An ancient letter box was one among the many prized possessions that Tony Almeida kept in hand. Joe Banana (bar and grill), Anjuna, Goa—the engraving read. For decades, the address had served as a beacon for visiting hipsters, enamored and fascinated by the mystic land beyond the Himalayas, their philosphy, music and gurus. "This location is practically a cul-de-sac. The path ends here," said Tony, who took charge of the joint from his father Diogo (popularly known as Joe Banana).
Almeida, clad in an oversized sweatshirt and shorts, is an enigma. A good-natured faucet that fully opens up only after multiple tries. An old-timer, in every sense of the term. "The first foreigner came through this path, the one you are seeing right in front of you. I was 17 at that time. I still remember the sight, a group of five Americans with short pants and long hair, raising their hands in salutation," he gestured wildly.
Joe Banana's bar and grill was the first restaurant (opened in 1968), which catered to a growing number of Westerners who made Goa their home. It became the favourite haunt for hippies. The number of tourists had only grown since.
The hipster movement finds its roots in the tumultuous 1960s counterculture movement that rocked the Western nations. The constant wars (like America's involvement in Vietnam), financial uncertainties and civil rights movements had stimulated a generation of disillusioned youth to swim against the tide. Equally influential were the concepts of eastern philosophy and spirituality, which were rapidly gaining popularity among the young, American audience. In 1968, the Beatles made their highly publicised trip to Rishikesh in India. In 1960, Harvard psychologists and counterculture icons Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert experimented on the mind-altering effects of psilocybin with LSDs. In 1967, Alpert travelled to India and took the name Ram Dass. Beat generation poets like Allen Ginsberg (Howl), Jack Kerouac (On the road) and musicians like Bob Dylan lent their voices to the alienated youth. As Rory Maclean noted in his book Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail From Istanbul to India, the effects of the movement were global—"Ginsberg's poems emboldened Turkish writers like Can Yucel, Ece Ayhan and Cemal Sureyya; Dylan influenced Erkin Koray, father of Turkish protest music."
August 15, 1969 was a watershed day in the history of that counterculture movement. Over a million people congregated at a 600-acre farm close to New York, for three days of what would later become mainstreamed as the quintessential hippie lifestyle. Outdoor acts by musicians like Jimi Hendrix, the quintessential rock rebel rhythms of Janice Joplin and Joan Baez, and an unadulterated atmosphere of acid, harder drugs and “free love” transformed Woodstock into a lasting icon of the counterculture decade. More importantly, it was an hour-long performance by sitarist Pandit Ravi Shankar, then a rising star in the global circuit, that changed the face of world music. Much of what we know can be gleaned from first-hand documentation. There was Jimi Hendrix, who performed a psychedelic version of the American national anthem, prancing around like a mad man searching for a portal to heaven. There were the rock and roll stars in Joplin and Baez, who performed throughout a raging thunderstorm (Concert 101: If the floor is even slightly wet, handling an electronic music instrument can zap you into a crisp). Then, there was the curious absence of The Beatles (attributed both to a denial of visa, and the machinations of Yoko Ono), and Bob Dylan.
In the midst of all that star power stood Ravi Shankar, the famed sitar teacher to The Beatles’ George Harrison, Yehudi Menuhin collaborator, and the master of an exotic eastern instrument; the mere sounds of tuning the instrument sent the crowd into a frenzy. Shankar, born in a Bengali family, spent his youth touring Europe with a dance troupe led by his brother Uday Shankar. Later, he gave up dancing to perfect his sitar skills, under musician Allauddin Khan. At Woodstock, Shankar opened with a rendition of Raga Puriya, followed by a table solo by Alla Rakha. Shankar, who was brought up in the strict disciplinary traditions of Hindustani classical music, and brought up to believe in the divinity of the instrument in his hand, was perturbed at the sight of fellow musicians like The Who and Jimi Hendrix breaking their instruments on stage. Even more horrifying was the sight of drugs being openly consumed, which led him to term the audience as “water buffaloes” in an NPR interview.
“I thought that this thing is not going to live anymore because it was far gone,” he told NPR. “Music was just an incidental music to them. They were having fun. It was a fun place, picnic party. They were all stoned. It was raining. It was in mud. And as I said in my book, it reminded me of these water buffaloes we see in India who are, you know, they feel very hot and they sit there, get so dirty, but they enjoy it. So, I mean that was the thing I felt. But because it was a contractual thing, I couldn't get out of it. I had to go through it. But I was very unhappy.” His anger over the incident could also be attributed to the unhappy situations prevailing back home in India, where he was accused by some conservative quarters—who mistook his verve for cultural amalgamation as losing touch with his roots—as a sellout. For another two years, he didn’t attend a Western pop/rock concert. Elen Orson, who was involved in the making of the documentary Woodstock, summed up the sheer dissonance of Shankar’s presence among the rest of the western musicians: “There were no vocals, no lips to read, no flashy rock and roll moves, nothing to establish a point of correspondence. Just five people sitting calmly, making many, many hand movements.”
But, was the performance so significant that it changed the face of world music? Shankar was already an established name, having been the first Indian musician paid to perform at the prestigious Monterey fest. Shankar had already worked with the legendary John Coltrane, influencing him to such an extent that the saxophonist named his son ‘Ravi’. He worked with jazz musicians like Bud Shank, as author Peter Lavezzoli has documented. He influenced Philip Glass in developing a minimalist style of music. He did countless concerts with Yehudi Menuhin. Because of his influence, The Beatles—the biggest name in music at that time—had adopted eastern motifs, perfunctorily in early songs like Norwegian Wood and with much more sophistication and drive in later works like Within You Without You.
What Ravi Shankar’s performance at Woodstock did was to provide a portal for a generation of hispters into the east; a lot of them would later arrive—naked and free, as Almeida described them—at the beaches of Goa. The drug industry has grown to such an extent that rave and full moon parties, involving copious amounts of psychedelic drugs and trance music for up to 24 hours, had grown to define Goa for an entire generation of millennials and college-goers. These dusk-to-dawn parties attracted a large number of foreigners. It was not uncommon for them to come dressed in faux leopard skins and carrying tridents, swaying to digitally remastered songs glorifying Shiva. According to writer Rory McLean, "the full moon beach parties morphed from guitar-pick singsongs to the Goa trance scene. Ravers took over the northern shore and Indians found themselves unwelcome in waterside cafes." In that psychedelic transition would be born the world-famous Goa Trance music style, a reverberation of Shankar’s sitar half a world away.
