Hippie Masala Forever in India

HIPPIE MASALA FOREVER IN INDIA

with Robert from Holland Hanspeter from Switzerland Meera from Belgium Cesare from Italy Erica and Gillian from South Africa

directed & filmed by Ulrich Grossenbacher scripted & co-directed by Damaris Lüthi sound & transport Avesh Serge Valentin sound & sound design Bathasar Jucker edited by Maya Schmid editorial assistant Kaspar Grossenbacher location manager Varsha Ursula Grace catering Varsha Ursula Grace, Sharada und Anju graphics Jens Müller guitar Disu Gmünder sitar Shalil Shankar saxophone Robert Geesink music Disu Gmünder translation Peter Grunder, Monica Zeeman, Damaris Lüthi

archival footage: Junge Schweizer auf dem Guru-Trip, 1973, von Erich Dammann - SF-Archivmaterial: Telepool Gmbh, Zürich

technic: music editor: Peter von Siebenthal – grading: RecTV, Bern, Peter Guyer - sound mix: Zone 33, Bern spotting SRG SSR idée suisse, Media Services Bern - english subtitles: Titra Film S.A., Genf

supported by: Bundesamt für Kultur (EDI), Schweiz - Amt für Kultur, Kanton Bern – KulturStadtBern Amt für Kultur und Sport, Kanton Solothurn Volkart Stiftung, Migros Kulturprozent

[email protected] - www.looknow.ch HIPPIE MASALA

In the 1960s and 1970s thousands of hippies journeyed East in the search for enlightenment, free drugs or a ‘pure’ life. Indian peasants assumed that a severe drought in the West was the reason for their migration. India’s holy men saw it, more accurately, as a search for spirituality. Most of the freaks moved back to their home countries after a few months or years. Some stayed for good. The Italian Cesare, for example, still lives today as he has done for decades, as a Yogi in a remote cave, striving for spiritual release. He is so completely integrated into the Indian Ascetic community and Ascetic way of life that his foreign roots are barely recognisable.

Hanspeter from Switzerland runs a small farm in the Himalayas. He is, however, far from the archetypal Swiss farmer, as one realizes while being enveloped in a cloud of smoke from his hash pipe. He does not waste any interest in the local community and, therefore, is in constant conflict with the authorities of this small mountain-town. His indigenous wife Babali tries to mediate between the townspeople and her obstinate husband, but she too sometimes dreams of fleeing to foreign parts.

The Belgian Ascetic Meera has lived for 18 years in the central Indian town of Hampi, where she has pursued her search for inner freedom. She lives a hand-to-mouth existence, relying on alms from foreign visitors, to whom in return she provides spiritual guidance.

The Dutch painter Robert has lived for more than 25 years in the central Indian town of Hampi where he arrived after fleeing his self-destructive life as a delinquent and drug addict in Europe. He found what he had long dreamed of: a house on a small island in the middle of a river where he could paint in peace and quiet and, from time to time, enjoy the music and drugs of the Full Moon Parties. Many of his friends who lived in the area have died in the past few years, so Robert, now with a young family, is practically the last of those who stayed behind in their adoptive homeland.

The twins from South Africa, flowers in their hair, whirl through the former hippie-paradise of Goa, cultivating the image of the eternally young ‘flower-power-children’. They sew ‘hippie-pants’ for the old-time hippies as well as for the new generation of ‘Goa-freaks’.

Hippie Masala shows ageing flower power-children who, after fleeing Western civilisation, found a new home in India. Contents

From the mid-1960s many western hippies and ‘freaks’ have been drawn to India in the search for an alternative way of life, enlightenment, or drugs. Some stayed for ever. Those who stayed, now approach- ing retirement age and having had very complex and contradictory life experiences, were the ones we focused on. Not the left-wing revolutionaries of the ’68 movement ended up in India, but the people who questioned their society in indirect ways, who sought to evade their society by means of an alternative lifestyle or drug consumption, or by fleeing to distant lands.

We were interested in the life such migrants lead today; their visions, obsessions, personal development and frustrations. What arose out of the geographic, climatic and religious changes? Have the long-serving Indiaphiles adopted an Asian way of life, or do they persist in cultivating an idealistic Flower-Power men- tality? Does that hippie impulse toward self-realisation sit comfortably alongside a life lived on the margins of a new society? How have the permanently youthful idealists come to terms with the realities of getting older? How do they feel about the new streams of world travellers such as punks, trekkers, or the techno- movement? Our intention was to capture the enigmatic personalities, stories and views of the India- hippies in all their fascinating but also paradoxical and at times repulsive facets. The India-hippies are an ageing species on the edge of extinction. One of our purposes, therefore, was to seek the last traces of the drop-outs of the ’68 generation. Motivation

What brought me to the idea of making a film about hippies in India were my own experiences as a young traveller in India. At the end of the 1970s, I managed to catch one of the last waves of trekkers to India, and I ended up spending a considerable time on the subcontinent. During my travels, there was no expe- rience, adventure, drug, mystic, or meaning-of-life-philosophy that I denied myself. These all belonged to the basic equipment of the romantic self-exiles at that time. I was in awe of travellers who had already been on the road for more than 10 years, and who obviously had not the slightest need for their constric- tive homelands. Their sometimes sad, but more often funny stories fascinated me. It was in India that I first came across Buddhism, first as a ‘Meditation-Trip’ as it was called then, but then increasingly as a life-affirming philosophy and practice. Later, Buddhism was to bring me to India again, as a pilgrim to the places where Buddha carried out his life’s work.

Now I have returned to India yet again, this time to discover what became of those who survived ‘the Trip’ and stayed in India. What interested me most of all was how these peoples’ identities had developed as a result of the cultural divide between East and West. With the help of hindsight, and particularly with the help of my film partner and anthropologist Damaris Lüthi, I have become somewhat more sober and dis- cerning in my estimation of the hippie drop-outs. As always, what impresses me is their meaningful search and their radical views. However, I am now also able to see the ‘ego-trip’ and the profit these people take from having hard currency in a poor country.

The India-hippies are an ageing species which will soon be extinct. Part of my mission, therefore, was to seek out and preserve the fading traces of the drop-outs of the ’68 generation.

Ueli Grossenbacher Journey to the East

Hey, old hippie, what’s your name? Hey, old hippie, why the long beard? Hey, old hippie, why the long hair?

(Song of the Lambani-Nomads, 1999)

For centuries India has been a magnet for western traders, colonial masters, missionaries, researchers and writers. First it was the shipment of pepper, ginger, cinnamon and silk to the old world that was the impetus for contact with the subcontinent. Later, the ‘otherness’ of the culture inspired scientific studies, philosophical reflections or Christian missionaries. India exerted a great attraction on Europe, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, and for those interested in culture the country served as a canvas on which to project their ideas, as well as a counterpoint to the ‘rational’ western world. Novels such as ‘The Ra- zor’s Edge by William Somerset Maugham, or ‘Siddhartha’ by Hermann Hesse emerged. A particularly euphoric interest in India began in the mid-1960s with the hippies, drop-outs and meditation practitioners. A musical high-point was reached in 1967 with the Beatles record ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. The LP was recorded after a three-month stay by the ‘mop-tops’ in an Indian Ashram: the influ- ence was unmistakable. The musician Ravi Shankar and eastern gurus became fashionable and the wanderlust of young westerners knew no boundaries. Many rebels, resigned to the stagnation of reform in their own societies, departed the West and built new lives in the “boundless freedom of India”. For those belonging to the counter-culture, India was a place “where nothing was unacceptable, where the people were free, open, wise in a natural way and knew the concept of Enlightenment….one could live in the jungle and eat berries, meditate in a cave, wander around naked, do whatever one liked and nobody would mind because everyone understood it intuitively” (Tomory 1996). Whether hitch-hiking, taking the bus or train, or, most comfortably, their own ‘Doeschwo’, all set off on the -trail through Istanbul and Tehe- ran to magical-sounding places like Afghanistan, Kathmandu, Benares, Rishikesh, Goa or Hampi. In 1960, 900,000 Westerners went to Asia, in 1970 it was more than 6 million (Tomory 1996: xiii). Indian farmers were sympathetic, assuming that the reason behind this mass migration was a severe drought in the West. The holy men of India, the Brahmins and Ascetics, recognised that what was lacking was less of a material nature than a religious and spiritual one.

The trip led, for example, to Goa, a former Portuguese colony. Goa had developed into a ‘hippie-centre’ with lonely beaches, palm-trees, cheap food, drugs and communes. As in other places such as Thailand or Nepal, the hippies, freaks and trampers were merely the fore-runners of the mass-tourism that would come some two decades later in the style of the travel agents Kuonis and Neckermanns and with hotel blocks replacing the palm huts and bungalows. The hippies retreated and avoided contact with these less idealistic travellers. Even today’s India-freaks, with their ‘Goa-trance’ music and drug consumption, are not received with open arms by the ‘old-hippies’, whether it be in India itself or in London. The estab- lished India-travellers distance themselves from those who come only to enjoy the techno-parties on the beaches of India and who take no interest in the country or its way of life.

The old hippies who still hang around in India have retreated to small towns and are dispersed across the Indian subcontinent. From the beaches of Goa, they have settled, for example, in Hampi where ruins dot the landscape. Here was once the centre of the powerful Vijayanagar Empire which ruled half of India from the 14th to 16th century. Today the area is strewn with the picturesque remains of thousands of tem- ples and palaces. In the 1970s, Hampi was home to a large ‘hippie-paradise’, which in the intervening years has dwindled to a handful of steadfast Westerners. Globetrotters were also drawn to the Himala- yan foothills, for example to Dharamsala, the site of the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile, or to Manali with its stronghold on marihuana production. These days, many enjoy the summer months from March to August in Manali where the mountain air is cooler, and move to Goa for the winter.

Many of the old India-hands know each other and maintain contact with each other. In Manali, for example, the ‘freaks’ and drug-dealers meet every Sunday for pizza and a game of boule in the Sportclub. At Bob’s Inn, a pub in the Goan region of Candolim, can be found most evenings a table of about ten regu- lars: dishevelled, smoking, boozing old hippies. While most hippies are eager to make contact with the locals, the reverse is not the case. The simple people of India find these western visitors strange. The locals do not differentiate between ‘freaks’ and other tourists (see Gottardi, 1996:102) and judge western travellers across-the-board as bad-smelling, immoral hippies. The image of Westerners in Manali was shaped by the English who, in the 19th century, quite successfully integrated into the life of the valley. This image has now been completely replaced by a new stereotype, thanks to the junkies who have settled in Manali in the last decade (Gottardi 1996:79, 99). In terms of status, westerners are categorised as middle to lower caste. When it comes to charas (hashish) the locals can also play tough if they feel threatened (ibid: 81-2). For example, in North India the drug-dealers belong to the highest castes, they are helped by the lower castes and tolerated by the police. Were the naïve hippies to try to compete with this, or to step outside the local code of conduct, they would be turned in to the authorities and put out of action by means of long jail terms.

Thoughts about travelling to India

Today’s world order is all about mobility. That this has long been the case is often forgotten. More than ever before it can be said that totally isolated societies or cultures no longer exist, rather, “everyone is on the move, and has been for centuries” (Clifford 1997:2).

Traditionally, travelling was the domain of men and the well-to-do. The archetypal traveller is someone who enjoys security and privilege and is able to move about relatively unhindered. In the dominant travel- discourse it is seldom a woman or a non-white who is the heroic pioneer, the aesthetic interpreter or the scientific authority. The travel culture of the working class is also unofficial: people who must leave their homes in order to survive. A change of location can also mean abduction – with all its associated vio- lence.

For those heading to India, travel meant escape from civilisation, escape from criminalisation and a search for an alternative lifestyle. They were travelling on a shoestring and in choosing their destinations they let themselves be inspired by wanderlust, spiritual and cultural interests, climate and drugs. But this type of travel was also ultimately based on privilege. It was only possible thanks to the hard currency from the West and the low oil price in the 1970s. The average Indian could never afford to hang around Europe for months or even years at a time. HIPPIE MASALA

The Protagonists

Robert

The Dutch painter Robert (57) has lived for more than 25 years in the central Indian town of Hampi where he arrived after fleeing his self-destructive life as a delinquent and drug addict in Europe. He found what he had always dreamed of: a house on a small island in the middle of a river where he could paint in peace and quiet and, from time to time, enjoy the music and drugs of the Full Moon Parties. There he lived for many years with his indigenous Lambani wife, Sita. After her death he moved to a more popu- lous area and a few years ago married for a second time another Lambani woman, with whom he now has three daughters. They have a typically Indian household shared with various relatives, enjoy a har- monious marriage and live from the sale of paintings to a foreign clientele. Many of his hippie friends who lived in the area have died in the past few years, so Robert is practically the last of those who stayed behind in their adoptive homeland.

“India was for me a kind of re-birth. It really was. That’s why people say ‘Mother India’” HIPPIE MASALA

Hanspeter

Hanspeter (‘Hampi’), also known as ‘Grumpy’ by other travellers, was born in Trub, in the Emmental region of Switzerland in 1954. In the mid-1970s and after serving time for possession of drugs, he left his home country and headed first to Afghanistan and then to Manali in the North of India. There he estab- lished himself as a small-scale farmer. Today he runs his small farming enterprise with cows, chickens, geese, dogs and cats, the latter sharing also his house and bed. He spends his time walking in the mountains, hunting pheasants and pigeons and, after yet another fight with his wife, fishing in the river. His constant companion is the almost permanent smoke from his hash-pipe, filled with the finest local grass. As a rule the local community is of little interest to him, bringing him into constant conflict with the authorities of this small mountain-town. His indigenous wife, Babali, tries to mediate between the townspeople and her obstinate husband, but she too sometimes dreams of fleeing to foreign parts.

“I am not here to get rich, I am here because here I can do what I like. Here I am not under pressure to achieve something, like in Switzerland. In Switzerland there is too much of a good thing. There you can have every luxury and such things but for that you must pay a price and I am not prepared to pay that price.” HIPPIE MASALA

Meera

The Belgian Ascetic Meera (43) has lived for the last 18 years in the central Indian town of Hampi, where she has pursued her search for inner freedom. She lives a hand-to-mouth existence, relying on alms from foreign visitors, to whom she provides spiritual guidance in return. She refuses to work under a Guru, which would be normal practice in India. Nevertheless, she wishes for guidance for her further spiritual development.

For the first eight years of her life in India Meera lived with and learnt from an indigenous ascetic. After his death and with the help of the villagers she carried out the necessary funeral rites and continued her hermit existence in the same place.

“I have no income and no savings, I live from one day to the next” HIPPIE MASALA

Cesare

Cesare from Italy (in his early 60s) is a Sadhu and Guru in his own small Ashram near Hampi. He came to India 29 years ago and first made a pilgrimage across the subcontinent before settling in Central India. His path to enlightenment is through 24-hour meditation, which encompasses all his daily activities, in- cluding smoking ganja (hash) which helps him to reach greater spiritual insights and to aid his connection to God Shiva. According to Indian law, it is for this reason that every sadhu is allowed to carry one kilo- gram of the herb. Cesare is so completely integrated into the Indian ascetic community and ascetic way of life that his foreign roots are barely recognisable.

“I lived under that tree there for two years, then under another tree, then for a year in the middle of the rocks over there…………..” HIPPIE MASALA

Erica and Gillian

The twin-sisters Erica and Gillian (mid-50s), designers from South Africa, have lived in the Indian town of Goa since 1981. It was here that they arrived after an odyssey of many years, which took them to the hippie-centers of the world – Ibiza, Portugal, London, Brasil – making and selling hippie-clothes as they went. They love materials, beaches, parties, money and alcohol. Goa is their dream destination. The sisters lead a symbiotic life, they always wear identical outfits, their voices are indistinguishable and they speak at the same time. With flowers in their hair they whirl through the former hippie-paradise cultivating the image of the eternally young flower-children. India is nothing more than an exotic backdrop, the locals there merely to serve.

“Mother is very proud of us. All mothers are proud of their children. We don’t ask our mother for money, therefore…………….that is a bonus” HIPPIE MASALA

Ulrich Grossenbacher

Born 1958 in Langenthal. 1975 Basel Art School. Artist and restaurer until 1994. 1995-96 classes in film history and documentary film at Berne Art School. Freelance cameraman, camera assistant and filmma- ker since 1996.

Filmography: 1995 'Hintertür' (short film) / 1996 'Museumswärter' (documentary video) / 1997 'Silk, Muthappar and VHS (co-author, documentary video) / 2006 'Hippie Masala' (co-author, documentary video)

Damaris Lüthi

Born 1959 in Brienz. PhD Social Anthropology, specialist in South Asia and Visual Anthropology.

1993 '1000° Celsius - Working in the Crematory' (co-author, documentary video) / 1997 'Silk, Muthappar and VHS' (co-author, documentary video) / 2006 'Hippie Masala' (co-author, documentary video). Press Reviews

It is touching, informative and funny in an endearing way. Ewa Hess - Head of Kultur, SonntagsZeitung

HIPPIE MASALA is a great enjoyment, an incense and hash-smoke filled documentary journey, sensual and entertaining, but never trivialising the lives of the hippies who stayed for ever in India. HIPPIE MASALA fascinates with its loving but, at the same time, sober look at these stranded figures: from the Italian, Cesare, who has become a Sadhu and a respected holy man, to the Swiss, Hanspeter, unconcerned by the rejec- tion by the local community of the Himalayan town where he has spent years building his own little Switzerland. WoZ WochenZeitung - Nina Seiler

Ulrich Grossenbacher and Damaris Lüthi, both from Bern, play with clichés in their documentary HIPPIE MASALA. They set out in search of those hippies who, after dis- covering enlightenment in the 60s and 70s, stayed in India and renounced the comfort- able lap of western civilisation. Cesare, from Italy, lives for Yoga “24-hours-a-day”. In the intervening minutes the more-than-60-year-old devotes himself to the preparation of his hallucinogenic substance – and the size of his hash-pipe leaves one only to guess at how ambitious his search for enlightenment is. As well as funny moments, HIPPIE MASALA offers a fascinating look at people who haven’t entirely given up on their dreams. Berner Zeitung - Madeleine Corbat

A highlight. Ulrich Grossenbacher and Damaris Lüthi ask in their revealing film what became of the dreams of the flower-children who, in the mid-90s, searched for paradise in India. Without making judgements, they show the bizarre and funny, but also the tragic facets of the biographies of each western drop-out who stayed in India and today represents an endangered species. The dreams have faded, the utopia has grown stale, the conflicts with the fathers which served as the impetus for so many journeys to the Far East and so many escapes into a permanently stoned existence, are still unre- solved. Der Bund - Thomas Allenbach