A Blue Hand: The Beats in India (Hardcover)

by Deborah Baker (Author) "IT WAS WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT on December 11, 1962, and Allen Ginsberg, a thirty-seven-year-old poet from Newark, New Jersey, had gone off to pee for..." (more)
Key Phrases: Allen Ginsberg, New York, Hope Savage (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"A passionate account of the Beats at home and in the world. Baker captures the range of their artistic and spiritual passions, as well as their pettiness, their tantrums, their always difficult loves. Her tenderness and finely tuned humor, as well as her ease in both cultures, makes her a perfect recreator of this ornery band of seekers. And of the ways in which India and the United States have understood and misunderstood each other over the ages. A truly vivid, wonderful book."
-Kiran Desai, author of The Inheritance of Loss

"Sympathetic without being sycophantic, Deborah Baker has made an important and vivid contribution to our understanding of the Beats, both as phenomenon and as individuals. More broadly, A Blue Hand is an original and entrancing account of how India expanded the possibilities of western consciousness."
--Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage

"A fabulous book - comic, tragic, and written with great verve and nerve -about the Beats and their 'passage to India'. It is a remarkable saga of various lives and stories all drawn together by Deborah Baker - the biographer as adventurer."
-Michael Ondaatje

"'Beat' was short for 'beatitude,' and India was the place to find it. A Blue Hand is a deeply researched, elegantly written account of those days of divine, induced, and congenital madness- the last adventures in American poetry."
-Eliot Weinberger

"This is a haunting portrait of a band of poets bravely, if naively, taking on drugs, disease, unbridled passion, and the whole of Indian religious history, in an adventure that never fails to move and often instructs. A fascinating history of the weirdest moment in the long and ongoing European and American search for the answer to it all in India."
-Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School, University of Chicago

"I boarded those third class trains to enlightenment, and befriended the fragile heroes of this book. Deborah Baker's narrative is concise, rich, unsentimental and shows how, just like India, a spiritual journey is grotesque, sublime, comical, but never sad."
-Francesco Clemente

"A beautiful book! As deftly woven and fully-realized as a novel, this is a fascinating, original work of scholarship, following the beat poets on their journeys to India in a way that illuminates their inner lives, their poetry and the fantastical nature of pilgrimage itself." -Melanie Thernstrom, author of Halfway Heaven

Product Description
A literary exploration of the Beats' encounter with India in the 1960s, a journey that inspired and influenced generations of Americans and Indians alike

In 1961, Allen Ginsberg left New York by boat for Bombay, India. He brought with him his troubled lover, Peter Orlovsky, and a plan to meet up with poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. He left behind not only fellow Beats Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs, but also the relentless notoriety that followed his publication of Howl, the epic work that branded him the voice of a generation.

Drawing from extensive research in India, undiscovered letters, journals, and memoirs, acclaimed biographer Deborah Baker has woven a many layered literary mystery out of Ginsberg's odyssey. A Blue Hand follows him and his companions as they travel from the ashrams of the Himalayan foothills to Delhi opium dens and the burning pyres of Benares. They encounter an India of charlatans and saints, a country of spectacular beauty and spiritual promise and of devastating poverty and political unease. In Calcutta, Ginsberg discovers a circle of hungry young writers whose outrageousness and genius are uncannily reminiscent of his own past. Finally, Ginsberg searches for Hope Savage, the mysterious and beautiful girl whose path, before she disappeared, had crossed his own in Greenwich Village, San Francisco, and Paris.

In their restless, comic and oftimes tortured search for meaning, the Beats looked to India for answers while India looked to the West. A Blue Hand is the story of their search for God, for love, and for peace in the shadow of the atomic bomb. It is also a story of India-its gods and its poets, its politics and its place in the American imagination.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (April 10, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594201587
• ISBN-13: 978-1594201585
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #402,724 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Jewish Poet in India, April 27, 2008

By	Daitokuji31 (Black Glass) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

During the 1970s there were the punks, during the 1960s there were the hippies, and during the 1950s, and beyond, the Beatniks were the epitome of America's counterculture. Normally from respectable, if not wealthy families, and highly educated to boot, the Beatniks frightened conservative, Eisenhower era America with there drug use, displays of both hetero and homo sexualities, and willingness to embrace other counterculture figures as Dr. Timothy Leary. However, it was not only conservative America that gave the Beats an overblown image, those who supported them, those who read Jack Kerouac's On the Road and wanted to be the next Sal Paradise beatified instead of demonized their idols, and the true personalities of the Beats were hidden behind a wall of media and hype.

In the past few decades a large number of biographies and autobiographies about and by the Beats making one think is Deborah Baker's A Blue Hand: The Beats in India really necessary? I must say that, yes, it is necessary because it sheds light on a subject, which, of course, has been written on before, that is usually only given a chapter or a few footnotes in comparison to the Beats and sex or the Beats and Drugs: The Beats and spirituality/religion.

Although the book is titled A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, it might be more properly titled: A Blue Hand: Allen Ginsberg and The Beats in India because most of the book is centered upon the balding, heavily bearded poet who changed the American literary scene with his poem Howl in 1957 with the hoopla it caused along with the obscenity trial following its publication. Instead of being described as an icon or a demon, Ginsberg is shown as a man who is trapped in the memories of his mother, who died after going insane, and his Jewish upbringing which he is unable to extricate from his mind and being. After having God read aloud to him a poem by William Blake and others deities coming to him in various stages of chemically induced transcendence, Ginsberg becomes obsessed with finding a teacher whom can help him obtain Enlightenment, so therefore India becomes his Mecca and along with his longtime, and eventually lifetime lover and partner, Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg goes to India to search for his guru.

However, things do not go as Ginsberg hoped. He wanted to find Enlightenment on his terms, i.e. being able to find it quickly and through the copious use of drugs. A number of the self-styled gurus he encounters are obviously charlatans who are trying to make a quick buck off of white folks and those whom possess true knowledge are bemused by the presence of the American poet with his thick glasses and beard because what he seemingly seeks is not true enlightenment, but release from personal demons and an easy reason to delve into questionable substances.
Ginsberg is an Orientalist who has exoticized a country and its people to help him seek things that he believes that he cannot find in his own culture. Instead of enlightenment, what he truly finds in India is a group of poets, like him, mostly highly educated and from well off families, who seek to leave their own county to find philosophies that they believe their own country and its "backward" ways lack, so therefore it is a meeting of Orientalist and Occidentalist, a meeting that results in disappointment.

With Ginsberg as the core of her book, Baker does an impressive job sketching how other Beats fit around the prominent poet. Although arguably the most famous, especially for his road novels, Jack Kerouac seems to be the biggest homebody, reluctant to leave his mother, William S. Burroughs, with his decades of drug use, love of firearms, and considerable talent and intellect, comes off as a collected psychotic, and Gary Snyder, who went to Japan to find his enlightenment through Zen Buddhism, seems to be the polar opposite of Ginsberg, a man who is willing to take the time to truly learn the religion he studies while becoming enmeshed within his adopted society.

At first, I thought A Blue Hand was going to be a simple biography of the Beats in India, but instead it, through Baker's through research of both primary and secondary materials, it is a literary biography in which she details the thoughts and feelings of not only the Beats, but the women in their lives and the teachers and Indian poets they encounter. This style was a bit disorienting at first for me because I am not used to reading books structured this way and I was a bit put off from reading it at first, but as I continued reading I was able to get drawn into the "story" and able to thoroughly enjoy the book. However, I did also have a couple of issues with the book, primarily there were just too many names. If one is not familiar with some of the lesser known beats and the slew of Indian poets Ginsberg meets, one can be quite at a loss while reading this book. While there is a semblance of endnotes at the end of the book which tells where Baker found her information, footnotes would have been a major help to distinguish who was who in the book. Besides that, the book gets a bit repetitive at times, such as mentioning Ginsberg's poetry spouting God several times, but that is a small matter which does not cast a shadow over the whole of the book.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating portrait of interesting times, June 5, 2008

By	Otaku Girl "Asian Culture Fan" (Laramie, WY) - See all my reviews

I read in the New York Times that Deborah Baker was Barack Obama's editor for his memoir, so I was curious to see if she was as good a writer as she was an editor. I'm happy to report that she is an excellent writer. I was thoroughly engrossed by A BLUE HAND. To be honest, I was never a big fan of the Beats in general, but Ms. Baker's book reads like a novel and I find her portraits of the characters to be multi-layered and complex. I especially like the complex portrait she also paints of India and New York City. I feel that I learned quite a lot about the historical period and cultural zeigeist. What's more, Ms. Baker's prose is quite lyrical. For example, I liked lines such as "A woman married in a red-and-gold Benarsi silk sari is a well-married woman. The rooftops of Benares are dotted with cross-legged old men at spinning wheels who, like latter-day Rumpelstiltskins, spin skeins of gold thread onto skeins of white silk." Her literary roots and appreciation are revealed in her judicious use of quotes from writers of the era. I highly recommend this book to readers who enjoy good prose!

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A extraordinary single volume history, January 19, 2009

By	Kevin M. Harvey - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A Blue Hand is something of a minor miracle: it somehow manages to cover the history of the main characters in roughly 100 pages- before we get to India. The writing is musical and flawless and the biook serves as perfect introductory, background text to the work of the BEATS. It is, in manay ways, a perfect course in 200 pages. I can't recommend it highly enough.