Revisiting The Beatles’ India tour

Spencer Leigh

Fifty years ago, the four Beatles and their partners flew to India to learn about meditation from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Their journey, both physical and spiritual, is being celebrated in an exhibition as part of The Beatles Story at the Albert Dock in their hometown of Liverpool, the UK.

Enter the space and smell the sandalwood incense! Experience the vibrant colours of the compound! Walk in the living quarters where the Beatles wrote their songs! See Donovan’s guitar and Ravi Shankar’s sitar! Martin King, managing director of The Beatles Story, says, “We are trying to give a real feeling of the Ganges and the foothills of the Himalayas at the Albert Dock. Even the floor covering is like a grassy pathway. You see John Lennon’s No 9 bungalow with Donovan’s guitar outside: the idea is that they have been playing together and just left the set. We are transporting people back in time to a very exotic place. It is such an important part of the Beatles’ story and such a creative fulcrum for them. The White Album comes from their time in India.”

The exhibition was opened by two sisters with the most intriguing credentials in rock music. Pattie Boyd was a model for Vogue who married George Harrison in 1966 and later Eric Clapton. Harrison wrote Something for her and Clapton wrote Layla and Wonderful Tonight. Pattie recalls, “I remember George playing Something to me on a little cassette machine and it was so beautiful, and then it was so powerful and big in the studio. I love hearing the song.”

Jenny Boyd, a model like her sister, was a close friend of Donovan, and they both went with the Beatles to India: she married Mick Fleetwood and wrote a book about creativity in rock music, It’s Not Only Rock’n’Roll. Jenny says: “Donovan played this lovely song for me, Jennifer Juniper. At first I thought it was really pretty and nice and then I realised it was how he was feeling about me. I was so sorry that I couldn’t reciprocate his feelings, but he was a wonderful friend.”

The mid-Sixties had been a spiritual journey for many young westerners. Jenny had experienced the college kids who were turning on, tuning in and dropping out in San Francisco, and Harrison and Pattie visited her there. Back in England, Pattie attended a talk by Maharishi in London and told Harrison about him. The Beatles went to see Maharishi in north Wales, and he invited them to Rishikesh.

“It was going so well in Bangor,” says Pattie, “until we heard that [Beatles manager] Brian Epstein had died. He had been their friend and their mentor. I had never seen people in such shock, and Maharishi knew that they had to grieve properly. It was lucky that they were with him as he was very solid, very wise and the perfect guide.”

The Beatles’ time in India was private as they lived in Maharishi’s ashram with no reporters on site. The only outsider was a Canadian filmmaker, Paul Saltzman, who had been working in India. “I got a letter from my girlfriend Trisha saying that she had moved in with someone else,” he says. ”I was heartbroken and somebody said I should try meditation for the heartbreak. That is what led me to the ashram. I didn’t know that the Beatles were there. I did a 30-minute meditation and it was an absolute miracle. The knife in my heart was gone. The screaming I could hear in my head was gone. What replaced it was this state of bliss. I had done drugs in the Sixties and I had been seeking this state of bliss. I thought that if Trisha is happier with him, then I am happy for her.”

Jenny agrees. “I was incredibly happy in India. I was naturally shy and if you smoke pot and are shy, it makes you even more introverted. I wasn’t doing that anymore and I felt much more relaxed and much more open to everything that was going on. I wasn’t looking for a guru so I never felt that Maharishi was the one, but I knew that meditating was exactly what I had been looking for.”

On one of the captions in the exhibition, Paul McCartney says that, had they had found what they were looking for, they might not have returned home. “That’s nonsense” says Pattie. “They would have returned. They were Western guys. They wrote songs on acoustic guitars and they wanted to work them out in a recording studio with electric instruments. They needed the tools of the West and they had plans to start Apple and to find a new manager.”

Neither of those worked out well, but they weren’t to know that. But then neither did the Indian experience with John Lennon accusing Maharishi of sexual harassment and writing Sexy Sadie with its key line You made a fool of everyone.

After years of disrepair, the ashram itself has opened as a tourist attraction, but for some the memories of Rishikesh remain with them every day. “Life comes and goes and when I get tense, I try and remember Breathe, Paul, come back into your own core, come back into your own inner self,” says Saltzman, “I still meditate, and meditation and prayer are both keys to an inner domain. They are keys to the soul, which is a connection to whatever divine presence there is in the universe.”

The exhibition will run for two years. — The Independent