For a Fistful of Sitars

August 1971. The crème de la crème of international rock was appearing at Madison Square Garden, summoned by George Harrison for a memorable concert in support of Bangladesh, then wasting away due to a terrible famine. Ravi Shankar took the stage. The Indian musician picked up his sitar. The first notes glided over the thronging crowds. After a few seconds, the music stopped. And the audience exploded in an ovation. Ravi Shankar thanked them, and added: “If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more.”

That sentence is the insignia and definitive interpretive key for one of the most characteristic infatuations—and most curious misunderstandings—of the counterculture during the 1960s and 1970s. The rules of classical Indian music dictate that concerts traditionally begin with the tuning of the instruments. But this was unknown to the audiences at Madison Square Garden.

All they knew was that those sounds came from India. And therefore they were very cool.

The rock-hard conviction of this audience in New York, during the summer of 1971, had distant origins. And, I presume, its motivations were generally something other than the appreciation (let alone the understanding) of classical Indian music.

At the close of the 1950s, long before the Beatles arrived in Rishikesh and were deceived by the guru, and long before Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead went looking for inspiration in Varanasi, the passage of an oppositional Occident, autopiloting beyond the boundaries of the Western establishment toward a mysterious India (principally imagined and imaginary), was inaugurated by bus-packers, spacey seekers of the divine, hippies, freaks, globe-trotters, and young high-school dropouts, traveling from London or Amsterdam all the way to Amritsar aboard a “magic bus.” Aging Jeeps, broken-down Volkswagen vans, and London double-deckers painted with the colors of the rainbow covered in just a couple of months that infinite journey from the shores of the North Sea to the Indian sub-continent. No one can say if more petrol or more LSD was consumed on those trips—without a doubt, the contest was hard-fought.

With the decisive contribution of these two fuels, over the course of twenty years magic buses traversed Europe and half of Asia. Thousands of proto-tourists spilled into the country of the Vedas with reddened legs and minds full of acid-inspired, exotic sensations. Nearly all of them had pored over the sacred writings of the Beat Generation, and a few daring individuals even went on to read Hesse’s Siddhartha. But few it seemed were acquainted with Guido Gozzano’s Journey towards the Cradle of Mankind: yet those youngsters—mostly the offspring of an England, with its minor myths and rituals, not much different from Gozzano’s Turin during the early twentieth century—were the unsuspecting brothers of our melancholic poet. Gozzano in 1912 was already looking in India for an improbable form of physical and mental health, and he’d already understood everything when he wrote that “The English only went [to India] for two reasons: eating and making love.” Hippies only slightly modified the project of their colonialist grandfathers, replacing food with less nutritional but more entertaining substances.

The magic buses—immortalized by the song with the same name by the Who—transported the imagination of Western youth on the brink of modernity, in a tumult of ideas and hormones. And when rock music became the common language of that generation, it seemed natural for India to become part of it, by any means necessary. Which meant that—with a few obligatory exceptions—music from that period was steeped in Indian flair, with very little India. Let’s take as our example a key episode of that infatuation (the most well-known and talked about): when the Beatles and various other celebrities of that period met with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and the sojourn of the celebrated musicians in Rishikesh, in the guru’s den. Tabloids of the time wallowed in this news, but musical critics also wondered (and still do) about the influence of...