The Beatles in India

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  In February 1968, four young men from Liverpool crossed the River Ganges on foot, walked up a jungle hill, and disappeared behind the locked gates of a walled ashram in northern India. The Beatles had come to Rishikesh to study Transcendental Meditation under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and the world's press followed them every step of the way.

  What unfolded over the next two months was unlike anything in the history of popular music. Ringo Starr brought two suitcases: one packed with clothes, the other stuffed with tins of Heinz baked beans. John Lennon walked to the local post office every morning to read telegrams from Yoko Ono. And George Harrison, sitting on the roof of his bungalow with the sound of the Ganges below, wrote some of the most searching music of his life.

  The trip produced more new Beatles songs than any period before or since. It reshaped Western attitudes toward Indian spirituality in ways that outlasted the band itself. And it exposed fractures inside the group that would not fully close before they broke up in 1970. The questions that Rishikesh raised about faith, fame, and what four of the most celebrated people alive were actually searching for still do not have simple answers.

• 2. The Road to Rishikesh

  ›

  On the 27th of August 1967, the Beatles were in Bangor, Wales, attending a meditation seminar with the Maharishi, when word arrived that their manager Brian Epstein had been found dead in his London home. The seminar ended abruptly. The band had intended to travel to the Maharishi's training centre in Rishikesh in late October, but at Paul McCartney's urging they postponed the trip to work on the Magical Mystery Tour film project, worried that losing Epstein meant they should focus on their careers first.

  George Harrison and John Lennon were already deep into the Maharishi's world. In autumn 1967 both appeared twice on David Frost's television programme to promote the benefits of Transcendental Meditation. They joined their teacher at a UNICEF benefit in Paris in December, where Harrison introduced Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys to the Maharishi. Wilson's bandmate Mike Love described a private lecture beforehand as "the most profound experience I'd ever felt."

  The Maharishi was receiving extraordinary media attention. Life magazine devoted a cover article to TM and declared 1968 the "Year of the Guru." The British satirical magazine Private Eye was less reverent, nicknaming him "Veririchi Lotsamoney Yogi Bear." Lennon defended his teacher's requirement that students donate a week's wages to the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, saying: "So what if he's commercial? We're the most commercial group in the world!" Behind the scenes, however, the band was already uneasy about the Maharishi using their name to negotiate a television special with ABC in the United States. Peter Brown, who had temporarily taken over from Epstein, twice visited the Maharishi in Malmö, Sweden, to stop the deal, and reported that the Maharishi simply giggled in response.

• 3. The Ashram and Its Guests

  ›

  Lennon and Cynthia Lennon, Harrison, Pattie Boyd, and Boyd's sister Jenny landed in Delhi on the 15th of February 1968, and their longtime assistant Mal Evans drove them 150 miles, a six-hour taxi journey, north to Rishikesh. They crossed the Lakshman Jhula footbridge over the Ganges and climbed the hill to the compound. McCartney, Jane Asher, Ringo Starr, and Maureen Starr arrived in Delhi four days later; Starr immediately asked Evans to find a doctor because of a reaction to an inoculation, so the second group stayed overnight in Delhi before making the drive on the 20th of February.

  The Maharishi's International Academy of Meditation, also known as the Chaurasi Kutia ashram, was a 14-acre compound surrounded by jungle, 150 feet above the river. To Western eyes, the facility had been carefully prepared. The Beatles' bungalows had electric heaters, running water, and English-style furniture. According to Nancy Cooke de Herrera, the Maharishi's publicist who was present throughout, the Beatles' rooms had wall-to-wall carpeting, foam mattresses, mirrors, and wall coverings that made them look, compared to those of the other students, "like a palace." Cynthia Lennon noted that her room alone contained a four-poster bed, a dressing table, two chairs, and an electric heater. Starr later compared the ashram to "a kind of spiritual Butlins", referring to a low-cost British holiday camp.

  The group of roughly 60 students training to become TM teachers included musicians Donovan, Mike Love, and jazz flautist Paul Horn, actress Mia Farrow, her sister Prudence, and her brother John. Canadian filmmaker Paul Saltzman had camped outside the compound until he was invited in and welcomed into the Beatles' circle. Journalist Lewis Lapham was the only mainstream reporter granted access, to write a feature for The Saturday Evening Post. Much of what was filmed during the stay appeared later in the 1995 television documentary The Beatles Anthology, shot on 16mm handheld cameras by various students.

• 4. Days of Meditation and Music

  ›

  Harrison told Saltzman plainly what had drawn the Beatles to Rishikesh: "We have all the money you could ever dream of. We have all the fame you could ever wish for. But, it isn't love. It isn't health. It isn't peace inside, is it?" In Saltzman's reading of the four, Harrison had a genuine dedication to meditation; Lennon's approach was "more adolescent" and driven by a search for "The Answer." According to Donovan, at the Beatles' first group meeting with the Maharishi after arriving, an awkward silence was broken when Lennon walked over and patted the Maharishi on the head, saying, "There's a good little guru."

  The Maharishi's teaching centred on seven levels of consciousness, with the course aimed at the fourth: pure or transcendental consciousness. He cancelled formal lectures early on and told students to meditate as long as possible. One student meditated for 42 straight hours. Boyd said she once meditated for seven hours, and Harrison told her he had also achieved an "out-of-body experience." Because their individual practice disturbed each other, the two eventually moved into separate rooms. Jenny Boyd suffered from dysentery, and Lennon dealt with jet lag and insomnia. The intense meditation left many students moody and oversensitive, and both the Maharishi and other students became particularly concerned about Prudence Farrow's refusal to stop meditating.

  Food was communal and largely vegetarian, and the dining area was raided regularly by Hanuman langurs and crows. Lennon called the food "lousy"; Pattie Boyd called it "delicious." Starr was allergic to many ingredients and disliked the menu so strongly that he had arrived with a suitcase full of Heinz baked beans. Evans stockpiled eggs specifically for him. After dinner, the musicians gathered on the roof of Harrison's bungalow, listening to the Ganges, playing guitar and sitar, and sometimes spinning records. One evening Lennon described the Beatles' albums to Lapham as "diaries of its developing consciousness."

• 5. Songs from the Foothills

  ›

  Saltzman recalls the Beatles being "very close and tight" during his time at the ashram. The stay produced what Lennon later described as some of his "most miserable" and some of his "best" songs. Donovan taught Lennon a guitar finger-picking technique, which McCartney partly mastered as well, and Lennon used it on "Julia" and "Dear Prudence." He wrote the latter song specifically to lure Prudence Farrow out of her prolonged meditation, later explaining: "She'd been locked in for three weeks and was trying to reach God quicker than anyone else."

  Starr completed "Don't Pass Me By," a composition he had begun back in 1963, becoming the last Beatle to finish his first solo writing credit. In his 2005 autobiography, Donovan recalls that while the other three Beatles played acoustic guitars, Starr sometimes played a set of tabla hand drums that Harrison had bought for him in Delhi. McCartney was rarely without his guitar and entertained the group with parody songs including "Rocky Raccoon" and "Back in the U.S.S.R.", though Donovan felt he was not "totally convinced" about TM. Harrison complained that too much time was being spent on songwriting rather than meditation. When McCartney discussed assembling the songs into an album, Harrison replied: "We're not fucking here to do the next album. We're here to meditate!"

  Of the songs eventually counted from Rishikesh, estimates ranged from 30 to 48. Lennon put his own count at around fifteen, McCartney's at about twelve, and Harrison's at six. Eighteen went on to appear on The Beatles, the double album also called the White Album. Two others, "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam," appeared on Abbey Road in 1969. Donovan and Harrison were also writing together; Harrison demonstrated sitar ideas drawn from his work with Ravi Shankar, and the two assembled the Indian-styled "Hurdy Gurdy Man."

• 6. The Unravelling

  ›

  Starr left the ashram on the 1st of March, after ten days. His wife Maureen had a strong aversion to insects; McCartney recalled she was once "trapped in her room because there was a fly over the door." The Maharishi told Starr that for those operating in pure consciousness, flies no longer mattered. Starr replied: "Yes, but that doesn't zap the flies, does it?" On his return to Britain, he was careful to tell reporters he still meditated twice a day and believed it had made him a better person. McCartney and Asher left in mid to late March; he told Cooke de Herrera as he departed, "I'm a new man." In private, he was uncomfortable with the Maharishi's habit of calling the Beatles "the blessed leaders of the world's youth."

  Tensions sharpened after Alexis Mardas, a Greek electronics engineer who had been among the first to suggest the Maharishi to the band in 1967, arrived at the ashram. According to Saltzman, Evans told him the Maharishi had asked the band to deposit up to 25 per cent of their next album's profits into a Swiss bank account as a tithe. Lennon's reported reaction was: "Over my dead body." Mardas pointed to the luxury of the compound and the business acumen of their teacher, and reportedly questioned why the Maharishi always had an accountant at his side. Beatles associate Barry Miles later wrote that Mardas feared for his own position as Lennon's personal confidant and worked to sabotage the relationship. In a statement published in The New York Times in 2010, Mardas denied this account.

  A competing dispute arose over documentary film rights. The Beatles had been considering making a film about the Maharishi through their company Apple Films; Harrison had already called director Joe Massot from India to invite him to join the project. But Charles Lutes, head of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement in the United States, had separately arranged a film with producer Gene Corman and Four Star Films, with John Farrow scheduled to direct. When a film crew from Lutes' company Bliss Productions arrived in early April, Lennon and Harrison, according to fellow student Mike Dolan, "were more than a little pissed" and stayed out of sight. Paul Horn believed the film crew's arrival was the direct trigger for the final departure.

  Before leaving the ashram, Mia Farrow had told some students that the Maharishi had made a pass at her during a private ceremony. In her 1993 account, Cooke de Herrera said Farrow confided that the Maharishi had stroked her hair during a private puja, and that Cooke de Herrera told her she had misread the gesture. Farrow's own 1997 memoir describes an encounter in his private meditation cave where the Maharishi tried to put his arms around her. Through Mardas' insistence, Lennon became convinced that the Maharishi had also had a sexual encounter with a second woman. Most of those present, including Harrison, Horn, Cooke de Herrera, Cynthia Lennon, and Jenny Boyd, did not believe the allegations. In her account, Cynthia wrote that they nevertheless "gathered momentum... without a single shred of evidence or justification."

• 7. The Departure and Its Fallout

  ›

  On the night of 11-the 12th of April, Lennon, Harrison, and Mardas sat up late and decided to leave in the morning. Harrison was furious at Mardas and did not believe the allegations, but Lennon had already wanted to leave to see Ono. Pattie Boyd had told Harrison they should go after she had a disturbing dream about the Maharishi. Lennon was chosen to speak to their teacher. When the Maharishi asked why they were leaving, Lennon replied: "If you're so cosmic, you'll know why." Lennon recalled that the Maharishi gave him a "murderous look" in response. In Mardas' later account, the Maharishi responded simply, "I am only human."

  While waiting for their taxis, Lennon wrote a song he called "Maharishi," later retitled "Sexy Sadie," with the lines: "Maharishi - what have you done? / You made a fool of everyone." The taxis were slow to arrive, which Lennon interpreted as a deliberate delay by locals loyal to their teacher. When the group finally left, Jenny Boyd later wrote: "Poor Maharishi. I remember him standing at the gate of the ashram, under an aide's umbrella, as the Beatles filed by, out of his life. 'Wait,' he cried. 'Talk to me.' But no one listened." After the cars broke down repeatedly on the road south, the Lennons hitched a ride to Delhi and took the first available flight back to London. On that flight, Lennon drunkenly recounted to Cynthia a litany of his numerous infidelities.

  On the 14th of May, appearing on The Tonight Show in New York to launch Apple Corps to American media, Lennon told host Joe Garagiola: "We believe in meditation, but not the Maharishi and his scene" and "We made a mistake. He's human like the rest of us." McCartney, characteristically, offered a softer summary: "He's a nice fellow. We're just not going out with him any more." Harrison, who had returned to London on the 21st of April, said only days later that he and Lennon had been wrong to treat the Maharishi as they had. He told reporters in Los Angeles in June that his real dissatisfaction was with how the Spiritual Regeneration Movement had become "too much of an organization."

• 8. A Legacy That Outlasted the Band

  ›

  Philip Goldberg, in his book American Veda, wrote that the Beatles' trip to Rishikesh "may have been the most momentous spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those forty days in the wilderness." The comparison was extravagant, but the scale of TM's spread in subsequent decades was not. Deepak Chopra credited Harrison with spreading TM and other Eastern spiritual practices to America almost single-handedly. Spiritual biographer Gary Tillery wrote that the Beatles' endorsement of their respective teachers was the key factor in yoga and meditation centres becoming widespread in Western cities over the following decades.

  The Maharishi fell out of public view after 1968, and TM was widely described as a passing fad. Interest grew again in the 1970s when scientific studies produced measurable results. He appeared twice on The Merv Griffin Show in the mid-1970s, generating a surge of popularity that lasted until the end of the decade. Harrison gave a benefit concert for the Maharishi-associated Natural Law Party in 1992, and later apologised by saying, "We were very young." He stated plainly in The Beatles Anthology: "It's probably in the history books that Maharishi 'tried to attack Mia Farrow' - but it's bullshit, total bullshit." When asked if he forgave the Beatles following Harrison's public apology, the Maharishi replied: "I could never be upset with angels."

  By the time of the Maharishi's death in 2008, more than 5 million people had learned TM and his worldwide movement was valued in the billions of dollars. McCartney said his memories of the Maharishi would "only be joyful ones." Starr said in 2008: "I feel so blessed I met the Maharishi - he gave me a mantra that no one can take away, and I still use it." Yoko Ono, representing Lennon, said he would have been "the first one now, if he had been here, to recognize and acknowledge what Maharishi has done for the world." In 2009, McCartney, Starr, Donovan, and Horn reunited at Radio City Music Hall in New York to benefit the David Lynch Foundation, which funds TM instruction in schools. The abandoned ashram at Rishikesh was opened to the public in 2015 and has since been renamed Beatles Ashram, drawing visitors who come not for the Maharishi's teaching but for the music it produced.