A few days had passed since thousands of Buddhist monks took to the streets in Myanmar in September 2007 to protest against economic and political stagnation when an English couple walked into the Bad Monkey in Dali. They came into the bar, in China’s Yunnan province, with tales from the Ayeyarwady region, the rice bowl of Myanmar, where life hadn’t changed much “since the days of George Orwell.” The Myanmar they saw, from Rangoon to Mandalay, along poor delta backwaters to colonial hill stations, was aided by a book by Emma Larkin. Finding George Orwell in Burma tells the tale of Myanmar through the experiences of Orwell. The political travelogue brings together Burmese Days , Animal Farm and 1984 as a trilogy that offers the most accurate reading of the dictatorship of Myanmar, one that the country is still struggling to shake off.
Living the present by revisiting the past is a theme I encountered time and again in my four years on the road. In China’s Guangxi province, in a wonder of a village called Yangshuo, I met a Swedish biker who was travelling with a China guide from the 1960s that he picked up in Tehran. Facebook had exploded in the West in a big way and he was keen to disentangle himself from technological vortex. So he picked a time, a place he wanted to be, and let literature be his compass.
We travel to seek new experiences but we travel expecting a glimpse of a past we idealise. Perhaps that is why so many of the books you pick up on the road are second-hand. The Beat Bums, my bookshop/coffee shop that I ran for a couple of seasons, tucked away in Old Manali and later in Hampi, was stocked largely with second-hand books picked up from the street vendors at South Bombay’s Flora Fountain. Old books crystallise a part of travel, its impermanence, and the fact that everything is transient. And, in the days after the Bob Dylan Nobel, it is worth recalling how much the Road in India is informed by his “poetic expressions”.
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Bob Dylan of the 1960s, the icon of an age of protest, and his words and music, are the soundtrack to the Road in India. Dylan’s lyrics, of revolt against convention and hierarchy, follow you across India — from the barren plains of Leh to the beaches of Anjuna where travellers recite his poetry. They strum on their guitars in 300-rupee guesthouses, around bonfires in the boulders of Hampi and along the banks of the Ganga in Rishikesh. Dylan’s classics unite strangers, lessening the distance between foreign languages and alien customs. His lyrics are etched on the walls of Noah’s Arc guest house in Arambol, asking the traveller, taunting the traveller: “How does it feel/ To be on your own/ With no direction home/ A complete unknown/ Like a rolling stone?”
Dylan presides over as a patriarch, a prophet. The bond forged by travellers traipsing all around India for months on end is furthered strengthened by the ideas of the road and idealism associated with it. For many cling on to the values of the 1950s and 1960s counterculture, they quote Jack Kerouac and recite the words of Allen Ginsberg. It is their howl we hear at late night jam sessions that the local police and forestry department officials so desperately try to silence.
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No longer a lonely planet The traveller comes searching for a romanticised version of India: of hippies and hash, of enlightenment and 20-rupee meals. Instead they are confronted with an industry that has rapidly developed, with touts on every corner, where a chain of Dylan’s Roasted and Toasted has opened in multiple locations on the path well trodden. This taints the organic experience. Now it feels like the first bite of a McDonald’s burger in a foreign country, sounds like the reassuring ring that accompanies the sliding door at a 7-Eleven. The traveller in mystical India has been transformed into a tourist in Incredible India and the industry pulls at the most predictable strings.
But the lonesome traveller isn’t willing to let go, is protesting and resisting the Lonely Planetisation and gentrification of the road. Communities come together and create new enclaves to retreat into. Some have acquired lives of their own such as the one on the shore of Paradise Beach where long-haired hippies trek along a winding path and into secret coves. They set up camp on the idyllic harbours every year, living in the most threadbare conditions and dance naked to the sound of the guitar on the beach. Others, such as Sadhana Forest, have piggybacked on older communes such as Auroville and use its legitimacy to bring people together for outlandish projects such as the creation of a forest.
An older compact But the global nomad isn’t relenting. Just like the original hippies of Arambol, who have camped in the jungles, have called the banyan trees home for decades and resisted the pressure to leave. They aren’t giving in to the stereotypical image of the selfie-wielding tourist travelling to document his or her journey on Instagram. Instead they have formed cliques and this year they meet in the forest of Uttarakhand, far away from tentacles of the tourist industry for a month-long love-in.
They gather away from the eyes of officials, secure in their isolation, and sing: “Come gather ’round people/ Wherever you roam/ And admit that the waters/ Around you have grown.” But they refuse to accept that the times they are a changin’.
Alia Allana is a Mumbai-based journalist who writes for ‘Fountain Ink’.