Anyone who's completely unaware of the impact that Beat poet Allen Ginsberg left on American life in the second half of the 20th century must have spent his life on Mars. But what a lot of us are less aware of is his international peregrinations, especially to India and its environs.
Deborah Baker, a writer who has lived in Calcutta since 1990, describes in A Blue Hand -- The Beats in India how in 1961, Ginsberg embarked with his lover Peter Orlovsky on "a restless, comic, and tortured quest for meaning in the ashrams in the Himalayan foothills, the opium dens of Delhi, and the burning pyres of Benares."
In Calcutta, Ginsberg joined a circle of aspiring young writers, which led to a cultural exchange of ideas between East and West. Baker's work traces "how India's landscape of spectacular beauty and spiritual promise, devastating poverty and political unease profoundly altered American literature in the latter half of the twentieth century."
