Mark Liechty, Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal (2017)
In 2002, on my second trip to the Indian Subcontinent, I began with a ten-day meditation course at Kopan Monastery in the Kathmandu Valley. We began our days in silence, sipping our chai to the sound of Tibetan Buddhist prayer emerging from the main gompa: deep, rumbling chanting, punctuated with cymbal clashes and horn blasts. For ten days, we lived among the Tibetans. The monastery served as a school for children, and we watched as the young monks engaged in raucous outdoor debating sessions, or simply ran and played as kids do, little streaks of excitable maroon zipping in and out of the buildings.
Our course was led by Karin Valham, a Swedish nun who had come to Nepal in the 1970s and stayed on. In the afternoons we got into debates with her, sometimes contentious, and I began to wonder how well she understood either Tibetan Buddhism or Western philosophy. A couple of times we had answer sessions with Lama Lhundrup, through a young translator, and tried to get answers to our more difficult questions. At one point, the lama was giving a fairly mechanical idea of how karma works — if you’re handsome, it’s because you were humble in a past life, if you’re rich it’s because you were generous, and so on — when a woman asked if this meant people in Hollywood had the best karma. There was a long exchange between the translator and the lama, and then the translator asked, “Excuse me, Hollywood is in America?”
It was a charming moment, and we took it as a delightful proof of authenticity: here was a small remaining corner of the world where Hollywood was less important than holy words. But perhaps we should have known better.
In Far Out, Mark Liechty tells the story of Kopan Monastery and much else besides. This unusual book is a fascinating look not just at how tourists came to Nepal and responded to it, but how Nepal and Nepalis responded to tourists and shaped their experiences. Beginning in the 1950s, Nepal became a playground for the wealthy who wanted to go to the ends of the earth, a kind of last haven of Raj nostalgia where you could meet exotic royalty and hunt tigers. That phase gave way to mountaineering and adventure tourism, driven by the 1953 summitting of Everest.
And then, starting in the 1960s, the hippies started to come, both on the overland route and increasingly by air. Liechty clearly has a soft spot for this generation of travelers — it’s there in the title — and like a lot of people, he seems to imagine it as something of a golden age. And for a lot of Nepalis it was. Liechty, who speaks Nepali, conducted extensive interviewers with Nepalis who were part of the tourist trade, or who partook of the hippie culture. One gets an extraordinary, all-too-rare sense of the Nepalis as participants in the global youthquake that shook that era.
The hippie phenomenon lasted a little longer in Kathmandu than elsewhere in the world, but it had to fade there too, and it did, especially after Nepal banned marijuana sales (but not possession) under US pressure. Liechty seems a little chagrinned at the newer wave of Westerners who were less willing to slum it and get dysentery, who wanted basic creature comforts on their relatively short vacations, though this era also brough a lot more money to Nepal (but you can get the impression tourism is the main part of the Nepali economy, when in fact it’s just 7.9%, well under the global average of 10.3%). As Pico Iyer discovered in Video Night, tripping gave way to trekking in this era.
Liechty also documents another shift in Kathmandu that has broader global parallels. I had already noted that Tibetan Buddhism was for Gen X what Hinduism had been for the boomers. Ravi Shankar played at Montery Pop, the Beatles and Donovan went to Rishikesh, and Swami Satchidananda spoke at Woodstock. Well, I went to the Tibetan Freedom Concert, hosted by the Beastie Boys, and everyone was there. Hinduism lacked a way for outsiders, mleccha, to become a real part of it, but Buddhism welcomed everyone.
And that’s where Koman Monastery comes in. We saw it as a Tibetan institution, but it turns out to have been something more complex and hybrid. Liechty tells the story of Zina Rachevski, a Hollywood socialite, an heiress of Russian, possibly Russian Jewish, descent and pretended royalty who was known as “the princess,” had an affair with Marlon Brando in Paris, declared herself the reincarnation of Madam Blavatsky in Greece, and eventually wandered to India, where she met two Tibetan lamas living in a refugee camp. She got them out of there and into better lodgings, then brought them to Kathmandu, where she encouraged them to teach the Westerners who hung around Bodnath (there appears to have been some sort of rivalry between the Buddhist trekker types there and the Hindu stoner types out by Swayambunath). Rachevsky wasn’t always the easiest person to get along with, and after a while she seems to have been pushed out. In the end she departed for a three-year silent retreat at a remote monastery near Everest — her Buddhism seems to have been sincere — and there died of a stomach ailment. She was in her forties.
No one ever mentioned Rachevsky while I was at Kopan. She’s a poor fit for an institution that sells itself as an authentic outpost of Tibetan culture — more authentic than what you can find these days in Tibet itself, since Kopan is free from Chinese government inteference. Yet Kopan is an authentic manifestation of something Nepal excels at, which is bringing together elements of its own culture, those of its neighbors north and south, and those of the West to create something unique and inviting. The earliest Westerners to visit Nepal were struck by its syncretic mix of Hinduism and Buddhism, and that syncretic instinct lives on: in Tibetan monasteries with Swedish nuns giving courses designed for Westerners, in restaurants where the pizza is topped with buffalo cheese, in trekking lodges of Thakali-style stone with names like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley, where they bring the apple fritters and spring roles to the hot table with the brazier of coals underneath to keep your legs warm. India has a reputation for absorbing and making Indian every influence that comes to it; Nepal, always a little different, has its own way of taking those outside influences and reflecting them back in enticing ways. Liechty tells this story well and with admirable depth, giving Nepalis a voice in their own story of engaging the wider world through the twentieth century.