Beatles: Rishikesh on the rocks

A few weeks ago, a fellow music journalist and I were talking on Twitter about the curious obsession Indian newspaper editors seem to have with classic rock bands and their long-ago India sojourns... the time members of Led Zeppelin played at a small nightclub in Mumbai, the time the Police played in India and, the most frequently regurgitated of them all, the time the Beatles came to Rishikesh.

The initial trigger for the discussion was a cringe-inducing hagiographic article celebrating the 50th anniversary of Led Zeppelin’s formation. The odiously long tribute to the British rock pioneers illustrates the usual problems with mainstream Indian ‘rock writing’ — a mix of bad research, long-buried ‘sex, drugs, rock and roll’ clichés, outdated slang, and the breathless faux gonzo prose that otherwise excellent writers inexplicably adopt when writing about music. But its worst crime, by far, is the sepia-tinted nostalgia, even as it fails to engage — critically or otherwise — with the country’s strong, vibrant and contemporary homegrown music industry.

So when a copy of

Across The Universe: The Beatles In India , by Ajoy Bose — best known as an authority on Mayawati and dalit politics — landed on my desk for review, my initial reaction was of weary scepticism. “Not this story again,” I said to myself. It didn’t help that the book’s introduction featured the groan-worthy and wildly inaccurate claim that the Beatles “father[ed] the important and still popular musical genre of rock”. Hardly an auspicious start. More than anything, though, I wondered why we needed another book about one of the most written about bands in the history of popular music.

But a few chapters in, my scepticism fell away as I was drawn in by Bose’s lovingly crafted and extensively researched tale of the Beatles’s short-lived but spectacular love affair with India. Conscious of his lack of expertise as a music critic, Bose abstains from offering original critique or analysis of the band’s music, instead leaning heavily on the works of American scholars — especially

Revolution in the Head author, Ian MacDonald — to illustrate the influence their dalliance with Indian music and spirituality had on their songwriting. What the book lacks in fresh analysis, it makes up for in its exploration of the social, intellectual and historical context within which this unlikely meeting of East and West took place, and its impact on the principal characters. Marshalling extensive quotes and excerpts from other sources, along with a handful of new material from fresh interviews, Bose brings to life the many conflicts — between tradition and modernity, spirituality and commercialism, and between the band members themselves — that crystallised around their time in India.

The story begins on the set of Help! , the Beatles’ s and Richard Lester’s 1965 comedy-adventure film that is a parody of a Thuggee cult worshipping the goddess ‘Kali’. Orientalist and full of racist stereotypes as it was, the film’s shoot introduced George Harrison to the sitar, kickstarting the guitarist and composer’s lifelong fascination with Indian music and culture. Harrison would soon seek out Ravi Shankar to teach him the sitar, leading to a deep friendship and Harrison’s eventual adoption of Hinduism. But he wasn’t alone. At a time of growing Indophilia among the western cultural elite, and having been introduced to the mind-bending wonders of marijuana and LSD, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr too found themselves attracted by the — real or imagined — charms of India. Bose maps out the series of improbable coincidences and chance meetings that led the Fab Four to transcendental meditation and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Rishikesh ashram.

Of even more interest is Bose’s account of Mahesh Yogi’s spectacular rise as one of India’s most well-known ‘holy men’, powered by a mixture of personal charm, business cunning and the gullibility of the Western ‘Eat Love Pray’ crowd. The quotes and anecdotes paint the relationship between the Beatles and Mahesh Yogi as a marriage of convenience between a marketing genius eyeing a global reach and wild-eyed rockstars with a wild-ride adventure approach to attaining Nirvana. The Beatles’s stay at the ashram — described by American Vedas author, Philip Goldberg, as “the most momentous spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those forty days in the wilderness” — takes up a large chunk of the book. Bose talks not just about the Beatles’s efforts to learn transcendental meditation, but also the effect the trip had on their relationship with one another and on their songwriting, ending with conflicting accounts of the group’s unexpected and controversial return to England. The book doesn’t really provide a conclusive answer to the one big question surrounding this entire episode: Did Mahesh Yogi make a pass at American actress and fellow ashram resident Mia Farrow? But, by the end of the book, you realise that, either way, this was always an experiment with an end-date. Still, Bose makes a convincing case that the time spent at the ashram would have long-reaching effects on the Beatles’s music and their future.

 

 

 

While the lack of significant fresh information means Across The Universe is unlikely to make too big a splash, it is nevertheless a worthy addition to the annals of Beatles scholarship. The only real qualm I have is that Bose gives the Beatles an easy pass when it comes to the essentialism and orientalism of their statements about India and Hinduism. And phrases like “the Beatles and their women” have no place in literary writing — even those about notoriously philandering rockstars — in 2018. These quibbles aside, this is an excellent book. Dear newspaper editors, the next time you want to repeat the old ‘Beatles in Rishikesh’ story, please just publish an excerpt from this book instead?

Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer