Many from the West have come to India seeking solutions to questions that they themselves are not clear about. Allen Ginsberg, key member of the anti-materialistic literary movement called the Beats, was one such. In 1961, already famous – or notorious, rather -- after the publication of his epic poem Howl, he arrives in India with his lover Peter Orlovsky and sets out on a restless search across the country. Parallely, there is also the story of the beautiful but elusive Hope Savage, Ginsberg's friend Gregory's lover, who too is in India. Did Ginsberg find his answers in India? Does he finally get to meet up with Hope and what happens to her?
On the surface, this is what this literary suspense is all about. But well known biographer Deborah Baker (she is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and apparently also had a hand in editing Barack Obama's memoirs) actually pulls of a fascinating, multi-layered book, with bits of politics (the China war, Kennedy visit, communist stance in Bengal), travelogue (a rich, colourful account of the hippie joints in India that westerners inevitably made a beeline to in the 1960s), and literary movements all documented.
It also helps that her subjects – all the Beats writers ranging from Ginsberg to Naked lunch author William Burroughs to Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso -- lead highly bizarre lives. They mostly wrote under an LSD or opium induced haze, breaking all literary barriers and did pretty crazy things with their lives – if Ginsberg was "a hyperintellectual neurotic" who claimed to see William Blake in a blinding vision and then spends the rest of his life chasing the meaning of this vision, then Burroughs shoots his companion in a William Tell game.
All of that is here in the book, albeit told in a very confusing fashion. Although Baker's story is gripping and she has a skilful way with words, she has no sense of chronology or structure. The narrative flits hither and thither in episodic flashes and lingers for long on trivial happenings, which though interesting, ramble and seem to have no connection with anything. And she also assumes that her reader knows everything about the Beats and all the people they came in contact with. So you go squiggle eyed keeping track of the assorted characters who flit in and out of the narrative (apart from Ginsberg and Hope Savage, there's also Asoke Sarkar's life that Baker gets into) and the wide array of places they visit.
The story begins on a train in India in the present (which is India in the 1960s) to move suddenly to Harlem in the late 1940s, to Tangier not to speak of all the usual hippie joints in India. To confuse things further, there are surreal dream moments that most of the characters go through, living as they do in a drug induced state. In fact, at times, it is difficult to differentiate the dreams from the real incidents.
But once you get used to this disjointed narrative style, you can't help admiring Baker's effort to document this rather strange journey, gleaned from diaries, journals, interviews with those who came in contact with the avant garde writers. Baker's strengths are that she knows India well, is a dispassionate observer and yet her writing is so intensely visual with attention to the minutest details that you can literally imagine each episode in your mind's eye – whether it is the addas that Ginsberg has with the Bengali poets Sunil Gangopadhyay and Sakti Chattopadhyay, the Sivaratri celebrations in Rishikesh with poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger (incidentally they seem to be the only other Beats in India – Gregory just keeps threatening to land up in the country, but never does).
On the actual books and poems and literary effort of the Beats, you will find practically no analysis – though there are stray explanations about the cut up style that Burroughs popularised that Ginsberg tries to give an Indian journalist. Baker, instead, chooses to focus more on the Beats' lives, their sex lives, their convoluted and tortuous thought processes.
In sum, A Blue Hand is an unconventional book on an unconventional set of people.
Book Reviews 
Many from the West have come to India seeking solutions to questions that they themselves are not clear about. Allen Ginsberg, key member of the anti-materialistic literary movement called the Beats, was one such. In 1961, already famous – or notorious, rather -- after the publication of his epic poem Howl, he arrives in India with his lover Peter Orlovsky and sets out on a restless search across the country. Parallely, there is also the story of the beautiful but elusive Hope Savage, Ginsberg's friend Gregory's lover, who too is in India. Did Ginsberg find his answers in India? Does he finally get to meet up with Hope and what happens to her?.jpg)
