Swaying Hippies and shimmying Hanuman Dhoka
Throughout my ten years (1966-’76) at Radio Nepal, the nation’s broadcasting nerve center reflected Kathmandu as the kingdom’s capital which, in turn, was a mirror of Nepal of the decade.
Between them, everything remained a halfhearted phase of a project suspended somewhere in the primary or secondary stage of being and begun, and almost nothing reached the tertiary level of national development. [break]
The radio station remained typically tittering, like the Rana-derelict Hanuman Dhoka Durbar Square and its Malla-era complex in Kathmandu, its bricks and tiles dislodged, and its wooden erotic tunal-s rotting and detailed brass toran-s askew.
Next to Hanuman Dhoka was the open Basantpur Chowk. On the southern side was the Eden Hashish House, one of the many new monuments to Kathmandu’s Hippiedom and a mecca for charas reefer smokers.
It was adjacent to the narrow Jhhochhen Galli that led to the Jaisi Dewal. It was renamed Freak Street where hashish-high Hippies congregated for their cheap marijuana-laced meringue and bowls of soybean-curd stew and vanilla yoghurt.
Their ganja smoke polluted the entire area from the New Road Gate to the west, and the smell filled up the streets of Jhochhen, Chika Muga, Pode Tole to the other side in Maru Ganesh and the cabins and guesthouses along the River Bishnumati.
The bedraggled crowds – Americans, Canadians, Australians, Brits and other Europeans but virtually no Negroes and Latinos and only some Japanese – in billowing circus costumes spread from Dhoka Tole to Chhetra Pati and then across the Bishnumati to Bijeshwori and Swamabhunath Stupa on the other side. The Hipsters promptly renamed Swayambhu “Monkey Temple.”
The Hippies invaded and occupied Boudha and Kapan for their Transcendental Meditation ™ on empty stomachs and heads filled in by the fumes of clay chillums of organic hashish, bhang, ganja, dhatura and charas before Timothy Leary and lab-manufactured LSD entered Kathmandu with his sermon of “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
To me personally, it was shocking to see these White youngsters, the cream of their respective societies, loafing aimlessly and lying languidly all over town.
Having seen, however faintly, the last days of the British Raj in my childhood years in Darjeeling, I had high esteem of the remaining English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish tea planters, American and Canadian Jesuit priests managing schools and colleges for decades, new missionaries, social workers and other professionals from America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, all white people, trying to plant churches and filling up the voids left by the departing British.
They were all dignified people with work ethics; they were laborious and industrious at what they did.
These impressions I got were totally shattered when I saw the Hippies in Kathmandu. Whether they were draft dodgers – as Bill Clinton, George Bush the Son, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld did when they were young like these Hippies in the 1960s and ’70s – or whether they genuinely hated their society’s capitalistic ways or what their elected Cold War administrations were doing in Vietnam and elsewhere, it was their escapist and evasive philosophy of life that disappointed me, while they expected monthly cheques and money orders from the very “Capitalist Pigs” parents of theirs who forwarded cash relief to them at the nearest American and British embassies and consuls general.
Nepal was trying to evolve developmentally in the reign of King Mahendra; instead, the Hippies caused Nepal to devolve to the Stone Age. But the welcome was extended and the tolerance shown to the Hippies were a “Big Blunder Mistake” on Nepal’s part, and the hospitality lasted ten long years – from 1965 to 1975 – before the hosts refused to renew their visas of the overstayed guests.
It was only the unavoidable imminence of King Birendra’s Most Auspicious Coronation that caused the Haight-Ashbury tribe to exit Nepal and head south of the borders to Goa in India for their last flings and then fade away into the Arabian Sea to later reemerge as Yippies and Yuppies.
It has been said in the tourism industry of Nepal to this day that the Flower Children brought tourism in the country; but it was not class tourism but a mass one, a messy one.
That the make-love-not-war sub-cultural and countercultural Peaceniks brought quantity tourism while Nepal needed quality tourism – cultural sightseeing and historical tours, bird watching groups, adventure tourism in trekking and mountaineering and rafting.
These incomparable packages could not be catered to the Hippies because they were simply not acculturated to these gifts of Nature and Nurture.
They were broke, unemployed, aimless, freewheeling and freeloading, irresponsible, ill-fed and almost unclothed, dirty and unwashed and unshaved, with flimsy apparels, long hair, uncouth attitude, always under the influence of quick-fix drugs and wet in free unchecked sex.
What the Hippies brought to Nepal and introduced from Kathmandu to the world at large were its Dirt & Drug Tourism. In their first decade of modern development in all fields and disciplines, the Nepalis learnt from the Love & Peace People indiscipline, apathy, indifference and malign negligence, all leading to and resulting in general nonperformance in all sectors.
The Hippies came to Kathmandu, smoked cannabis and injected dope and then disappeared. They did not bring any music or art or literature to Kathmandu because they neither could sing nor play instruments; they would not write because they could not; they did not paint because they would not.
They hung around and listened cross-purposely to Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride,” Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love,” Janis Joplin and the Holding Company’s “Me and Bobby McGee,”
Donovan’s “Colours,” Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” and Gordon Lightfoot’s “In the Early Morning Rain.”
True enough, among these Day Trippers and Overland Travelers were Cat Stevens and Bob Seeger who created their multimillion-seller iconic paeans to “Kathmandu.” But they could do so only after they left the amnesiac Valley of Nirvana and went home.
There were also Michael Hollingshead and Charles A Reich who wrote, respectively, “The Man Who Turned on the World” and “The Greening of America” although another bestselling writer, James Michener, mentioned Kathmandu just once in his “The Drifters.” But that was a minor matter while the major themes were Rock music, cannabis, and blue jeans symbolizing a neo-Edwardian counterculture – “Consciousness III” – focusing on personal freedom, egalitarianism, and recreational drugs, but without having to work for them: all wrong attitudes for the new “Rising” Nepal.
Illustration: Sworup Nhasiju
Reportedly, too, another Hippie was a young British woman, and this was a different trippy in Kathmandu’s cannabis caverns. Anita Roddick studied endemic Nepali ways and means and found about the country’s rich and unique herbs and medicinal plants with natural perfumes and goodness for human skin.
This accumulation of information and knowledge led her to found her international beauty-product empire. Her first Body Shop mini display began in Brighton, and the rest is history in responsible conservation, animal rights and ethical practices in the manufacture or organic cosmetics and beauty-care products.
By 1975, however, as the auspicious day of King Birendra’s coronation approached, the government decided that the Hippies had overstayed in Nepal anyway.
Hence His Majesty’s Government of Nepal “politely” refused to renew their visas, and the Hirsute Horde faded away from Nepal. By which time, the Jefferson Airplane had become Jefferson Starship, and The Mamas and the Papas had become the first Hippie millionaires many times over.
Only The Grateful Dead remained true to their un-capitalistic tenets and clung to their commune canons, and so they lasted much longer than the Movement itself.
To be fair, and that too in revealing retrospectives of today that, even though the narcotic and sexual cocktail of the heady Hippy decadence – resulting from their rejection of their parents’ established systems and advocating instead an extreme liberalism in politics and lifestyle – lasted for more than a decade in Kathmandu, no perceptible number of Nepali drug addicts were ever evident from the long period of western indulgences in “grass” or “pot.”
It was only later, in the ’80s and ’90s, the next generations of Nepali youngsters were to be literally and irretrievably hooked to newer, more dangerous and uncompromisingly addictive drugs, and the scary scourges still continue.
Also, the liberal and unprotected sexual licentiousness practiced by the Hippies remained among their own coteries, and no spillovers in the form of unwanted pregnancies and venereal diseases of the day spread to those many Nepalis who were Freak Street Inc regulars as visitors and operators of restaurants, bookshops, lodges, guesthouses and hashish dens, and dealing in foreign currencies and curios.
It is also not unsurprising to realize today that no mental and physical health epidemics ensued in those days in the absence of drug rehabilitation and counseling centers nor were there a single abortion and VD clinic, either, in primitive Kathmandu then.
That guaranteed pandemics did not at all occur then is a wonder to marvel at on this day in 2012. That the pan-psychedelic madness of the ’60s and ’70s passed off without any major mishaps among Kathmandu’s youth then is a fact to wonder at in deep sighs of relief in today’s distant safety.
To be continued in the next edition of The Week.
The writer is the coopy editor at The Week and can be contacted at pjkarthak@gmail.com
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