Author: Josh Philip Ross

Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana (1937)

An influential work can look less impressive once its influence is everywhere. Lever House was once a lone rectangle of glass in a sea of ornate stonework. It’s harder to see what the fuss was about now that it’s surrounded by other glass rectangles. It’s harder to grasp what was so startling about thematic touches and studio trickery of Sgt. Pepper when you’ve grown up on Dark Side of the Moon and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy then when the top 10 albums included The Monkees, More of the Monkees, and The Sound of Music.

The same could be said of The Road to Oxiana, a travel account of crossing Persia into Afghanistan in 1933. Here, before Bruce Chatwin, before Eric Newby, before William Dalrymple, is a wry Englishman — Eton, Oxford, gay and closeted — writing with a now-familiar mixture of rapturous description of places and slapstick interaction with local people and the many irritations of life on the road. There are comedies rendered as playscripts, and there are long, moralizing analyses of squinches. I can sort of see why this book became an object of worship for the likes of Chatwin and Paul Fussell, but sometimes it feels like trying to get a Deadhead to explain to you what the deal is.

There are inspired bits of silliness, like his decision to refer to the Shah of Iran as Marjoribanks to avoid any trouble with the authorities should they read his notebooks, and also disheartening burts of anti-Jewish sentiment and other ugly judgments of local people. Maybe the best and most revolutionary conceit is that The Road to Oxiana never explains itself. It begins in medias res with Byron swimming in a canal in Venice and just goes from there, and either you come along or you don’t. You gather that Byron is interested in seeing the ancient architecture, about which he is deeply knowledgeable, but there’s never any real rationale given for the trip or why you ought to care about it. The story is just the story. Though they’re very different books, and very different characters, it’s the same technique you find in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and you find it also in An Area of Darkness, the first of V.S. Naipaul’s India books.

I don’t know that I can take quite so astringent an approach to writing my own travel story. Much of what interests me is exactly the why that hovers around the journey, the hidden lines of influence that steered me to India and away from other places. But there’s something to be said for telling the story without apologies or excuses. I was there, I saw what I saw, I felt what I felt, I behaved the way I behaved. A reader can come along with me or not, but I should probably avoid pleading overmuch for any significance. If it’s interesting to you, then it’s a story worth hearing. If not, read something else. All of my favorite books are boring to somebody.

And another thing: In my own writing, no squinches. In book after book, I’ve found myself exhausted by passages of architectural and horticultural description. In the era of Google especially, none of this is necessary. I can give you a general sense of what the Jantar Mantar or what you looks like, and then you can Google it if you care to. And I neither know nor remember enough to bore you with which sort of bird alighted on which sort of blossom just before the rains on a particular Thursday. So there you go. No architraves and no excuses.

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966)

In writing about my travels in India and Nepal, one of the core questions, briefly phrased, is What the hell was I thinking? I have been focused on this question from the angle of what put the notion of India into my head in the first place, but it seems that much of the story is the clash between prior notions and what I actually faced once I’d arrived, and how I responded to that dissonance.

One way I responded, of course, was to read books. In the time before ubiquitous internet, when even English-language cable content was hit or miss, books were the companions you had when you retreated to your hotel room, or while waiting for a banana pancake and a lemon soda that for some reason are taking over an hour to prepare. I read a great deal on the road, and the books influenced my mindset as I confronted the unknown, whether it was reading Migraine and thinking I was having them, or reading House of the Dead and beginning to see cheap South Indian hotels as gulags.

What I chose to read is also a reflection on my thinking at the time. I don’t think I read a single book about India or by an Indian while I was traveling. Reading was my escape from an overwhelming experience. But what I did choose — constrained, of course, by what was available in whatever used bookstore I was browsing at the time — was … Well, it was sometimes pretty weird. Why read about Dostoevsky in Siberia? Or why, still jet lagged and addled in Bombay, did I walk out of the Taj Mahal Hotel bookstore with In Cold Blood? I hadn’t ever read true crime before, and maybe I just thought it would be gripping enough to keep me enthralled through the difficult nights ahead, but I’m not sure psychopathic murderers on a travel spree was the best thing for me at that moment. I remember feeling like a walking moneybag amid Bombay in all its poverty and not knowing how you might recognize the sort of badmash who would stab you for your wallet, although eventually I consoled myself with the thought that unlike in New York City, here I was at least bigger than most of the people around me.

So you want a review of In Cold Blood? Jesus, did you not read it in high school or something? Or maybe see the movie, in which murderer Perry Smith is played by future murderer Robert Blake? Or see Capote, for which Seymour Philip Hoffman won an Oscar nine years before he overdosed? Well, it’s the story of two psychopaths who murder a very nice Kansas family and then drive around for a while and then get caught and executed.

The style, revolutionary at the time, was novelistic, and there have been questions about its veracity, which Capote insisted on, to his detriment. This was before The New Journalism of Tom Wolfe or the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson, before Helter Skelter and Mindhunters. Neither true crime nor novelistic journalism were yet prominent. As with many influential works, you have to squint to see what was so startling in it because so much of it has become commonplace. Sgt. Pepper’s thematic structure, its songs fading into each other, its sound effects and studio trickery, blew everyone’s minds in 1967, but none of that seems so extraordinary if you grew up on Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall and hip-hop. But Sgt. Pepper has great songs, and In Cold Blood has Kansans and losers. Its questioning of capital punshment and of the criminal responsibility of emotionally and physically damaged people is too shallow to amount to much in today’s terms, though again these may have been bold questions at the time, the beginnings of a long conversation.

It’s also worth noting that as an inveterate New Yorker junkie flown to Bombay, I gravitated, entirely by accident, to a book originally serialized in that magazine. (The other book I bought that day was Migraine, by frequen New Yorker writer Oliver Sacks.) You can take the boy out of New York, but you can’t take The New Yorker out of the boy.

Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East (1988)

On a rooftop in Kathmandu in 1997, I watched Trainspotting with a bunch of other tourists, and I remember thinking, during the infamous scene about the worst toilet in Scotland, that it actually looked pretty posh, what with its porcelain basin and all. I’d just come back from a couple of weeks in the mountains, and I’d seen far worse.

I’d always thought Video Night was about these tourist showings, and that the book was another Karma Cola, another Indian’s perspective on the marauding Western tourists. But Iyer is Californian, not Indian (though his parents are from India), and Video Night is a kind of mirror image of Karma Cola: a look at how Asia and Asians are being changed by the globalized economy that was just beginning to emerge in the 1980s.

Iyer breaks his book into chapters by locale — Bali, Tibet, Nepal, China, the Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, Japan — and for each he delves into a particular theme, drawing from it a kind of insight about that particular nation. It’s a risky business, but Iyer’s insights are so sharp, and his turn of phrase so skillful, that he carries it off. For all the places I visited in the years or decades after Iyer, he seems to have captured an essence that resonated powerfully with my own experience. (The one significant exception is China, which by the time I visited in 2009 and 20014 had transformed itself from a land of cement buildings, gawping old folks, carless boulevards, and empty plazas into a teeming capitalist madhouse.)

More than any other book I’ve read so far, Video Night seems like what I’d like to write. Indeed, reading Video Night as prep for my own book sometimes felt like getting out your guitar and ProTools and then listening to the White Album for inspiration. What even is the point? But my story is its own thing, I suppose, and happened in a different time, and I’ll tell it.

What’s most useful to me from Iyer is the structure. A lot of itinerary-driven travel writing falls into the same meandering difficulty as the travelers themselves who start to wonder why they’re slogging on to the next ruin in the guidebook. Even when it’s done very well, as in Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana, it can come to seem a little flacid and pointless. Iyer escapes this difficulty by writing thematically rather than chronologically. Some of the essays are more narrowly pitched than others — Thailand is about love for sale, India is about Bollywood, Japan is about baseball — but even the more diffuse pieces have a sort of a thesis behind them, which gives the narrative force and purpose. You feel like each essay has something specific to say. There’s a reason you’re being asked to come along.

While I don’t imagine restructuring my narrative quite so much — the chronological quality seems more important in what is, in part, a bildungsroman — I can see how I might organize the journey into chunks, each with a kind of theme or focus. I won’t give too much away for now, but I’m grateful to Iyer for reminding me of my own essayistic strengths. My best writing has been travel writing, and the best of that was written on specific themes. Maybe that’s the way to go.

Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh (1982) and The Te of Piglet (1992)

In college, I had a minor romantic entanglement with a hippie who changed my life by giving me a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, putting me on a Green Tortoise bus (she was eager to get me the hell out of Eugene, Oregon, where I was moping about because she had a new boyfriend when I came to visit), and telling me to look into Taoism. So I took a class on Eastern religion and read the Tao Te Ching, and I went to a couple of meetings of a campus group of Korean Taoists who all wore suits and ties and instructed me to chant until I could raise water from a bowl placed in front of me, but mostly I read Benjamin Hoff like everyone else.

Rereading him now, I’m embarrassed that I ever took him seriously, though I can see what must have been appealing. College was, for me, pretty overwhelming. Going from a mediocre California high school to Columbia University, I was faced with the reality that I was not so smart or special as I had thought, and that there were a great many people who knew a great deal more than me about a great many things. The workloads were daunting, the reading difficult. And then along came a book telling me that the scholars were actually full of it, and that lying stoned on the floor was perhaps the profounder wisdom. I liked that.

The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet are, in fact, full of straw men, and as much as Hoff hopes to lighten the atmosphere with Winnie-the-Pooh quotes, he comes off as cranky and aggrieved in ways that have become far more familiar in the last couple of decades. His anger about the modern world, about capitalism, about environmental damage, seemed back then to put him on the political left. But he’s also angry at scholars who act as gatekeepers of knowledge, and at feminists who question the neutrality of masculine pronouns and just don’t seem very feminine, positions that have been taken up by the right in today’s culture wars, and that anyway never seemed to have much to do with Taoism.

Indeed, The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet are long on complaints but short on solutions, other than a rather cavalier conclusion that we are facing a “cleansing” crisis that will lead to a new Eden. “Many will find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Hoff says, “because they did not pay enough attention to what the natural world was telling them.” I suppose the Syrians and Ukranians and Chinese Uyghurs should have listened to the trees more.

In spirituality, it’s wise to look to the preacher to assess what’s being preached. Benjamin Hoff seems bitter and acerbic, which is maybe not the best possible recommendation for the spirituality he espouses. It’s also disappointing to discover that your old guru was a fraud, but I guess that puts me in closer touch with the Indian experience of many Westerners.

As for where my own head was at, it seems fittingly nineties to have formulated a spirituality out of slacking, childishness, and despair.

Kill the headlights and put it in neutral.

Lawrence LeShan, The Medium, The Mystic, and The Physicist: Toward a General Theory of the Paranormal (1974)

Lawrence LeShan was a researcher into the paranormal who claimed to practice and teach psychic healing. He seems to have worked in good faith, attempting to maintain a level of scientific scepticism and rigor, although whether he achieve that is open to question. He’s largely forgotten now, but he’s important to me because he was my grandmother Shirley Winston’s Ph.D. mentor and the one who taught her psychic healing, a practice she continued for some years (my father and his mother both attested to her success at it for specific ailments).

Like many before him, LeShan tried to put paranormal rsearch on a sound scientific footing, and like many before him, he seems to have failed. I’ll lay out his theory first, then talk about where it falls short, and lastly how all this is related to my research on India and Nepal and my own travels there.

The theory

LeShan starts by crediting reports and studies that show evidence of clairvoyance — knowledge the medium had but should not have had, either about the future or about some distant situation — and of psychic healing, where recovery from illness was outside the bounds of normal medicine. Assuming that there are enough such reports that these phenomena can be considered real, he proceeds to explain them with a kind of analogy to the theory of relativity in physics.

To start, he explores how clairvoyants and healers describe the experience of doing what they do. This, he shows, is similar to how mystics across time and cultures have described their experiences. They feel a sense of the oneness of all things, of connection to all beings, of abiding love, of timelessness, of there being no right or wrong in the ordinary sense because all is as it should and must be. LeShan decided to take these mystics at their word, and he describes this alternate way of seeing reality as the Clairvoyant Reality. In that reality, paranormal activity should be possible beause time and distance are collapsed and all things are interrelated.

To bolster the case for this Clairvoyant Reality, LeShan turns to modern physics, particularly relativity theory, which posits time as a dimension and the fabric of the universe as a kind of vast field. He demonstrates that the writings of physicists, in attempting to explain this strange new world, are often indistinguishable from the writings of mystics. And if it’s true in physics that time is relative and that all things are connected, then why should it not be true of the Clairvoyant Reality?

The problems

First, LeShan takes it as given that paranormal experiences are real, but this has been notoriously difficult to prove in any consistent way. For now, let’s leave that aside as both the most serious and least interesting deficiency in his theory.

Second, LeShan assumes that what mystics are describing is an external reality, not an internal one. He does raise the possible objection that these are all internal experiences, but dismisses it quickly without exploring it. But unless there’s some other physical evidence to support the existence of what LeShan calls the Clairvoyant Reality (as there is, amply, for the theory of relativity), why not assume that what mystics across time and cultures have experienced is similar because it has a similar biological root in our brain structure?

As for the analogy to physics, it falls flat. The evidence for relativity isn’t our ordinary everyday sense data, in that it’s collected by scientific instruments, but it’s sense data in our ordinary reality, not in some other reality. Nor is it surprising that scientists, struggling to describe the peculiar ways the universe works on scales either too large or too small for ordinary human comprehension, should turn to some preexisting language as metaphor, and the preexisting language for discussing vastnesses beyond ordinary comprehension is that of mystics.

It’s important to remember that this is how physicists talk to lay people about physics. I remember figuring this out in college, when I took Physics for Poets (yes, it was really called that) to meet the science requirement. I was struggling over the whole wave/particle duality with light when I realized that both wave and particle were metaphors drawn from the macro world, and that the best description of what light actually did was neither wave nor particle but a mathematical formula. (The formula is, of course, just another approximation, but a better one.)

I also recall discovering that there is nothing mystical or strange about the notion, in particle physics, that every observation affects what is observed. At a macro level, this is necessarily a kind of mystic metaphor, since we know that there are times when we observe things at a distance without appearing to affect them at all. But in particle physics, this just means that the way you observe something is to bounce something else off of it, which of course sends the observed thing careening in a different direction. It’s like determining a golf ball’s position in flight by hitting it with a basketball. Of course the golf ball changes direction after that! When you look at the moon, you don’t change the number of photons bouncing off of it. When you look at an electron, you do. That’s all it is.

As the Buddha once said, don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. The metaphor is not the reality.

Why I read LeShan anyway

So if LeShan is just a forgotten, discredited researcher in a forgotten, discredited field, why bother? And what does any of this have to do with my larger project of writing about my travels in India and Nepal?

Whatever drew me to India, it was part of a long cultural association of the East with wisdom, understanding, profundity. And that cultural association is complexly tangled up with Western ideas of the occult, the paranormal, the uncanny, and the other. The Theosophical, Gurdjieffian mysticism that leads down to people like Tim Leary and Ram Dass isn’t really seperate from the Theosophical, William Jamesian, Jungian plumbing of the mystic depths. LeShan calls on Indian mystics for support, and in his turn shows up in a footnote in Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, about his spiritual quest in the Nepal Himalaya.

At the time I hatched the whole scheme to go to India, I hadn’t read either Matthiessen or LeShan, but I was living with my grandparents, sleeping in the room that had been my grandmother’s psychology office. Ram Dass’s Remember, Be Here Now was on the bookshelf, though I hadn’t read that either (I was too busy being elsewhere soon). Somehow these influences seem to have trickled into me. I didn’t go to India on any overt spiritual quest — no visits to ashrams, no temple stays — but I had a spiritual yearning, and some level of credulity, or at least of openness to the idea that there are many things we don’t understand.

As for my grandmother, we have tended, after her passing, to regard her as a sort of Yoda, full of deep wisdom and great power. But that’s not quite honest, is it? She was a muddled up human like the rest of us, highly intelligent but at times credulous, at times querulous.

Still, her healings seemed to work, and her uncanny presence recurs in surprising ways over the course of my life — ways that have something of the flavor of LeShan’s Clairvoyant Reality, outside of the normal flow of time.

But for that, perhaps wait for the book I’m writing. There’s much yet to unravel.

Gita Mehta, Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East (1979)

By the late seventies, the image of Westerners in floppy shirts traipsing after Indian gurus was already a cliche, with Hare Krishnas in airports and Stevie Wonder declaring that Transcendental Meditation gives you peace of mind (in a song called, of all things, “Jesus Children of America”). It was to this peculiar state of affairs — the West, long seen by Indians as the seat of sophistication and the model of development, now turning to the East for wisdom — that Gita Mehta turned her eye, delivering a slim but devastating volume that sends up, gently and sympathetically but relentlessly, the credulous Westerners and the gurus who prey on them.

This theme of West meeting East is one that Pico Iyer would pick up a few years later, more fully and incisively, in Video Night in Kathmandu, but Mehta deserves some credit for getting there first, just a year after Edward Said’s Orientalism (and Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, that paean to the mystic power of the Himalayas and the plausibility of yetis). But Mehta has none of Said’s rage and none of his showy erudition. She shows great compassion for the lost souls washing up on her shores, and also a clever understanding of how strange it is for ordinary Indians (or at least ordinary educated Indians) to adjust to the notion that they, and not the West, have Got It Right.

There’s a lot in this book that’s very, very good, though at times her circumspect, elliptical style can become a liability. Nothing is footnoted, and one wishes that references to “an Indian writer” and the like were less cryptic. There’s in irony in a book like this asking us to take so much on faith. Still, it captures a flavor of absurdity that was familiar enough both from my upbringing in the Marin of the seventies and eighties and my own travels in India. (I remember an older woman, after telling me she and her husband had just come from the Osho asharm in Pune, looking me intently in the eye, sliding a hand along my thigh, and declaring, “You should go. It’s amaaaazing!”)

It took me a while to realize that I had read this book before, twenty-five years ago, on my first trip to India. Bits and pieces seemed familiar, and then I came to the part about Goa. I remembered the image of the naked Brazilian man with the silver fluete being pimped out at the Anjuna Flea Market, which I attended and found to be dustier but not more impressive than the Guerneville Flea Market in Sonoma, which is not very impressive. There was no naked floutist.

Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (1978)

In a delicious irony, the book that has been “the inspiration for more hippy trails and backpacker expeditions to Kathmandu and beyond than any other volume,” was written by a CIA agent. The Snow Leopard is the tale of a trek into the Dolpo region to look for Himalayan black sheep and, yes, snow leopars (spoiler alert: no snow leopards), and it’s also the story of a man trying to center himself after the death of his wife. His journey is a time of reflection colored by his devotion to Zen Buddhism.

It’s the mysticism that set this book apart — not a hippie mysticism, but a very New York Review sort of mysticism (or maybe I should say Paris Review, since that’s the journal Matthiessen founded alongside George Plimpton, apparently as cover for his CIA work, or New Yorker, since that’s where a shorter version was first published, but then you have to remember it was the William Shawn New Yorker, not the post-Tina Brown New Yorker). The footnotes are a who’s who of erudite occultism for the credulous highbrow: D.T. Suzuki, Chogyam Trungpa, Mircea Eliade, the German monk Angarika Govinda (The Way of the White Clouds), fabulist Carlos Castaneda, the Theosophists Alexandra David-Neel and Helena Blavatsky, the Theosophist hanger-on Walter Evans-Wentz. Most surprising of all was a quote from Lawrence LeShan, an ESP researcher and psychic healer who was also my grandmother’s mentor when she got her Ph.D. in parapsychology.

Small world.

The Snow Leopard is a curious choice for a hippie favorite, with its detailed natural description — including, alas, a very scientifish disquisition on evidence for yeti — and focus on the hardships of the journey, it harks back to an older style of travel writing that has gone out of style. There’s introspection aplenty, but very little that you could call post-colonial, and Matthiessen’s attitude toward the natives he travels with has more than a whiff of paternalism, though one ought to admire his honesty in depicting himself being churlish and shitty towards the porters and sherpas. There’s a jarring moment when he describes his trek as consisting of two people, meaning of course two white people and a large group of Nepalis.

For my work, the most important thing this book did was point me towards LeShan. For the rest of it, it didn’t move me. Some of it is beautifully written, but at times it sounds like a parody of George Plimpton diction, or a twelve-page Updike essay on pigeon feathers in the New York Review. There are some fine descriptions of the mountains and villages in an area not far from where I trekked, but the feel of the book is never quite right, never quite in tune with the Nepal I remember or have read about in so many other books. I suppose it’s the very headiness that’s off. For all its towering peaks and its temples climbing skyward, Nepal is an earthy place, rough and funky. Matthiessen seems to have missed its delightful goofiness.

Earthman, Eight Finger Eddie: The Hippie History of Goa and Kathmandu (2015)

This is a terrible book. I mean, really terrible. Written by someone who calls himself Earthman and self-published on Amazon for a buck ninety-nine (I mock, but is it where I end up?), Eight Finger Eddie is a sloppy mess of a book that attempts to tell the life story of Yetward Mazamanian, a local hippie hero known as Eight-Finger Eddie (he was born with just eight fingers) who was one of the first freaks to settle in Goa, and who, by virtue of being a couple of decades older than everyone else and pretty chill, turned into a kind of father figure to a lot of the lost, confused hippies who wandered in. (Earthman was one of them.)

The terribleness of this book is not just in its poor editing, its endless repetitions and recaps, or its lack of research — Earthman seems to have relied entirely on Eddie’s recollections, without checking anything — but in the adolescent, retrograde attitudes of its author, who seems never to have outgrown the viewpoints of the stoned kid he was when he first visited Goa in the early seventies.

But that’s what makes this book so useful.

I remember Goa as the one place in India that still felt colonized. The Westerners treated it like their own, and they treated the Indians as a nuisance to be dealt with. The locals don’t like nudity? Fuck ’em. The locals want to build a resort? How dare they ruin my dirt cheap paradise for their own financial gain!

Over the course of this book, Earthman manages to engage in an astonishing range of colonialist hippie cliches. He describes women as “luscious” again and again. When Eddie’s white girlfriend has engaged in a threesome with a couple of Mexican villagers, Earthman declares that the two of them “have made contact with the natives — way beyond National Geographic!” He goes into a tizzy when he feels Eddie’s wild experiences have trumped his own freakiness. He declares himself “deeply fascinated by India” and thinks there’s “pure village life” out there, but never makes any particular effort to engage with it beyond hippie hangouts in Goa.

At one point, bitching about Panjim’s big city ways, Earthman takes a leak on some public shrubbery, without grasping that this is what the hippies have been doing to Goa for decades. The pristine beaches they found back in 1971 weren’t pristine anymore once they had hippies camping, pissing, and shitting all over them. It never seems to occur to him that the tourist development of Goa he so despises — the charter flights, the resorts, the cops hassling the druggies — might be a boon to the Goans, whose state boasts some of the highest income and social indicators in India.

And these selfsame Goans, whose tolerance gets mentioned a lot, may have reasonably become exhausted with the insanity the hippies brought. It takes Earthman a long time to get to it, but his story finally winds around to Goa in the seventies, and to the various hippie houses Eddie led. They were places where people could, and did, go totally insane. Jumping down wells in fits of pique seems to have been a common behavior. Bursts of violence were not unusual. And then, when the wells began to run dry as the hot season approached (never would Earthman wonder who used up all the water), the hippies split, heading for Kathmandu while the locals had to go on living on their meager wages in Goa.

I remember that atmosphere of impending violence in Goa, something I felt nowhere else in India or Nepal. I thought it was because it was late in the season, with only the most exhausted burnout cases still hanging around. Or maybe, I thought, it was because so many people were waiting for the start of a party that had ended years earlier. But maybe that was just what Goa was about: the place the crazies went, and only the crazies stayed, because it was crazy — a kind of permanent colony for the Acid Test crowd. I grew up in the aftermath of the great hippie dream, and I saw many sides of it, good and bad — macrame and Volvos at the food co-op, lots of stoned parents, barefoot kids running around Point Reyes Station, crystal shops and bearded mystics, people trying to convince me carob was the same thing as chocolate — and Goa seemed to be the worst of the worst. And Earthman, in his obliviousness, has done much to confirm my impressions.

Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland, The Hippie Trail: A History (2017)

This is an odd little book. It appears to be the first attempt to write the history of what was known as the Hippie Trail, or the Hashish Trail: the overland route from Europe to India that began around 1957 and ended in 1978. (The boundaries are set, at the beginning, by the first overland coach service from England, at first used mostly by Indian nationals, and also the publication of Kerouac’s On The Road, and at the end by the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.)

Part of what’s so odd is that this is the first, and as far as I can tell, the only history of a phenomenon that swept up hundreds of thousands of travelers, made its way into popular songs by everyone from Janis Joplin to Bob Seger to Rush, was covered extensively and often luridly in the press, yet seems never to have generated any professionally written books at all beyond a couple of sensationalistic novels. The countless memoirs produced by travelers have been largely self-published or circulated in manuscript. This is all the stranger when you consider the success of so much adjacent writing: Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola, which picks apart the hippie guru culture of Western travelers to India in the seventies; Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu from a few years later looking at how Western culture has come to pervade the East; or even Remember, Be Here Now, Ram Dass’s personal story of spiritual transformation in Nepal and India.

Gemie and Sharif make an honorable if not quite comprehensive effort, having found eighty-eight Hippie Trail travelers to interview, as well as having slogged through a mountain of poorly written, poorly edited memoirs. There are times when their efforts feel a little amateurish, but I suppose that’s to be expected from scholars wading into territory no one else has bothered with. This is not the kind of book anyone should read who doesn’t have a personal or academic interest in the Hippie Trail, but it makes a decent case that more people should have the latter.

From my perspective, I most wanted to understand how and why travelers came to choose this route, this destination. In delving into it, Gemie and Ireland find that a search for drugs or a spiritual quest were the most common reasons given, when the reason was anything more articulate than just a vague quest for adventure or the exotic. But why India for all that? Indeed, it seems that in the early days, Morocco played much the same role for drugs and exotic adventure, but not for the spiritual quests as much. I suppose it may be asking too much of this book to look for the deeper roots of the fascination with India, and I have others for that.