Enjoy this post by Meenal Srivastava, one of our 2024-2025 First-Year Fellows!
“Ganesh is so fresh chillin on his throne/ surrounded by incense fruit and gold/…Ganesh makes everything possible/ because elephant power’s unstoppable.” Nicholas Giacomini’s 2008 rap song Ganesh is Fresh reminds listeners of the undeniable link between 1960s American Counterculture and Indian Hinduism.
Hi everyone, my name is Meenal! I’m a freshman majoring in neuroscience, and I’m super excited to share what I’ve learned about the intersection between American 1960s Counterculture and India.
Growing up Hindu not far from Sedona, Arizona, the Southwest’s bohemian haven, I have countless questions about the development of the Counterculture and the root cause of the India Syndrome characterizing it. One question I always wondered about is, why must Hippie inclinations to reject American culture equal fetishizing Indian culture? After all, from the perspective of an Indian-American, Indian and American politics are not so different, both overrun by many of the same problems. During my time thus far as a First-Year Fellow at the Sheridan Libraries’ Special Collections, I had the privilege of learning straight from the source.
Before I jump into the India-inspired ephemera in the collection, it may be prudent to take a look at how Hippies of the time defined their own community in America. One of my favorite artifacts is called “Hippieville U.S.A. Guide and Map: Haight Ashbury, San Francisco Hippieville.”The carefully drawn map features rather interestingly named shops–”UFO Gallery,” “The Weed Patch,” and “Quasar’s Ice Cream Shop,” which boasts a “psychedelicious” treat. It also mentioned the presence of “diggers” in the area, and a little research found two possible definitions: a slur for the California Indigenous groups, or a nonviolent group of Englishmen that endeavored to help the poor through “the power of love,” later planting the seeds for Quakerism before being eliminated by Oliver Cromwell by 1650. The nature of the map as a guide to “Hippie Haven” leads me to believe that it is referring to the successors of the latter.
On the back of the map was a fascinating guide to hippies written for “squares”–aka non-Hippies. Although San Francisco photographer and Haight-Ashbury resident Phiz Mozesson once said, “Defining a hippie is a little like trying to capture the sea in a sieve,” the guide was still very helpful for giving a square such as myself some insight. It describes “Hippi” as an entirely new language of the youth derived from English, creating both a language barrier and a generational gap between Hippies and the rest of America. Notably, the mapmaker claimed that the language’s most striking characteristic is its use of intensifiers (“Man” is Hippie for 1960s layman English’s “boy,” “O,” or “indeed), space talk (“All systems are go!”), and drug talk (“on a trip” and “acid head”) . Through this helpful explanation, the mapmaker attempted to make Hippi more accessible (and perhaps less distasteful) to the lay people of 1960s America.
Now, here is where the guidebook gets more interesting. The mapmaker explained that Hippies show interest in both Native American and Asian Indian culture “because of the mystical attitudes both groups have been noted for,” and that Kathmandu, Nepal used to be a hippie center before they got expelled from the city. Intrigued, I did some digging on this subject and found a New York Times article by Bernard Weinraub published August 13, 1973.
It details the Nepali government’s crackdown on the ganja-carrying Hippies, citing how the unrestricted use of hashish and marijuana was harming the Nepali youth: according to a local newspaper, Matribhumi Weekly, “One can see groups of youths intoxicated by drugs, wandering aimlessly in the streets of Katmandu.” Interestingly, the Counterculture Special Collections also happens to have an authentic poster from Kathmandu advertising a local ganj shop: the Eden Hashish Center, circa 1971. The poster is in English, so it’s clearly targeted to foreigners rather than locals, and features a beautifully drawn picture of the Hindu goddess of wealth, Lakshmi. With further research, I found that the Centre was located in the infamous Hippie “Freak Street” of Kathmandu before the crackdown in late 1973, after which the hashish business shut down its shop and went underground.
The Nepali Foreign Minister, Gyanendra Bahadur Karki, said in Weinraub’s article that they were trying to be stricter about who they allow to come into the country, but were struggling to correctly identify hippies: “They shave their hair, they dress well and they get a visa. As soon as they come here they start growing long hair.” The journalist also took the liberty of interviewing local Hippies, who were unsurprisingly displeased with the local Nepali government for the mass Hippie deportations: “The wrath of Lord Siva will fall on the people who are doing this,” said English woman Fiona, who had left her young son in a Buddhist monastery to be allowed to stay in Nepal. Bold words, indeed.
Of course, the Hippies were undeterred and simply moved on to the next city on the Hippie Trail, Goa, according to an article published to the New York Times on November 10, 1974 by Clancy Carlile, who calls the town “an ideal setting for the thousands of freaks who converge on this coastal area of India.” Even to this day, Goa has a huge Hippie tourist industry–likely due to the easily available drugs and its exotic natural landscapes.
Drug culture wasn’t just a hobby of Hippies living in Asia, of course. Another one of my favorite items from the collection is “Psychedelicatessen,” a book of advertisements for the first headshop in New York, located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and owned by Susan Swede and Rick Southward.
Some of my favorite incense names from the catalog include “THE MYSTIC FUME OF INDIA,” “HINDU ROSE,” and “POT INCENSE SMELLS LIKE YOU KNOW WHAT”–all for the low low price of 80 cents to a dollar. Some other great deals from the catalog include 12 “Indian Skin Jewels Bright and Glittering” that look suspiciously like bindis for 60 cents, 5000 sheets of India Rosa-dark smoking rolling papers for 6 dollars, and a bell necklace for a dollar.
The front cover of the advertisement, illustrated by John Ka aka Symon, a Hippie and psychedelic artist who later relocated to Bali, also caught my eye. The bright colors combined with the squashed lettering made it difficult to interpret, which isn’t the norm for ads. I was also struggling to put a name to the unique art style until I went back to the trusty map of Haight-Ashbury and its guide to Hippieville. According to the mapmaker, Hippie posters are almost exclusively in the Nouveau Art style with “Modern Illegible” lettering because making the script hard to read forces the reader to be more involved in the act of deciphering, taking considerable time and effort. Supposedly, it ensures that only true, patient Hippies will read the illicit messages within.
A shame the NYC police were patient, too. “Psychedelicatessen” opened in 1966 and was rather short-lived–it was raided by detectives in the summer of ’68, and its owners and staff were arrested for possession of “two cardboard boxes of maijuana, pills, barbiturates and hallucinatory drugs, plus literature on growing marijuana and preparing it for smoking.” Judging by the shop’s “incense” advertisements, I’m shocked it took that long.
Turns out, the owners of Psychedelicatessen, Southward and Swede, were the high priest and priestess of the Hippie cult “The Church of the Mysterious Elation”–Edward Kirkman and Henry Lee write in the New York Daily News, 1968. Reportedly, when the policemen raided the home of the cult members, they got mesmerized by the spinning ceiling fans painted in psychedelic colors; luckily, they snapped out of it just in time to arrest the whole lot and tell the cult members to put some clothes on.
All these pieces discussed thus far–map of Haight-Ashbury, the Eden Hashish Center advertisement, and the Psychedelicatessen advertisement–are only a small portion of the full collection. In the coming months, I will delve into some of the newest acquisitions: Bengali poetry books inspired by American Counterculture, written by the pioneering Hungryalists of Calcutta. One of the books, Salted Feathers from March 1967, has some pages in handwritten Hindi that are partially obscured by old photographs of Bengali poets that were arrested by the Calcutta government for “obscene literature.” My Hindi reading is a little rusty, so I know what I’m going to be spending the next few days doing! Throughout this blog post, I discussed how American Counterculture drew from India, but in my future research and next blog post, I’m excited to delve into the reverse: how Indian Counterculture was influenced by America!