Indian Journals’, and revealed, amongst drug-fuelled, stream-of-consciousness ramblings and random moments seized in words as if with a contemporary phone camera – a collection of daily writings of rare beauty and insight.

The journals encompass three themes – an on-going rail against US imperialism during the period of the Cold War, his seemingly fearless fascination with Class A narcotics and his open embrace of the places, people and the spiritual life of India. Ginsberg’s Indian travels took him to Bombay and Varanasi but he spent most time in Calcutta living frugally in a down-at-heel Muslim hotel with his partner Peter Orlovsky.

This event will focus on Ginsberg’s writings about India, especially on his time in Calcutta, a significant theme of which is his attraction to the ceremonies of death conducted at the burning ghats which provide some of his most lucid, if gruesome prose. It will take the form of a conversation between British poet Michael Horovitz, who knew Ginsberg well following his epic appearance at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, and Barry Miles, the legendary Miles of Indica Bookshop, Ginsberg’s official biographer and close friend. Michael Horovitz will read extracts from the journals. The event will be introduced and chaired by producer Roger Elsgood who is currently developing a stage production based on Ginsberg’s Indian Journals for their 50th anniversary next year.

‘Allen Ginsberg: Indian Journals’ is an Art and Adventure production for the DSC South Asian Literature Festival.