A Blue Hand: The Tragicomic, Mind-Altering Odyssey of Allen Ginsberg, a Holy Fool, a Lost Muse, a Dharma Bum, and His Prickly Bride in India

by Deb Baker

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143114833
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/27/2009
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

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.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"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

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher

Baker's work is 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 several generations of hipsters, hippies, writers, artists, rock stars, mental cases and self-annointed medicine men…In new and far greater detail, and with a contagious sense of enjoyment that sometimes pushes her into the present tense and the personal, Baker shows how much the Beats owed their name and their legacy—including some of their politics of protest and a persistent head-shop aesthetic that ultimately benefited the Indian economy—to their embrace of Eastern beatitude. Columbus went looking for India and found America; in 1961 Irwin Allen Ginsberg went looking for India and landed in a whole lot of what would become the American counterculture.
—The New York Times

Celia McGee

Drawing on letters, journals, memoirs, and many unpublished sources, Baker (In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding) here traces the journeys of several Beat poets in India, particularly Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, and Joanne Kyger. The subtitle may define the book too narrowly, for these poets' quest for enlightenment is not the whole story; a fascinating subplot extends from Baker's search for Hope Savage, a troubled young poet who was once Gregory Corso's lover and muse and seemingly vanished off the face of the earth after crossing paths with Ginsberg in India. In addition to describing the budding poetry scene in Calcutta, Baker provides glimpses of Herbert Huncke, Janine Pommy Vega, and other Beat Generation writers who remained behind, seeking a different path to enlightenment on the drug-drenched streets of New York City's East Village. Beyond what it says about the role of India in the Beat imagination, the book raises larger questions about how travel helps to define one's identity and sense of home. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.
—William Gargan

Library Journal

An enlightening study of the Beat Generation's quest for enlightenment in India. The most prominent exemplar of the holy-fool searcher was not Jack Kerouac, who proclaimed himself a bodhisattva, or even Gary Snyder, who turned to Japan for guidance, but instead the ecstatic sensualist Allen Ginsberg. Baker (In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, 1993, etc.), a fine storyteller, traces the moment to a New York day on which Ginsberg, gazing out the window of some anonymous apartment, sees God, or at least a god. From that moment on, though famously still interested in more earthly adventures with young men, he sought the presence of the divine. No better place for that quest than India, which, in the early 1960s, was not wholly prepared for Ginsberg's arrival, nor the attentions of more reluctant beats such as Gregory Corso. Yet Ginsberg soon found sympathetic allies among religious but mostly nonsectarian Indians, who shared some of the American poet's worldly interests and brought a beat sensibility to their own culture, which was thriving, especially around Bombay and Calcutta. Blessed with the ability to mix and make friends and with a Zelig-like talent for being in the right place at the right time, Ginsberg antedated the Beatles in Rishikesh by a few years. Though in love with much of what he saw-he chided Paul Bowles for having warned him away from cheap lodgings, writing, "I must say, you made it sound as if a westerner would die of rat poison if he stayed anywhere but Taj Mahal Hotel"-he was also a realist enough to see India's suffering as well. This knowledge came to fill notebooks, and Ginsberg imported many things Indian, notably the Hare Krishna chant, to the Bay Area andGreenwich Village. Baker evokes strange worlds and distant times in a narrative that never fails to flow and that, in the end, is admirably illuminating.

Kirkus Reviews