RISHIKESH RISING / GHOSTS OF THE BEATLES INDIA

Introduction to 'REVOLUTION / THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE BEATLES' coming soon from Icon Editions

There is a rare film of a long-ago afternoon in February 1968 preserved )y an Italian television crew who, along with the rest of the world's media, descended on the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's enclave in Rishi-cesh for a glimpse of the Beatles as aspiring mystics. Even today it is an enticing image. Here are John, Paul, George, Ringo, Mike Love, Donovan, Mia Farrow with her sister Prudence and brother Johnny, and the Beatle wives singing sweetly to the jangling of acoustic guitars, "She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain", "When The Saints Go Marching In" - fronted by George Harrison and Mia Farrow - "You Are My Sunshine", "Jingle Bells", as well as a ragged rendition of the Hare Krishna mantra. The Maharishi urged everyone, "Fathom the infinity, dive into the Ganges. Fathom the infinity!" To which George replied, "Hey, I guess we don't merely just exist after all!"I played it back in my head in the early summer of 2000 as I struggled along in the stifling midday sun past the sparkling Ganges, past the thatched huts of a small group of ash-covered, dope-smoking babas, and finally the monsoon-carved, boulder-strewn left turn that took me to the Maharishi's padlocked front door.

Over the years I've spent a lot of time in Rishikesh, first drawn there in the early 1990s by images I saw as a kid flickering across my family's old black and white TV, of George, John and their friends walking peacefully along brick walkways lined with painted stones, deep inside the Maharishi's secret Shangri-la. Driving along the road from Hardwar (the nearest train stop from Delhi) I might have missed it, but even without being told I knew somehow that this was the place. Although the area has been built up over succeeding decades, Rishikesh is still a quaint village highlighted by an astounding black-topped suspension bridge, Ram Jhula, that connects the seeker to the opposite side of the Ganges. It is only just wide enough for two or three people to walk across shoulder to shoulder. After a sharp right turn, you are on the home stretch to Maharishi Central, circa 1968, the place where the Beatles were inspired to write some of their most compelling and spiritual music. Look hard enough and you will find photos of all of the Beatles, arriving as I did, on that gently swaying bridge.

If nothing else, the wide, swirling Ganges and the cloud-covered blue mountain range are enough to touch the hardest hearts. In this still magical valley there are dozens of tiny temples from which, by four thirty in the morning, you can hear the echoes of blowing conches, the chanting of the Hindu faithful, smell the pungent aroma of doop (north Indian hand-rolled incense) and smouldering cow-dung fires. Rishikesh overwhelms the senses and, within moments of arrival, transmits an immediate peace. After a few days the restless mind reads that as boredom but it soon turns into something deeper, richer and much harder to define.

Almost as soon as the Beatles had left, in the late spring of 1968, the Maharishi ordered the heavy iron front gates locked. No one, except local caretakers, some Indian followers and those foreigners bearing a signed letter from the master, was allowed entrance. As I fell into none of these categories on my first trip to Rishikesh in 1998 I was turned away in brusque Hindi by the guard. Still, I was determined to see inside the place in hopes it might somehow have remained frozen in time. After some debate, my wife Vrnda and I decided that if we got up early enough, around five or six, we might sneak in. Not expecting intruders at such an early hour the guard was sound asleep, his rifle tucked under his chin in the small booth at the outside perimeter. We walked silently through the ten-acre estate, with its own functioning post office, a large multi-storey dormitory and several dilapidated stone cottages, then decided to sneak out through a second gate at the opposite end of the property. There we met a good-natured wide-awake guard, who advised us politely not to go out that way as there were man-eating tigers, spitting cobras, and several wild ele­phants in the jungle beyond. Not to mention the three-hundred-foot drop directly into the rock-strewn river below.

Several months later I took my twenty-four-year-old son Devin, along with Sanjay Khemani, a family friend from Delhi, and a couple of mischievous Indian boys inside at dusk. This time there was no guard, no guns and even, no gate. Apparently the decades-long policy of guarding the birthplace of the Beatles' White Album and the spiritual revolution of the sixties had been abandoned. As we ventured inside the basement of a large dormitory, an old man rushed over from one of the cottages and warned us to come out immediately: the tigers often came at dusk to feast on young deer in the ravaged rooms that had once hosted the élite of the pop world. We didn't have to be told twice. We made our way to the famous house where the master had met privately with the Beatles to discuss the inscrutable Truth he had offered the war-weary world of the late 1960s. It was not at all the "million-dollar staccato house" to which John Lennon had referred impishly in his quasi-musical litany to the Maharishi but, rather, a simple stone and wood house with several large windows that allowed us to see inside. There was a moderately large living room, a kitchen, and perhaps two bedrooms at the back. Legend has it there is a cave underneath the house where the Maharishi performed deep meditation. What struck me was how often writers like myself, without any first-hand knowledge, exaggerated John's description that this house was some kind of mansion with a helipad. The Maharishi's elaborate chair - asana — with carved lion's feet stood empty on a veranda facing the compound, broken, weather-beaten, and perhaps not used since the Beatles had sat round him and strummed their acoustic guitars. The next morning I came back alone, excited and almost able to feel the imprint of the Beatles and co. from some thirty years before. This time I met an old sannyasi (renunciant), His Holiness Ravindra Damodara Swami, a god-brother of the Maharishi. He remembered well the Beatles' brief, but very public time there, and dancing with Mia Farrow during an impromptu acoustic concert by Donovan, the Beatles and Mike Love on the roof of the dining hall. He also recalled the day a helicopter took John Lennon and the guru for a ride over the Rishikesh valley. Intrigued, I questioned him further but he only smiled and offered me a tattered notebook he took from a trunk. It contained some seventy pages of scrawled Hindi which had evidently been a monk's diary. "You write book about Beatles and Guru Maharaja then you must read this, my writing from that time. Everything is here. You please take, sir!" he ventured. He asked me to return it after I had read it. He then walked me down the curving lane to the front gates and the Ganges, pointing out along the way four pebble-covered stone domes, which he said the Maharishi had built for the Beatles to use for advanced meditation. Inside, the little buildings were about ten feet round at the base with a small area for resting, reading or eating, and a little wooden ladder to a platform on which they would presumably have sat in the lotus position to ascend into the lofty Godhead from which we all spring. They were never used.

In many ways the Maharishi's Rishikesh estate is a kind of cultural time-warp. The events that took place there so long ago have somehow imprinted themselves on its fibre. Pilgrimage is an ancient and important element of human history and my trek to Rishikesh informed and inspired this book. There, among the old stones, rusted signs, tigers and solitary sadhus, many of my views on the Beatles' real import in our cultural history were crystallized. In the exotic, perfumed Himalayan foothills I was surrounded by the ghosts of John Lennon and his cohorts and simultaneously exorcized any doubts I might have had about going forward with this potentially risky book. Here, in a visionary flash, John and Paul were sitting on the stone steps of the former's bungalow composing the gentle Ί Will' while Ringo smoked a cigarette at their feet. As Donovan and George played love songs in the sunny grounds, the Beatle wives chatted in a circle with the children of the ashram staff. Overwhelmed by the enduring magic that hovered among the broken buildings I left my companions to stand alone on the edge of the mountain about which Donovan had once sung: "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is," and made a kind of silent pact with the history before me. For everything that this place - and, indeed, the Beatles — had given me I would write without reservation or restraint. Two years later, I am in a cramped mobile home in a northern Florida campground and you are at the other end of this collection of words, which spilled out in my search for the Beatles' secret history. Whether or not I got it right now seems entirely up to you.

Geoffrey Giuliano (Jagannatha Dasa)
August 9, 2009, Bangkok