Synopses & Reviews
A literary exploration of the Beats' encounter with India in the 1960s, a journey that inspired and influenced generations of Americans and Indians alike
In 1961, Allen Ginsberg left New York by boat for Bombay, India. He brought with him his troubled lover, Peter Orlovsky, and a plan to meet up with poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. He left behind not only fellow Beats Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs, but also the relentless notoriety that followed his publication of Howl, the epic work that branded him the voice of a generation.
Drawing from extensive research in India, undiscovered letters, journals, and memoirs, acclaimed biographer Deborah Baker has woven a many layered literary mystery out of Ginsberg's odyssey. A Blue Hand follows him and his companions as they travel from the ashrams of the Himalayan foothills to Delhi opium dens and the burning pyres of Benares. They encounter an India of charlatans and saints, a country of spectacular beauty and spiritual promise and of devastating poverty and political unease. In Calcutta, Ginsberg discovers a circle of hungry young writers whose outrageousness and genius are uncannily reminiscent of his own past. Finally, Ginsberg searches for Hope Savage, the mysterious and beautiful girl whose path, before she disappeared, had crossed his own in Greenwich Village, San Francisco, and Paris.
In their restless, comic and oftimes tortured search for meaning, the Beats looked to India for answers while India looked to the West. A Blue Hand is the story of their search for God, for love, and for peace in the shadow of the atomic bomb. It is also a story of India-its gods and its poets, its politics and its place in the American imagination.
Review
"A passionate account of the Beats at home and in the world. Baker captures the range of their artistic and spiritual passions, as well as their pettiness, their tantrums, their always difficult loves. Her tenderness and finely tuned humor, as well as her ease in both cultures, makes her a perfect recreator of this ornery band of seekers. And of the ways in which India and the United States have understood and misunderstood each other over the ages. A truly vivid, wonderful book."
-Kiran Desai, author of The Inheritance of Loss
"Sympathetic without being sycophantic, Deborah Baker has made an important and vivid contribution to our understanding of the Beats, both as phenomenon and as individuals. More broadly, A Blue Hand is an original and entrancing account of how India expanded the possibilities of western consciousness."
--Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage
"A fabulous book - comic, tragic, and written with great verve and nerve -about the Beats and their 'passage to India'. It is a remarkable saga of various lives and stories all drawn together by Deborah Baker - the biographer as adventurer."
-Michael Ondaatje
"'Beat' was short for 'beatitude,' and India was the place to find it. A Blue Hand is a deeply researched, elegantly written account of those days of divine, induced, and congenital madness- the last adventures in American poetry."
-Eliot Weinberger
"This is a haunting portrait of a band of poets bravely, if naively, taking on drugs, disease, unbridled passion, and the whole of Indian religious history, in an adventure that never fails to move and often instructs. A fascinating history of the weirdest moment in the long and ongoing European and American search for the answer to it all in India."
-Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School, University of Chicago
"I boarded those third class trains to enlightenment, and befriended the fragile heroes of this book. Deborah Baker's narrative is concise, rich, unsentimental and shows how, just like India, a spiritual journey is grotesque, sublime, comical, but never sad."
-Francesco Clemente
"A beautiful book! As deftly woven and fully-realized as a novel, this is a fascinating, original work of scholarship, following the beat poets on their journeys to India in a way that illuminates their inner lives, their poetry and the fantastical nature of pilgrimage itself." -Melanie Thernstrom, author of Halfway Heaven
Review
"A fabulous book-and written with great verve and nerve- about the Beats and their passage to India."
- Michael Ondaatje
"[A] dense, exotic, intriguing saga-not just Ginsberg's but India's too."
-National Geographic Adventure
"A piece of devoted scholarship and legwork dunked in the screwy, hyper-intelligent, tragicomic essence of everything that drove Ginsberg to take a trip that not only changed his life but helped spawn generations of hipsters, hippies, writers, artists, rock stars, mental cases, and self-anointed medicine men."
-The New York Times
Synopsis
Baker presents a literary exploration of the Beats' encounter with India in the 1960s, a journey--led by Allen Ginsberg--that inspired and influenced generations of Americans and Indians alike.
Synopsis
In this engrossing new piece of Beat history, Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker takes us back to the moment when America's edgiest writers looked to India for answers as India looked to the West. It was 1961 when Allen Ginsberg left New York by boat for Bombay, where he hoped to meet poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. Baker follows Ginsberg and his companions as they travel from ashram to opium den. Exposing an overlooked chapter of the literary past,
A Blue Hand will delight all those who continue to cherish the frenzied creativity of the Beats.
About the Author
In 1990 Deborah Baker moved to Calcutta where she studied Bengali and wrote In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Since then, her essays have appeared in a range of publications from The New York Times to the Calcutta Statesmen. With her husband, the writer Amitav Ghosh, and her two children Lila and Nayan, she now divides her time between Calcutta, Goa and Brooklyn.