Review of BBC 3 documentary: Ginsberg in India | The Sunflower Collective

Source: http://asiasociety.org/

Allen Ginsberg came to India for the first time in early sixties. These were important times for India; most importantly, its long standing dispute with China over Tibet and border areas reached a crescendo in the shape of a war in 1962. Ginsberg was in India when the war was on. However, his travelogue Indian Journals, which documented his time here barely mentioned the war which India lost miserably. (Within two years of the defeat, Pandit Nehru passed away; he and his defence minister V.K.Krishna Menon were heavily blamed for not being able to anticipate China’s aggressive designs. Both Nehru and Menon were considered leftists, the latter more so and their ideological orientation was cited by the critics as the prime reason behind their slip to identify the threat posed by China. The war with China divided the Indian Left also, with one faction of the Communist Party of India deciding to go its own way over the issue of support to the fellow communists on the other side of the Himalayas.)

The silence of a poet like Ginsberg on such matters, whose poetry was always deeply and directly concerned with political developments the world over, can only be called puzzling, to say the least and any one going through Indian Journals is likely to be intrigued by it.

The recent radio documentary by Jeet Thayil, Booker nominated novelist and poet, looks into this and other questions which continue to interest lovers of beat poetry and literature in general. It deserves praise for at least looking into an aspect of literary history that has largely been forgotten despite its uniqueness and far-reaching consequences.

Take the matter of the Indo-China war. The documentary has the writer Deborah Baker telling us that Ginsberg believed India was turning into a “militaristic” state by warring with China and that he wanted to go on a peace march with “Gandhians” to protest this – her book A Blue Hand: Beats in India has more on this.

It can be safely said that Ginsberg’s views on India becoming “militaristic” were either naïve or deliberately cruel. The troubles with China had roots in the colonial period and were chiefly concerned with its occupation of Tibet to which India objected, apart from the delineation of the boundary between the two Asian giants. Dalai Lama was given shelter by India after China invaded his country in an act of naked imperialism, all the more ironic because the aggressor was a communist country. To say that a country was turning “militaristic” when involved in self-defense is utter baloney and even Gandhi would have never agreed to it; one only needs to remember his support to Britain and allies in Second World War to understand this simple point. 

Poet and critic Ranjit Hoskote makes no bones in the same documentary about Ginsberg’s attitude towards India in general and terms it as an example of Orientalism. This is further illustrated by the Hungryalist poet Malay Roy Choudhury in the documentary. He mentions that Ginsberg only clicked beggars, lepers and the poor in India, at the exclusion of almost everything else. He narrates that his photographer father had admonished the Beat poet for the same, telling him: “whether a poet or a tourist, you white people are all the same.”

By choosing to look at India as being  good only for a certain kind of experience and refusing to consider that it was a developing nation coming to terms with its own destiny – not willing to stay encumbered by expectations of foreigners – Ginsberg is certainly guilty of prima facie Orientalism.

It must be noted that Ginsberg also met with tantriks and bauls who are not traditionally upper-caste and it is not this author's intention to suggest that he was a dyed-in-the-wool Orientalist; rather, there were traces of Orientalism in his attitude.

His love for Benaras, a continually inhabited city, which is how he described it in his last poem too, was a metaphor for his love for the Indian civilization: a continuum existing as it was for millennia, regardless of space and time.  However, it was only an image in Ginsberg’s mind when he came; his fault was to deliberately stick to this image despite contrasting facts, and his sullen refusal to accept the country in all its contradictions. For example, he did not once mention in his book that the burning ghats which fascinated him so much had a caste system of their own and Dalits could not be cremated at the spots marked for the higher-castes.

It is entirely possible that Ginsberg was following the foot-steps of the Transcendentalists, his literary fore-fathers whose debt he always accepted but he did not question their attitudes towards India. The Transcendentalists had also looked towards India for spiritual guidance and glorified the Gita, a text which is abhorred by India’s Dalits for its militaristic and reactionary philosophy that asks people to leave everything in the hands of God and keep perpetuating the system ad infinitum, regardless of the violence inherent in Hinduism’s caste system. Had Ginsberg not heard that B.R. Ambedkar gave a call for the annihilation of caste decades ago? Why was Ginsberg so obsessed with Indian Sadhus and their mumbo-jumbo instead, who have, through the centuries, acted as agents of perpetuating Hinduism along with its pernicious caste system which has oppressed and enslaved millions of people for so long?

There is also the slight matter of the Hungryalists. In a lengthy interview to The Sunflower Collective recently, Malay RC said quite categorically that Ginsberg spent close to two years with Bengali poets, including the Hungryalists, whose manifestos he collected and admired. According to Malay RC, it was only after coming in contact with the Hungryalists that the Blake vision departed from Ginsberg, and his poetry adopted a Bengali cadence, so to say, apart from imbibing the Indian attitudes to life and its phenomena in general. The documentary would have been enriched if the context to the Hungryalist movement had been provided in greater detail and the links between Beats and their Bengali counterparts (despite differences) looked into further.

The documentary also cites poets like Adil Jussawalla whom Ginsberg met while in Bombay. We can sense the annoyance Jussawala must have felt with Ginsberg’s patronising attitude; with hardly any inflection in his voice, he tells us that Ginsberg preferred the Urdu poets to the English ones at a reading organised in Bombay and sat at their feet “entranced” although he understood no Urdu. 

All said and done, Ginsberg was a complex man. While his conscious being was that of a white tourist in India, he did allow his poetic sub-conscious to be open to India’s rich and varied influence. 

He had an epiphany about his inclination towards Buddhism in India, leading to his subsequent conversion. (Ambedkar had also converted to Buddhism and maybe in this way, Ginsberg showed his aversion to Hinduism’s caste system.) The poetic influence will always be hard to prove and it was not only a one-way street. Arun Kolatkar, legendary Indian English poet, who met Ginsberg when he had visited Bombay, did acknowledge the Beat poet’s influence on his work. Ginsberg was also quite punctilious in writing to his Indian contacts, including several writers, to solicit their support for Malay RC when he faced an obscenity trial over his poetry and manifestos, along with other Hungryalist writers. 

While it will always be difficult to include everything that went on in the years Ginsberg spent in India, it can be said in conclusion that the documentary should have enquired more into the literary aspects of Ginsberg’s Indian travels and examined his Orientalism. Still, it makes a contribution to a better understanding of Ginsberg and his time here and must be welcomed for that reason.    

TSC Interviews | Malay Roychoudhury

Malay Roychoudhury by Utsab Chatterjee,  

pencil on paper

Malay Roychoudhury is an Indian Bengali poet and novelist who founded the Hungryalist Movement in the 1960s.  He was awarded a Sahitya Akademy award  for translating Dharamvir Bharati's Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda in 2003 but he refused to accept it. He spoke to The Sunflower Collective at length about his work, Hungryalist movement, Allen Ginsberg, other writers associated with the movement, politics and rifts with other poets, publishers and the establishment during the movement.

TSC: Young poets are calling themselves Hungryalists in West Bengal again, as you said in a recent interview. Jeet Thayil is making a BBC documentary on Ginsberg's time in India for which he met you. Deborah Baker wrote a book about the same not so long ago. Internationally, several films about the Beats hit the screens in quick succession in recent years. Do you see it as a revival of the two movements that were linked willy-nilly?

MRC : I don't think so. Saileswar Ghose, Subhas Ghose, Basudeb Dasgupta had been editing Hungryalist magazines Kshudharta and Kshudharta Khabor before they died a few years back. Pradip Choudhuri is still publishing Phoo and Swakal. Rasaraj Nath and Selim Mustafa are still publishing Anarya Sahitya. Ratnamoy Dey is still publishing Hungryalist Folder. Aloke Goswami had published Concentration Camp before he concentrated on  writing novels and short stories. Arunesh Ghose continued publishing Giraffe before he died a couple of years back. Since these magazines are in Bengali and they are not active on  social media, you don't hear about them. Pradip Choudhuri has done a lot of translation of Hungryalist work in French.

Prior to Jo Wheeler and Jeet Thayil, another producer, Dominic Byrne, had come and made a radio programme exclusively on our movement. Marina Reza had come from Weslyan University for research on our movement. Daniella Limonella had come from Italy for the same purpose. University of Exeter has published an interview of mine in their Exeposé  online newspaper. Mrigankasekhar Ganguly has made a film based on my poem Stark Electric Jesus. A debate is going on for a decade, for and against this poem on a Bangladeshi news portal.

Deborah Baker  neither met any Hungryalist nor consulted any written material available at Kolkata's Little Magazine Library Research Centre. Most of the information is  wrong and concocted, though she claims to read and write Bengali.  This Research Centre has an exclusive section on Hungryalist periodicals, bulletins, manifesto and books.

Students at IIT, Kharagpur, Jadavpur University, Rabindra Bharati University, Visva Bharati University, Calcutta University, Assam University have been doing PhD and M Phil etc on our work for more than a decade as a matter of academic routine.

Academic interest in the Beats, especially Allen Ginsberg continues. He had himself established a Trust to look after the interest of all the Beats and his own work with the million dollars he got from Stanford University by selling his collections. Bill Morgan, one of the Trustees, had visited me when I used to reside at Kolkata.

We, the Hungryalists, have not even been able to bring out an anthology of our work in English and Hindi, as there is no commercial interest in our work from the publishers. And none of us are well to do. Hindi being the prime Indian language, the Sahitya Academy should have evinced interest in bringing out an anthology.

TSC:  Ginsberg was concerned that the Beats did not receive the amount of academic attention in America they deserved. Do you feel the same about the Hungryalists, as far as Indian academia is concerned? In the case of the painter Karanajai, it appears even the critics abandoned him after a while leading to a very embittered existence.  What are your thoughts on this?

MRC: Yes, he was worried during his lifetime that the American Establishment is not ready to award them with governmental and academic recognition. However, presently a lot of academic work is being done on Beats due to the next generation of poets who took an interest in them. Even if the Beats were anti-Establishment, they were typical products of the American capitalist world. Ginsberg created his trust with a huge fund to carry on his legacy. Kerouac's manuscript roll was sold for 2.40 million dollars; enough to carry on his legacy by his Trustees for eternity. Ferlinghetti opened City Lights Bookstore on West Front in order to regularly publish the Beats. In Greenvich village they had Barney Rosset's Grove Press, James Laughlin's New Directions and the Village Voice newspaper for support. They regularly interacted with the digital companies and brought out their recitations and films etc. They appointed secretaries to enable them to get paid invitations for poetry readings from various European and American cities.

As I told you just now, there has been continuous academic work on Hungryalist poets and writers. Sahitya Academy has awarded prizes to Utpalkumar Basu, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Binoy Majumdar, Saileswar Ghosh and Subimal Basak. Since I do not accept literary and cultural prizes I had refused their award. The point is we do not get publishers like Ferlinghetti or James Laughlin in Kolkata to bring out our works and arrange for distribution. And we do not get translators who would translate and publish our works in Indian periodicals. There is still a strong lobby against us at Kolkata, though it has weakened after Sunil Gangopadhyay's demise ; nevertheless Sunil's trained disciples are still active.

After receiving the Lalit Kala Academy prize at a young age in 1972, Anil Karanjai started sympathizing with the Naxalite movement; his studio at Benaras was ransacked by police. To avoid the repression, he married an American lady and went to Wahington DC to live there. He was soon disillusioned with the Western world and came back a few years later after divorcing the lady. He got involved in social activities and avoided the dirty machinations that painters had started  resorting to at that time. Karuna Nidhan also fled from Benaras and went to Patna where my elder brother Samir opened a coloured fishes shop for him. When Anil returned to Delhi, Karuna joined him. Anil married Juliet Reynolds and settled at Dehradun to avoid the Delhi painters' circus. . Anti-Establishment writers and artists in that circuit are rare these days.

TSC : What are your views on Shakti Chattopadhyay leaving the movement?

MRC: Shakti Chattopadhyay testified against me because Shakti  had fallen in love with Samir's sister-in-law Sheela at Chaibasa. He felt that he could not marry Sheela because of Samir who did not want her  to get married to an unemployed drunkard. That Sheela was living at our Patna residence at that time for post graduate study at Patna University added fuel to Shakti's fire.

This,  along with instructions from a newspaper group which was against us, and which offered Shakti a sub-editor's job,   forced him to leave the movement. Now, after Sunil Gangopadhyay's death, when Sunil's letters to his friends are being published, it is found that Sunil was goading his friends to leave Hungryalist movement, as Sunil thought that my sole motive in launching the Hungryalist movement was to destroy his 'Krittibas’ group. Almost all of these letters spew venom against me. In these letters Sunil wrote that to be an anti-Establishment writer, you have to join the Establishment and work from within.

TSC: Is there something akin to an anxiety of influence which informs the relationship between the two movements? In his Indian Journals, Ginsberg continues to profess adherence to the Blake vision. He mentions the harmonium but there is no indication he first learnt about it through the Hungryalists. At what point do you think he discarded the Blake vision and allowed the Indian influences to play out? Could you give some specific examples? I understand that his use of breath as a measuring unit for verse might be one?

MRC: I don't think we were bothered about influencing each others' movements. In an interview to LIFE magazine Ginsberg had said that the Blake vision departed from him when he was traveling in a train while returning from India and started weeping .

When he had visited Bodhgaya he had chanced upon a piece of stone wherein small replicas of Buddha were inscribed. He had told me that seated on two stones he was shitting, as at that time the Japanese had not developed Bodhgaya and it was almost a village. He said it was a divine direction from Buddha ; thus he became interested in Buddhism and departed from mysticism. Due to archaeological restrictions he could not carry the stone to USA. He had cleaned that stone with his tooth brush at our Patna residence.

Bill Morgan, one of Ginsberg’s trustee, who visited me had said that there were more than fifty copies from which edited pages were included in his India Journals. Ginsberg was spied upon by Indian agents and a few of his copies were picked out of his shoulder sling bag by some of these agents to find out what was he recording. Ginsberg himself told me about it. The harmonium story might have been in one of the fifty copies.

Sunil Gangopadhyay, who was in USA at the time of editing Indian Journals, tried his best to shut out the Hungryalist movement from this book. Bill Morgan had told me that Ginsberg regularly mailed packets to his step mother in New Jersey so that she could arrange the papers in the almirahs of their basement. Ginsberg had country-wise almirahs . He collected most of our manifestos and they are available in Stanford University.

TSC : In his Indian Journals, Ginsberg does not allude to your movement although he knew about it and took deep interest. Do you think it was deliberate? Do you think he appropriated your techniques and attitudes regarding poetry and art in general?

MRC : I think I have answered your question just now.

TSC: Ginsberg met poets in Bombay also, including Kolatkar and others. How can then it be said that he was principally influenced by the Hungryalists?

MRC: He met poets of other Indian languages for a day or two ; but he stayed in Kolkata for about two years, attended Bengali poetry readings, went to country liquor den Khalasitola visited by Bengali poets, Sonagachhi visited by Bengali poets, smoking joints visited by Bengali poets.

TSC : You have criticised Ginsberg for clicking pictures of beggars while he was here. Is that part of a larger disenchantment with your old friend? Do you think at the end of the day, he was as superficial as other white tourists?

MRC: Yes, when Ferlighetti sent me a copy of India Journals I felt quite ashamed, I did not show the book to my dad who had admonished Ginsberg for taking photographs of beggars, lepers, lame men, naked sadhus etc. I have visited other countries and never thought of making a mockery of poverty of certain people. In his Indian Journal there is a photograph of Ginsberg himself in the guise of a beggar seated beside a beggar.

Ginsberg had several photo exhibitions in USA which highlighted Indian beggars, lepers, destitutes, almost naked sadhus, cows on the streets, stray dogs, goats etc. Cards to these exhibitions were sold to patrons. When he revisited India during Bangladesh war, he shot photos of refugees fleeing the war zone.

He did have the typical white tourist in him.

Probably my childhood in Imlitala slum taught me to respect the poorest man.

TSC: Could you tell us about the politics of the Hungryalists?  Were there direct links back then between the Naxals and the Hungryalists?

MRC : Hungryalist movement had started in 1961, The Naxalite movement started in Seventies. I have already told you about the plight of Anil Karanjai and Karuna Nidhan. My first book was on Marxism. Saileswar Ghose, Subhas Ghose, Aloke Goswami had joined the CPI (M) for literary gains. I was disillusioned with Marxism after I started reading about the activities of the Soviet establishment as well as the activities of the lumpens of CPI ( M ). Strangely CPI ( M ) resorted to the same murderous activities of the earlier Bengal governments. Now the new Bengal government has co-opted the same lumpens and are resorting to same murderous activities.

TSC : The beats were crticised for their lack of gender awareness. How do the Hungryalists fare in your opinion on that count? Were there female hungry gen writers and artists? Also, did the movement display consciousness of caste issues?

MRC : Young bold women writers were rare at that time. We had one lady member, Alo Mitra, who later married Tridib Mitra. They together used to edit two Hungryalist magazines, one in Bengali, named UNMARGA, another in English named WASTE PAPER.

We were the first to bring lower and backward class writers and poets in literature. Prior to us there was not a single poet to be seen on the pages of poetry magazines. Debi Roy, Subimal Basak, Abani Dhar, Rasaraj Nath belong to lower or backward class.

TSC : Tell us a little about your poetic process? What influences and inspires you?   Is the process of writing poems that deal with stark reality harder than facing the wrath of audience and editors?

MRC:  I was initiated into poetry in a strange way. Being a Brahmin family, at our Imlitala house we were not allowed to eat chicken eggs. I was sent to fetch duck eggs from our Shia Muslim neighbour quite frequently. I was ten. The elder girl of their house whom I called Kulsum Apa was fifteen years old. She used to recite Ghalib and Faiz Ahmed Faiz to me which I did not understand; but she explained those poems to me. She indirectly, through those poems, told me that she loves me. One day when I asked for the meat being cooked in their house because of the scent, she induced me into sexual relation. The meat was wonderful and she licked clean my lips with her tongue. After a few days, due to painful  scratches on my penis, I got scared and stopped going to Kulsum Apa's house. However, the impact of the poems remained. I had told about this sexual relation to my grandmother who told me to never talk about it to anyone in my life. I still miss Kulsum Apa. When I last visited Imlitala I enquired of the family and was told that they had sold their house and left Imlitala.

My next influence was again a girl of higher class named Namita Chakroborty at the Ram Mohun Roy Seminary, who doubled up as Librarian for the Bengali section. I had a great crush on her. She initiated me into Marxism and introduced me to works of Brahmo writers and poets including Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das. One day I had kept a chit on her table in which I had written "I love you". She had preserved the chit and showed it to one of my aunts after several years, when my name started appearing in magazines and papers. Both Kulsum Apa and Namitadi had dimples.

At Imlitala house we had two servants, Shivnanni and Ram Khelawan, who were paid in kind, that is food, dresses and shelter. Since they were servants they could not reprimand us children directly. Shivnanni knew Ramcharitmanas by heart. Ramkhelawan knew dohas of Kabir, Rahim and Dadu. Both of them reprimanded through quotations and explained the lines as well. Shivnanni used to play a game called Ramshalaka, that is a metal stick. You have to close your eyes, open a page and put the Ramshalaka on a line. Shivnanni explained how our day will pass based on the line.

Imlitala was considered a bad influence by Dad as we were exposed to free sex, toddy, cannabis, country liquor etc. He constructed a house in Dariapur and we shifted there. My elder brother Samir was packed off to Kolkata for post-school studies. It helped me. He joined groups of poets and brought lots of poetry collections and periodicals for me. Ginsberg had come to our Dariapur residence. Prior to that Ginsberg and Orlovsky had visited Samir at Chaibasa, Singhbhum and experienced Mahua drink.

I am not bothered about editors in my life. Only when I am requested do I send my poems and novels to them. Most of the editors are younger to me and they respect me. Yes, dealing with reality is harder. Earlier I used to maintain a bank of images, words, lines, sentences when I wrote with pen on paper, Now, because of arthritis of fingers, specially the thumb, the process has become difficult with the computer. Since I take a lot of medicines, including sleeping pills, I tend to forget these days.

TSC : What is your opinion of the current writing scene in Bangla and English in India? Are there any writers you like in particular?

MRC : I do not have much idea about what is happening in Indian Writing in English. As far as Bengali writing is concerned lot of exciting things are happening in the little magazine world. Every year a Little Magazine Fair is held apart from the Kolkata Book Fair. Book Fairs are also held at the district headquarters. This gives us a glimpse into a wide range of creative writing.

The poets whom I have noticed recently writing in a new way are Raka Dasgupta, Sridarshini Chakraborty, Mitul Dutta, Barin Ghoshal, Dhiman Chakraborty, Anupam Mukhopadhyay and Bahata Anshumali to name a few.

TSC : Are you concerned about the general rise of right-wing and other intolerant forces in India and elsewhere?

MRC: Yes, I am very much disturbed by the latest events taking place all over India. It appears that a worthless government run by cheaters was better than one influenced by fundamentalist criminals baying for blood of the meek and helpless. I wonder how this country had once given us Khajuraho, Puri temple, Meenakshi temple, Konarak, Ajanta, Ellora ; how kings enjoyed meat and wine after the Ashwamedh Yajna.

TSC: Is Neera in Sunil's poems and the one whose name appears in your poem "Please Don't tell my grandmother" the same person? Was she real? Was she a writer/ publisher who could be associated with the Generation? Is Mala in Debi roy's Malar Jonne real?  Was she too a poet associated with the Generation?

MRC : Yes, she is the same Neera. Sunil Gangopadhyay never asked for a poem from me for his magazine Krittibas. After his death his wife Swati Gangopadhyay became editor of Krittibas which Sunil used to edit. Krittibas asked me to contribute a poem. I had sent this poem but they were scared to publish it in Krittibas. They did not publish it and told me to replace it. Obviously I had to decline. But the fact became known to little magazine circle of poets and writers in Kolkata.

No, Debi Roy's wife Mala was not a poet ; she was a housewife. She died recently.

A Calcutta Story | Deborah Baker

In a moving tribute to Calcutta and Ginsberg, Deborah Baker writes about her early days in the city, having married one of the best writers of Indian English literature, who belonged to the place. The lack of a sense of belonging informs her early days while she accompanies her husband on his evening visits to the house of a Calcutta poet who knew Ginsberg. Here she writes about feeling a sense of affinity with Ginsberg whom she imagines to have undergone the same set of suspicions that she had faced and like him,she also ended up disarming her local interlocutors.This is followed up with a description of meeting Allen in New York city where she felt like an outsider once again.She tells us how even the young and irreverent who thought nothing of mocking other senior writers were respectful towards Ginsberg. Read the original English version of Baker's piece first published exclusively by The Sunflower Collective.

Allen Ginsberg in Calcutta circa 1960
Source: https://artcritique.files.wordpress.com/

In February 1990 I married my husband before a crowd of strangers on the rooftop of his parents house in Calcutta.  That first year I worked on a book in the back room of a borrowed apartment in Ballygunge while he worked on his book a few kilometers away in his childhood bedroom in Jodhpur Park. Every month or so we would go to the home of a popular and prolific Bengali writer named Tarapada Ray. He lived with his wife on the second floor of a big house near the Astor Hotel closer to the city center.

It seemed we always arrived at Tarapada babu’s in the midst of  loadshedding. We would creep up the large stairway that wound round the inner walls of the house in complete darkness, my husband carrying a bottle of Old Monk while I tried not to trip on my sari. Fluorescent tubes lit up the flat while ceiling fans rotated weakly, both powered by a contraption referred to as an inverter. Unlike a generator that makes a loud roar and can operate as long as it has petrol, the inverter is made from an assemblage of car batteries, wired to switch on when the current failed. If load shedding lasted long enough or returned often enough, the batteries would run down completely.  Every household had one. There was nothing more dispiriting during loadshedding than the sound of a ceiling fan over your bed stopping in the middle of the night.The mosquito net would heave a final sigh before settling on you like a collapsed lung. When the swish of the fan returned, an hour or two or more later, it felt like the wings of angels.

Tarapada babu cut a striking figure. His bloodshot eyes were banded in a darker pigment of skin lending him a distinct raccoon-like appearance. Most prominent was his belly. This preceded him by some distance, particularly when his dhoti’s knot rested atop it, giving his figure a senatorial fullness. He had a bullet head set upon prominent jowls and no discernable neck. Unexpectedly, he vibrated with energy and would periodically explode in barrel chested laughter. In his wild younger days the American poet Allen Ginsberg had christened him Torpedo.

Evenings at Tarapada babu’s were spent smoking Gold Flake cigarettes, and throwing back large tumblers of rum. Both fueled an uninterrupted flow of Bengali stories. From the evidence of my husband’s good humor, these stories were very funny. Tarapada’s wife spoke no English, and Tarapada wasn’t terribly keen on it. My husband would occasionally try to translate for me but it was like trying to describe an orchestra to a deaf person. When Tarapada spoke English, it came out in short, hoarse bursts of glottal noise, not unlike gunfire. The last words were nearly always unintelligible and I would have to ask him to repeat himself which naturally exasperated him. Similarly, if I risked a question I could never tell if Tarapada understood a word of what I was saying. His glare signaled blank incomprehension, if not actual hostility. I really couldn’t tell.  Mostly I just sat there counting my mosquito bites and making minute adjustments to the folds in my sari. At about 11 or 12 at night, Tarapada would send out for kathi rolls from the Astor Hotel. The cylindrical rolls, filled with spiced chicken and tiny green rings of hot peppers, arrived warm, with grease lightly flecking the waxy paper they were wrapped in. Their arrival signaled the close of Tarapada’s evening and the highlight of mine.  

Young Indian students had only recently begun to apply for undergraduate admission to American colleges and universities in significant numbers. Where once upon a time an aspiring Bengali academic might choose to pursue advanced studies in the Soviet Union or even Oxford or Cambridge, if they chose an America university they would have to answer for it. In Calcutta there was still something vaguely disloyal about anyone who chose to go to America instead.

A year before the first Gulf war, I felt that the pro Soviet/anti Americanism of the Bengalis was more of a salutary practice than a firm conviction, not unlike choosing low fat milk over whole. To someone’s proposition that the CIA had orchestrated the rise of Solidarity and the more recent fall of the Berlin wall, I once replied “you can’t be serious.” This was a mistake. On occasion some inane remark of mine at what I imagined was a friendly dinner party would end up in the society pages accompanied by a snarky comment. This happened more than once. It took me awhile to catch on that I was a subject of suspicion.

During one of these evenings at Tarapada’s house, he suddenly turned and spoke directly to me. He told me that he had known the American poet Allen Ginsberg, that he and his fellow poets had met him in the famed College Street coffeehouse in North Calcutta. Again, the tail end of the thought was lost in an explosion of incomprehensible and fearful sounds finishing in a deadly quiet. I smiled and Tarapada glared.   

           

I had met Allen Ginsberg just once, several years before. He was smaller than I had imagined; his stature further undermined by the folds and cushions of an off white sectional sofa at an upper west side cocktail party. The once rabbinical beard was then trim and graying and there were suede patches on the elbows of his jacket befitting his new position as a professor at Brooklyn College.  He carried the weight of his legend lightly, with none of the affectations the young are so quick to discover and disparage. He had kind eyes--one slightly drooping from an illness we had all heard about--behind thick spectacles.

Nearly everyone at the party had a claim on him but any direct approach was made somewhat awkward by the arrangement of furniture. The party took place in one of those storied pre-war classic six apartments, with a book lined hallway running its length, the kitchen at one end and a living room and its sofa at the other. Just being in an owner occupied apartment back then gave me an outsider’s sense of belonging, a sense of having cracked New York City in some essential way.

I came with several friends, all in our mid twenties, freelancers and journeyman editors with inchoate aspirations. One, the son of a much married father who had edited a prominent literary magazine, was a beautiful and haunted young poet, with a voice so fast and low you were obliged to lean closer to hear him. As a sulky adolescent he had known writers and intellectuals I had admired for years and he took pleasure in disabusing me of their immortal stature. Yet, even for him, Allen Ginsberg commanded attention. He approached the couch with the same confidence, I recall thinking, a pretty young woman displays in the presence of an older but moneyed man.

Yet what I remember most about that evening was noting that Ginsberg only had eyes for a young man from India who had accompanied us. Unlike my other friends, the man was a relative newcomer to the city and a stranger to the literary lions in the room. Ginsberg’s eyes and voice found him trapped in the doorway and, patting the sofa, drew him in. Knowing from his name that he was a Bengali, he wanted to know which writers he knew in Calcutta.

Three years later, newly married to this young writer, and settled in a city I never once imagined I would even visit, I realized that it was comforting to be reminded by Tarapada that Allen Ginsberg had been here before me. That he had braved the worst suspicions of an entire cadre of skeptical, wary, and fierce Bengali poets and had disarmed them and learned from them. That he was able to prove he was not, as they first imagined, a CIA agent out to destabilize their young country. In the end they decided he was one of them: a poet in a city full of poets. Tarapada babu wouldn’t have said so, but I could tell that even after thirty years, he still considered Allen Ginsberg his friend.  It occurred to me that perhaps he was telling me of this friendship as a way of declaring a truce with me, a suspect American married to a Bengali writer. Perhaps, resigning himself to the fact that I wasn’t scared off, this was his way of being hospitable.

That, at least, was how I chose to see it. It wasn’t exactly a warm welcome, but it was the start of something. Years later, still married and outfitted with two children, seven years after the death of Allen Ginsberg, I was fired from my job as a book editor. Rather than look for another job I decided I wanted to write a book about the place of India in the American imagination. I began my research with the Transcendentalists, proceeding through Walt Whitman’s “A Passage to India” and Martin Luther King’s embrace of Gandhi’s thought, and Hollywood’s discovery of yoga. When it finally occurred to me that Allen Ginsberg 1962 and 1963 travels would be the perfect vehicle to explore this subject, I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to think of it. Tarapada’s mention of Ginsberg on that long ago evening I now decided had granted me permission to write about Allen and the Bengali poets he had come to love.  It was only then, in the course of researching the book, that I heard all the stories of Allen’s stay in Calcutta.

Five days before he died Allen wrote a poem entitled “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgia)” which included memories of his days in Calcutta and Benares and his travels in India with his lover, Peter Orlovsky.

Nor ever return to Kashi "oldest continuously habited city in the world"

bathe in Ganges & sit again at Manikarnika ghat with Peter,

visit Lord Jagganath again in Puri, never back to Birbhum take

notes tales of Khaki B Baba

Or enter to have Chai with older Sunil & Young coffeehouse poets,

Tie my head on a block in the Chinatown opium den, pass by Moslem

Hotel, its rooftop Tinsmith Street Choudui Chowh Nimtallah

Burning ground nor smoke ganja on the Hooghly.

He meant the poem as a goodbye but for the poets he left behind, like Tarapada, it was more than that. Calcutta is Kolkata now and there are fancy malls and a lot less loadshedding.  But Tarapada is gone and the city is emptier without him.