Adrift from the Hudson to the Ganges: A reading of Allen Ginsberg's "Indian Journals (1961-1963)"

Allen Ginsberg's Indian Journals, written during the poet's stay in India from 1961 to 1963 and published a decade later, is woven out of intense journeyings and epistolary exchanges between the Beat fellahs, at that time dispersed in a state of diaspora in many parts of the world. The diary, a melancholic account of Ginsberg's longing for past collectivities, also marks the poet's pathbreaking influence on the American countercultural movements of the 1960s and his growing engagement with Eastern philosophies and spiritual practices.