A Season in Heaven:
True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu
by David Tomory
Harper Collins, London, 1996
pp 237, GBP 4.95 ISBN 1 85538 444 2
This entertaining reconstruction of the days of the hippie circuit from the survivors seeks to fix the flavour of the gypsy generation of Western youth engaged in colonisation-in-reverse, of white mendicants demanding cultural alms from the East. David Tomory has edited the diaries and the disaster reports adroitly and keeps the narrative moving in its cyclic fulfillment—back in the West—with linking commentary. But it is a pity that a writer of Mr Tomory´s depth, range and punch did not allow more of his background knowledge to illuminate the field. Nevertheless, this anthology of travellers´ highlights would make a brilliant script for a TV documentary, what with the exotic background visuals of Goa, Manali and Kabul.
As a book, it is asking too much of the reader who has not done the hippie overland beat to come up with the pictures to go with the text. But so colourful was that generation of Kamikaze crusaders freaking out to claim the freedom that was supposed to He in the mystic East, that you find yourself laughing outright at their gauche confrontation with the non-Christian world. However, the very success of this book in conjuring up the idealism and energy of the Sixties diaspora also manages to suppress what is equally true: that for an awful lot of travellers the road to Kathmandu was a season in hell. As someone who came overland on a theological assignment before the Sixties (and stayed on to record with pleasure the continuing success of the freak centres established all over the Subcontinent), I tend to agree that the movement was educational rather than religious. It was more of a Grand Tour of post-war peace-seeking internationalists than a crusade of anti-material revivalists.
It is significant that neither the gurus nor the shishyas of the flower power era have survived. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi went giggling to his Zurich bank and Bhagwan Rajneesh´s final therapy was to break into" gales of laughter. Neem Karoli Baba and his neighbour Hera Khan Maharaj have passed on, made famous briefly by their foreign acolytes. The people´s own choice like Shirdi Sai, Ramana Maharishi and Sathya Sai did not appeal to the cultists from the West, perhaps because their ashrams invoked the discipline of serious sadhana.