Josh Philip Ross

James Hilton, Lost Horizon (1933)

You may never have heard of Lost Horizon or James Hilton (who also wrote Goodbye, Mr. Chips), but you have heard of the magical place he invented: Shangri-La.

Lost Horizon is the story of a group of Westerners who, fleeing a revolution in Afghanistan, are crash-landed in the Himalayas and find their way to a mysterious monastery called Shangri-La. It turns out that this monastery is run not by an Asian, but by a Catholic monk from Luxembourg who has discovered the secret, if not to immortality, then to immense longevity. The head lama, seeing that he will die soon, recruits one of the Westerners to take over, presenting Shangri-La as a kind of repository of human culture and decency, hidden in the mountains, that may be able to weather the storm and share its wisdom after the coming dark age. The Westerners face a choice between a peaceful, contemplative life lasting centuries, but separated from the outside world, or an attempt at escape.

The novel really took off after the Frank Capra movie in 1937 and its publication as the first Pocket Book paperback in 1939. During the years of World War II, the idea of Shangri-La seems to have taken on a powerful resonance. When President Roosevelt converted a Maryland government camp called Hi-Catoctin into a presidential retreat in 1942, he named it Shangri-La — later renamed Camp David by President Eisenhower.

As a novel, Lost Horizon is an amusement cleverly laced with high culture references designed to make the reader feel smart while not demanding any actual knowledge, a trick Umberto Eco would later put to use to great effect. Artistically Lost Horizon is unimportant, and it has very little to do with anything actually Himalayan. The monastery a pastiche of Chinoiserie, complete with a beautiful Chinese girl who plays Rameau beautifully on the harpsichord, of all things.

For our purposes, though — understanding the train of Western fascination with South Asia that put one young traveler there in 1997 — Lost Horizon is a key of the puzzle. As a mass popularization of Theosophist-inspired ideas about a mystical Tibet populated with hidden Masters, Lost Horizon’s impact is enormous. The name Shangri-La began to attach to all sorts of things, not least rock and roll: the girl group supposedly got it from a Queens restaurant, and it turns up on an album by The Kinks in 1969 and by The Electric Light Orchestra in 1976. In fact, Shangri-La seems to have floated free of any real connection with the Himalayas at all, yet it seems undeniable that it contributed to a growing fascination with that part of the world at a time when Nepal was first opening to tourism and as a generation of young people set out on what would become known as the Hippie Trail (or the Hashish Trail) to Kathmandu.

Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America (1996)

If you want to understand how the East became mystical for Americans of the sixties and seventies, you have to understand an earlier wave of spiritualism. The names may be familiar even if you’re not sure who they are: Gurdjieff, Annie Besant, Krishnamurti. None was so influential as Helena Blavatsky, who in the middle of the nineteenth century proclaimed herself both to have traveled to Tibet (almost certainly a lie) and to have been contacted mystically by Spiritual Masters who resided in the mountains of Tibet.

Why people believed this Russian fabulist is difficult to understand, and one wishes Peter Washington had expended less energy ridiculing his subjects and more energy delving into why and how they came to mean so much to their followers. One also wishes he paid more attention to the role of women in these organizations, and how that stood out from the rest of society, creating a space for female empowerment that was otherwise hard to find. Still, this is the best and most detailed account — often overly detailed — we are ever likely to get of the evolving world of spiritualism that began with Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society, then expanded out in various directions to encompass various teachers.

The influence of the Theosophists was surprising, and surprisingly widespread. Most startling is the impact it had on the places from which they claimed to derive their teachings. Annie Besant, who became president of the Theosophical Society, was also an important voice for Indian independence and an influence on Gandhi. And the Theosophist embrace of Sri Lankan Buddhism had an impact on Sri Lanka itself, reviving it there while popularizing it in the West. Walter Evans-Wentz, the translator of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, was a Theosophist. So was Alexandra David-Neel, who wrote Magic and Mystery in Tibet and inspired everyone from Kerouac and Ginsburg to Alan Watts and Ram Dass.

Washington’s approach can be frustrating. His meticulous attention to the internal disputes of the very disputatious spiritual organizations he covers at times causes him to lose sight of the larger story. There are hints that we will see how all this Theosophy business will emerge as the Age of Aquarius, but we never quite see it happen, instead concluding with vignettes of the remains of these older organizations as they limp toward the end of the 20th century, dated relics gone respectable, like Esalen or The Society for Ethical Culture. One needs to move on to Karma Cola to see the aftermath, but that work is not, like this one, scholarly, and there’s a gap. Still, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon provides an important part of the story of the West’s fascination with the East, showing how the mostly academic and literary ideas of the oriental renaissance were transformed into a popular esotericism that continues to this day in crystal shops and yoga studios across America.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

I read On the Road because something close to half of the travelers interviewed in Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland’s The Hippie Trail: A History cited it as an inspiration. As a story, there’s not much to it. Sal Paradise goes to places like Denver, San Francisco, and eventually Mexico by hitching, hoboing, and driving. Along the way, he does a lot of drinking with friends, treating women like accessories rather than people, and getting very revved up about trips to jazz clubs.

There’s a lot to dislike about the book, which emerged before feminism or civil rights had gone mainstream. Like many a travel writer before and since — Thoreau comes to mind — Sal’s adventures are financed by periodic infusions from family members who actually work for a living. And this is the story of a white male slumming with poor Mexican immigrants and Black people and even poor whites whose misfortunes he romanticizes relentlessly.

But that’s not all it is. On the Road is also exuberant, joyful, wild, and amoral — thrilling the way Jane’s Addiction records were thrilling, with lines like “Ain’t no wrong now, ain’t no right” and “I love them whores, they never judge you / ’cause what can you say when you’re a whore?” There’s something enticing in the mad verve for life and the whole I-don’t-give-a-fuck ethos.

On the Road is blessedly short on self-justification, but there are hints of a reason for the ennui that afflicts so many of the characters. Though published in 1957, On the Road was first written in 1951, about travels that took place in 1947 and 1948, in the shadow of the war, which comes up only obliquely in references to people met in the Navy or to GI money coming in. For a later generation, raised on Red scares, under-the-desk drills for nuclear attacks, and paranoid conformity, the echo of that rejectionism was a siren call, and road tripping seemed like a way to break free of the constraints of ordinary life.

And what about the East? Sal Paradise never does make it further than Mexico, but as he puts it, “It was only Nuevo Laredo but it looked like Holy Lhasa to us.” Then he fantasizes about a grander journey and calls Benares “the Capital of the World.” The exotic dream of the holy Orient is there already in 1957, back before Ginsburg’s India trip, back when Kathmandu tourism was still the preserve of rich retirees, mountaineers, and big-game hunters. How did he know? How did Kerouac, never leaving North America, become the pied piper for a generation who would travel ten thousand miles to throw him off for Krishna, the greatest pied piper in world history?

We’ll see. Dharma Bums is on the reading list. But from what I understand, all this mystical mumbo jumbo was missing from the scroll version of On the Road, the famous first draft written on a single long sheet of paper. Somewhere between 1951 and 1957, it emerged. It’s notable that Huxley published The Doors of Perception in 1954, and 1956 brought the publication of the influential The Third Eye, a bizarre fake story of Tibetan Buddhism written by one Cyril Henry Hoskin, who claimed to have been occupied by the spirit of a monk named Lobsang Rampa. A swirl of poorly sourced dharma and karma and Tibetan mysticism was in the air, ready to coalesce into the saffron-and-sitar sixties.

Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (1950)

This is an insane book.

I don’t mean that it’s bad, or that it’s wrong. The basic premise — that there was a second, oriental renaissance in Europe that followed the first, Greco-Roman renaissance, and that this second renaissance, precipitated by the discovery and translation of ancient (mostly) Sanskrit texts like the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Bhagava Purana, had a profound effect on European philosophy and literature — is hard to argue with, especially after all of the data Schwab marshals.

And boy, does he marshal. The editors of this volume — an English translation of the 1950 French original, produced in the 1970s — warn that the bibliography is only partial, and couldn’t possibly encompass every work Schwab mentions. It runs to twenty-six pages.

What comes off as insane about this book is Schwab’s casual familiarity with the entire world of French and German orientalist scholarship for two hundred years. By all appearances, Schwab somehow not only read all the major works by all the major scholars, but also all of their minor works, and all the works of the minor scholars too, and the entire runs of periodicals like the Journal Asiatique and Reveu de deux Mondes. He knows what this minor figure said about that minor figure in someone’s salon in 1814. He is also intimately familiar with the literature and philosophy of the time, everyone from Hugo and Nerval to Goethe and Schopenhauer.

I suppose Schwab had time on his hands. Simmering beneath all of this Borgesian erudition is a thesis that one imagines must have been personal. For Schwab, the French and Germans took the oriental renaissance in two incompatible directions. For the Revolutionary French, the discoveries of oriental antiquity led to a kind of universalizing principle, a search for the commonalities across all times and nations. The Germans, meanwhile, smarting from the humiliation of French conquest and growing increasingly isolated as French rather than German became the international European language, somehow linked themselves to the Indo-Aryans and imagined that the deeper origins of all valuable culture belonged not to the Greeks and Romans, but to the Aryans from whom the Greeks and Romans borrowed their culture and to the Germanic barbarians who conquered Europe thereafter.

The German theory doesn’t hold up to scrutiny or make much sense, but it was a fantasy that played out gruesomely in the years Schwab must have been conducting his research. As a Jew, Schwab was dismissed from his government post in Paris in 1940, then reinstated in 1944. I haven’t been able to discover how he survived the war — this man who delves into the personal lives of generations of scholars never says a word about himself — but it must not have been pleasant.

Reading this book was a slog, though I would recommend it to anyone whose field of study is what used to be called orientalism. It is very French, which means a lot of abstract diction and philosophical maundering that may or may not mean something if you can parse it, as well as an assumption that the reader knows all about the Second Empire and the Paris Commune and the like, in the way that an American author might drop a casual reference to Brown v. Board of Education or Prohibition-era bootlegging and expect readers to understand it. The English edition has a preface by Edward Said, which is as erudite and impenetrable as his Orientalism. (Indeed, it was Said who led me to Schwab by continually quoting him, and you can see that Said picked up not just facts but a whole style of discourse, not necessarily for the good. Orientalism can sometimes read like an angried up version of The Oriental Renaissance.) I’m fairly sure I didn’t understand half of this book, but I’m glad I read it.

Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (2017)

Since before it was founded, experts (one hesitates, in this context, to call them pundits) have been predicting that India is too diverse, too poor, too fractious to survive as a single nation. To gather up this endlessly complex state and its history into a single volume is a formidable task. To make it readable, at times gripping, with coherent themes and threads, is a triumph of scholarship and literary craft. (Salman Rushdie did it, more or less, in Midnight’s Children, but as a novel, with the freedom to ignore or change whatever didn’t fit the story.)

In fact India began as two nations, and it came as a bitter surprise to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, that Jawarhalal Nehru decided to use the colonial English name for his country, rather than calling it the Republic of Bharat or something else entirely. Except in fact India began as dozens of nations, if you count all the princely states, not to mention lingering European colonies, that were eventually absorbed into the Republic. (You’ll find that the word “subcontinent” is extremely rare until the 1920s, and takes off in the 1940s, when the politically amorphous region called India had suddenly to be distinguished from a potential, then actual nation-state called India.)

Guha starts before independence but focuses on the compelling story of how this mess of a country made its progress in the world. There is plenty of ugliness — Partition, military defeat from China, language riots, anti-Muslim riots, anti-Dalit riots, fights over Kashmir, massacres in the Punjab, famines, poverty, and lesser-known stories like those of the ongoing tribal conflict in Nagaland — but Guha, without underplaying the moral gravity of these issues, gives well deserved space to India’s many triumphs as well, from rising literacy to successful elections, from agricultural development to joining the global economy as an IT powerhouse.

Very large nations — India, China, the United States — tend to be inward-looking. There’s enough there to keep one occupied, and the neighbors are far off. (Whenever a European says Americans don’t know geography, I ask her to name any six American states and any two state capitals.) And there is always a danger, in any national history written by a native for a domestic audience, of becoming too parochial and assuming too much insider knowledge. Will a non-French reader know what the Second Empire is and means? Do people outside of America know about McCarthyism? Guha does an admirable job of avoiding this trap, which can be especially dangerous in India, a land of endless factions and acronyms (a scroll through today’s Hindustan Times gives us UP, DDMA, BJP, and BCCI).

Guha is unapologetically a secularist, a democrat, and a liberal. Since I am too, I found this perspective companionable enough. I share his distaste for the reactionary, antidemocratic forces in Indian history: the religious nationalism of Pakistan, the dynasticism of the Nehrus, Indira Gandhi’s quasi-fascism, and especially the contemporary rise of Hindutva, which threatens to destroy Indian pluralism and wipe away Muslim Indian culture older than the Magna Carta because it’s not Indian.

If you’re looking for a thorough, deeply researched, readable history of modern India, India After Gandhi is a fine choice.

John Keay, India: A History (2000)

John Stanley Melville Keay, Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, is a particular kind of Englishman (man is used here intentionally) who is decent enough to know that the British Empire was a monstrosity but also deep down pines for a time when you could still think it was marvelous. He’s written admirable histories of India and China, but most of his works are about the heroic activities of intrepid white men in the Orient: Himalayan exploration, the great trigonometric survey of India, the spice route, the English East India Company, the end of the British Empire across Asia. While Keay doesn’t shy away from showing these explorers and colonizers as venal and nasty, the focus stays on them. Still, no one else is writing these studies, and if you want a one-volume history of India, Keay is what you’ll find.

India: A History has a dutiful quality about it. Keay loves a ripping good yarn, God bless him, and in India there are none until at least the Muslim period. Before that, the only textual resources we have are triumphal inscriptions and numismatics, unless you want to buy into the Sanskrit epics as history. Keay makes the best of all the toing-and-froing of various Guptas and Mauryas and Vijayanagars, but you can tell he’s bored, even as he tries to tie it all to bits of architecture to give it some interest. His relief is palpable once he gets to the Mughals and Rajputs, for which there are texts with stories, and his account of the Indian independence years is useful in understanding India today. Post-independence India gets a whirlwind postscript, but after some six thousand years, you can forgive him that.

Plowing through this tome (again) felt like a chore, and I’m not sure how useful any of it will actually be to my writing, but I can now say, like a good, responsible author, that I have read a history of the country I’m writing about. And if that history has a whiff of the pucca sahib about it, well, so does the country.

David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (2021)

Like a lot of folks, I came to Graeber and Wengrow by way of Guns, Germs, and Steel, which came out in 1997, and which I hadn’t read when I went traveling. Since the latter book is also on my reading list, I’ll discuss it later. And since everyone on earth is right now posting a picture of their copy of The Dawn of Everything on social media, I’ll skip the summary and jump to the stuff that’s most relevant to my own project, which is a travel book about India and an exploration of how India came to mean what it did to me and other Westerners.

The indigenous critique

If you’re interested in Asia as a field of academic study — and I’m interested to have a master’s degree in it — you become acquainted with the huge, if buried, influence that the Orient (which, unlike the more contemporary “Asia,” also includes Egypt and even Morocco) had on European thought and culture, particularly from the 18th century forward: not just tea and pajamas, but a whole intellectual framework that helped Europe to define what it was against what it was not. But if Orientalism is your orientation (excuse the pun), you can start to wonder why Native American culture didn’t have the same sort of impact.

The Dawn of Everything makes a convincing case that actually it did. In particular, Graeber and Wengrow highlight what they call the indigenous critique of European society, mounted by Northeastern native groups such as the Wendat (Wyandot) and Iroquois. This critique explains why Rousseau was writing about the origins of inequality in the mid-18th century, for an essay contest on that topic, one that you’d be hard pressed to find in medieval or Renaissance philosophy. Native American observers of European society were appalled at the poverty they saw, and also by what they perceived as the enslavement of all Europeans to their social superiors. They believed that they had better lives, and the data supports them: Europeans often defected to native societies, or chose to stay after having been captured in war, while hardly any Native Americans chose to enter settler or European society until their own communities had been largely destroyed.

This can all seem like a bit of sideshow if you’re trying to find the origins of Europe’s ideas about India, but it isn’t quite. First, it shows that Europe (and Americans of European descent) were passionately interested in alternative ways of ordering society and understanding reality, be they Indian, Chinese, Persian, or Native American. An overlooked impact of the Age of Discovery on Europe is that it made Europeans aware, in a way that they had not been, that things could be different. It’s notable that the Age of Discovery precipitates a long and unprecedented period of sociopolitical revolution in Europe and its colonies, in which I’d include not just the most famous cases — 1776, 1789, 1848, 1917 — but also everything from the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution to Romanticism and the scientific and industrial revolutions.

Here’s an example, in a wonderful little side note of the kind that makes The Dawn of Everything so much fun. Somehow in the 18th century, Europeans began thinking that the right sort of state was one that was ethnically and linguistically homogenous and run by bureaucrats trained in the liberal arts and selected through competitive exams. As an indigenous invention, this makes no sense, having no precedent in Medieval European politics. But it turns out Leibniz got the idea from the Chinese, who’d been running their empire along these lines for centuries, and he said so. He and his followers insisted that this was right for Europe, and their ideas were adopted.

Why India not Indians

The Dawn of Everything is also helpful if you want to know why Indian Indians and not American Indians became popular spiritual leaders in the 1960s, and why India not Native America is seen as the locus of ancient wisdom and enlightenment. The answer lies in the way that European conservatives answered the indigenous critique.

It’s worth remembering that back in the 18th century, there was little Europeans could hold up to show themselves as better than the Iroquois or the Wendat: not better health or sanitation, not more compassionate justice, certainly not democracy. What they did have, though, was farming and technology. These had not previously been seen as especially important in and of themselves, but they became crucial in the European response to the indigenous critique. Yes, argued the Europeans, Native Americans may be free and equal, but this is only possible because they are materially poor: no farmed land, no advanced technology. A theory was formulated about stages of development, from the barbarism of hunter-gatherers to agriculture and civilization.

This evolutionary model became incredibly influential. You’ve probably absorbed it without necessarily thinking about it. It turned hunter-gatherers, even those with complex political societies, into primitives, children in a state of nature. Children might say things that are profound, and they may have a certain sort of wisdom, but they’re not gurus, not World Masters. No true dialogue is possible between them and us.

Putting people into prehistory

Maybe the best thing The Dawn of Everything does is put human agency back into prehistory. History is full of individuals; even if you’re opposed to the Great Man school of historiography, you have to acknowledge that people like Alexander and Genghis Khan and Muhammed and Martin Luther and Napoleon made a difference, and that history would have taken a different course without them. So it has always felt odd that prehistoric groups are treated more like wild animal herds, migrating in search of food or because of changing climates but never because some individual prophet heard a voice telling him to or because an unbearable political climate pushed people to escape it. Graeber and Wengrow marshal archeological evidence and impressive interpretive acumen to show that we can, in fact, see these kinds of activity in prehistoric societies, even if we don’t know the names and dates precisely. The Dawn of Everything is above all a humanizing book, and for that it deserves the attention and praise it’s receiving.

Ram Dass, Be Here Now (1971)

When I was preparing for my trip to India in 1997, I lived with my grandparents in their Upper West Side apartment. My room had been my grandmother’s psychology studio, and it was lined with her books. (As an adolescent, I found the Kinsey Report.) I remember the odd, square book with the trippy purple cover staring out at me: REMEMBER NOW BE HERE NOW HERE BE NOW BE NOWHERE NOW BE HERE NOW BE HERE NOW.

I never opened it back then, far too focused on being elsewhere soon to bother with being here now. But somehow it crept back into my consciousness sometime last year. Be Here Now came to me at a moment when I needed it (which is something that would have surprised neither Ram Dass nor my grandmother) and played no small part in unlocking the door to my current writing project.

Be Here Now has no official author, but it’s by Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert, a smart Yid from Boston who found his way to Harvard, then to psychedelics, and finally to India. The book couldn’t be more of its moment if it were wearing a beaded macrame dress (it almost is) and listening to Joy to the World by Three Dog Night (it almost is). It’s divided into two sections. The first is a kind of graphic novel, all swirly psychedelics, about Alpert’s journey to becoming Ram Dass. The second is a cookbook, more or less, for tuning in and dropping out and going on a spiritual journey like Alpert did, with chapters on everything from breathing exercises to sex (with a delightfully honest admission that no one involved in writing the book really knows how to handle sex and spirituality) to starting an intentional community.

The time capsule quality of this thing is inescapable, from its visual style to its groovy dude diction. I was born in Marin County, California, in 1974, so this whole vibe is one that’s familiar from my childhood. Be Here Now is my madeleine. It’s full of absolute horseshit nonsense, as you would expect it to be, but it’s also wonderful, so sweet and lovely and loving and full of hope from a time when spiritual transformation seemed immanent and we didn’t know yet the Hare Krishnas abused kids. Like the best of that era, it achieves its saintliness by eschewing it. Dass is just another holy schmuck on the path, and he makes you realize you’re one too, and that it’s all OK. Just be where you are. Be here now.

As research for a travel book about India and Nepal, I’m reading a whole bunch. I figure I might as well post some short reviews of these books as I finish them.

Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (1899)

I first read Heart of Darkness in high school and didn’t get it. This may have something to do with its intentional vagueness, or with the fact that I’d never been outside the US to experience the dislocations that come with encountering an alien environment and culture. Not incidentally, this was also the first book I read after I started getting high every day, so there’s that.

I read it again late in my trip to India (still stoned), and then I felt it in my bones. My little tourist sojourn , riding in buses and trains and sleeping in hotels, had generated a shocking amount of rage and frustration in me. I was nowhere near “Exterminate the brutes,” but I could see how one would get there. I faced no great risks, ate restaurant meals, and had just completed a liberal arts education specifically designed to imbue me with a sense of shared humanity, and how many times had a combination of heat, exhaustion, mild illness, and culture shock driven me to screaming into the face of some person who made less money in a year than I was carrying in my money belt? And screaming at them because they were doing it wrong, whatever it was: preparing food, or overcharging me for something, or taking me to the wrong place. My tantrums were grotesque, and I knew they were, but I didn’t always have complete control over them. I could see how for Kurtz and men like him, under conditions far more extreme, the path from tantrums to mass murder was not a long or difficult one. I didn’t really hold myself above that either. Set the conditions, and any of us may turn out to be a monster.

Now, reading it yet again decades later, it still holds its power, though it’s less shocking than it once was. I don’t really buy the critiques, most famously from Chinua Achebe, that the book is a racist, colonialist depiction of Africa as the Dark Continent. It’s a book about racism and colonialism, deeply skeptical and with a fierce, burning anger at the supposedly civilized and civilizing forces of Europe that fired cannons into the forest and enslaved and starved the Africans they were supposedly saving. There is no Kiplingesque celebration of the white man’s burden to be found in Heart of Darkness. The name itself is a redirecting of the “darkest Africa” trope toward Kurtz’s dark heart, his hollowness, the dark heart of the whole European enterprise.

Heart of Darkness had a profound effect on me when I read it in India, clarifying a dangerous and ugly strain in my own mind — my own heart of darkness. It’s a book that holds up, a rare critical voice from the highwater period of European colonialism, published two years before Kipling’s Kim but seeming more contemporary to Orwell. Well worth a read now, especially if you’ve ever been angry and flustered in a place that was not your own.