The Beatles in India

Quite simply, it was the “the biggest fusion that ever happened,” santoor maestro Shivkumar Sharma says in Ajoy Bose’s new film, The Beatles and India. By the time The Beatles started incorporating sitars, tablas and harmoniums into their songs, Indian music had already been fused with Western classical music in the duets between Ravi Shankar and violinist Yehudi Menuhin, as well as within jazz via musicians such as John Mayer and Joe Harriott. But it was The Beatles’ enthusiasm for incorporating such elements into pop music that created an Indian ‘summer of love’ that lit up the swinging 60s.

At the time, the Western attitude to India was still largely one of ignorance, exoticism and colonial-era condescension. The Beatles helped to change that with their forays into Indian spirituality, and the influence of their fusion of rock and raga continues to reverberate to this day.

All of this and more is explored in Bose’s film, based upon his 2018 book Across the Universe: The Beatles in India. Both book and film examine how Indian culture changed the Fab Four’s music and their pioneering role in bridging two different cultures. “The Beatles came to India without any sense of entitlement. They were so open and curious,” Bose says. “Beatlemania was at its height, yet they wanted to discover something new. India gave The Beatles a philosophical state of mind, it matured them and helped them become individuals.”

Much of the film concentrates on The Beatles’ now legendary stay in 1968 at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh in the Himalayas where, accompanied by a host of other celebrities including Mia Farrow, Donovan and Mike Love of The Beach Boys, they learned the techniques of transcendental meditation at the feet of a charismatic yogi. They didn’t necessarily find the spiritual bliss they were seeking and Ringo Starr stayed just ten days, only until the suitcase full of tins of baked beans he had packed for the trip had run out. But John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison stayed for several weeks, and all returned with a batch of songs that would subsequently fill the only double-album of their career, officially titled The Beatles, but widely known as The White Album. Harrison also travelled to Mumbai to record with classical Indian musicians at the city’s HMV studios. The recordings were used in his soundtrack to the 1968 film Wonderwall, the first solo album by any member of The Beatles and an early world music landmark.

George Harrison and Patti Boyd standing with garlands as the other Beatles look on (©Colin Harrison Avico Ltd)

The Beatles’ adventures in world music began by chance in 1965. Filming a sequence in an Indian restaurant in London for their second movie Help!, they encountered a group of Indian musicians playing strange instruments, including a sitar. George Harrison in particular became intrigued by the possibilities of the sitar as a pop instrument and his fascination intensified while on tour of the US in 1965, on a day he and Lennon spent tripping on LSD with David Crosby, who introduced them to the recordings of Ravi Shankar.

After this Harrison bought a sitar and played it on ‘Norwegian Wood’, a John Lennon-penned song on the album Rubber Soul to which Harrison added some rudimentary sitar as an exotic embellishment. Yet he was determined to go deeper. The Beatles’ next album Revolver included Harrison’s ‘Love You To’, which followed a Hindustani classical structure.

Later, in 1966, Harrison and McCartney met Shankar for the first time at a dinner arranged by the Asian Music Circuit. McCartney soon grew bored of the technicalities as they discussed ragas and saptaks, alaps and tals. But Harrison was transfixed. Initially, Shankar was wary of his new disciple. “It is strange to see pop musicians with sitars. I was confused at first. When George Harrison came to me, I didn’t know what to think,” he said. “But I found he really wanted to learn. I never thought our meeting would cause such an explosion, that Indian music would suddenly appear on the pop scene.”

Lennon and McCartney perform for the Maharishi (©Colin Harrison Avico Ltd)

Taking lessons from Shankar, Harrison’s playing improved dramatically and reached its zenith on ‘Within You Without You’ on 1967’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a bravura performance with his sitar supported by classical Indian musicians and an 11-piece Western string orchestra. The author Dipankar De Sarkar describes it as “still the most complete and accomplished piece of Indian-inspired Western pop more than 50 years after the album’s release.”

Harrison was as fascinated by Indian religion as he was by its music, and Lennon and McCartney shared his quest for spiritual enlightenment. The three of them attended a lecture on transcendental meditation in London. As McCartney later put it: “There was a feeling of ‘it’s great to be famous and rich, but what’s it all for?’” It was their first encounter with the Maharishi, which subsequently led to The Beatles’ sojourn in Rishikesh.

Bose’s film also looks at how The Beatles impacted Indian culture, an influence that can be heard in a million rocked-up Bollywood songs. As the actor Kabir Bedi puts it, to an India steeped in ancient tradition and still living in the shadow of the British Raj, The Beatles “symbolised a new kind of life.”

Bose himself discovered The Beatles as a boy growing up in India in the 1960s and, ultimately, his film argues that The Beatles changed India as much as India changed The Beatles. The relationship was not one of cultural appropriation, but an exchange. There was “osmosis on both sides,” he notes. “The Beatles were tired of the West’s commercialised capitalist culture and looking for spiritual peace. But we looked upon them as exciting symbols of modern culture.”

The film interviews former members of Beatles-influenced Indian groups such as The Savages and The Jets and the cross-pollination is reinforced by a companion album to the film, Songs Inspired by the Film The Beatles and India, featuring a diverse cast of Indian artists, including Karsh Kale and Anoushka Shankar, interpreting Beatles songs, written during their stay in India or inspired by their fascination with its music.

Bose also goes beyond the music to look at the political impact of The Beatles’ presence in India, which set alarm bells ringing in the Kremlin and resulted in Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB spy, being sent to the Rishikesh ashram, to find out if the Maharishi was a CIA stooge. From the archives, Bose turned up an 80s interview with Bezmenov in which he concluded that the exact opposite was the case and credited the Maharishi and his followers “with contributing greatly to the demoralisation of American society.”

Long after the initial burst of 1960s idealism had worn off, the lure of India remained strong for at least two of The Beatles. ‘India, India reveal your ancient mysteries to me… I sit here at your feet, patiently,’ Lennon sang in a song that was recorded shortly before his murder in 1980. One of Harrison’s final projects was the 1997 album Chants of India, which he recorded in collaboration with Ravi Shankar. On his death four years later, his ashes were scattered in the sacred Ganges. At his memorial concert, Anoushka Shankar played a raga written in Harrison’s memory by her father.

‘All things must pass, all things must pass away,’ Harrison once sang. But the enduring influence of The Beatles adventures in Indian music continues to this day.

This article originally appeared in the December 2021 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today