Dharma Redux: The Goa hippie reunion

For a few days early this month, 'Old Goa' didn’t just refer to the abandoned city six miles east of the modern Goan capital, Panjim in India. Instead, the term could be used to describe a most unlikely reunion occurring further north -- on the equally fabled beaches of Anjuna.

The hippies were back.

In a joyous celebration marked with all the color and chaos of the golden age of the Sixties, the aging remnants of the baby boomer generation congregated in Goa for a trip to the old times. Along with their sons and daughters.

One such, Darius Devas, documented the project on Facebook.

"I watched with fascination as my dad Steve 'Madras' Devas, earlier last year began reconnecting with all his old Goa tribe. He and countless others had spent many years living the hippy life on the beaches of Goa from the early 1970s. It's where he met my mum and I spent the early years of my life. So now I’m headed to Goa [for the reunion] to connect with a family I know little about... I want to give these people the space to tell the real stories and break away from the clichéd hippie stigma," the Facebook post said.

The women all wore flowers in their hair. There were serious beards and batik t-shirts. Hash and hugs. Folk music and freshly made Tofu. The only thing missing was the sense of collective openness that distinguished the original outcropping of the hippie movement.

Not everyone was invited to this party.

In fact, the only invitations were made available to the Facebook-enabled group and priced at a serious premium -- including a Rs 1,500-a-head full-moon party (raised to Rs 1,800 to cover late bribe demands from the local police) and a Rs 600 commemorative souvenir calendar, with a Rs 10 lunch thrown in to make nostalgic amends. Michael, a visiting hippie alumnus from Devon whom I met at the rambling Saturday Night Market  refused to be part of the experience on pure pecuniary principle. "This wasn’t what I signed up for," he said.

Part One: Goa hippy tribe

To be fair, the tribe known as the Goa Freaks, the travelers (as opposed to tourists) who started showing up in Goa in the early 1970s, were largely version 2.0 hippies. The were the post Haight-Ashbury crowd, who chose to adopt most of the style but not much of the substance of the original intrepids.

Their approach to the lifestyle was more Hunter S. Thompson  than Timothy Leary. They formed part of a hedonistic exodus, more interested in escaping the compulsion of boring jobs and restrictive responsibilities rather than pursuing the high-minded early hippie ideals of human fellowship and bold spirituality, or the creative imperatives of Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters that were the vibrant hallmark of the consciousness-expansion brigade and the active agenda of the flower-power movement before them.

Goa was the affordable destination at the end of the Overland Route via Greece, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nepal, which allowed them to maximize their time spent away from home. They arrived here in droves, happy to cross the Baga river and fade into the budget-friendly, tourist-free wonderland of Anjuna where the drugs were cheap and plentiful, the parties went on without end and there was no police station to keep a check on their activities. 

They stayed until they were utterly broke, bereft of both money and ideology, and then most of them reluctantly returned back home to the West. Without the benefit of a robust dharma -- or guide for living -- many reintegrated into society and found refuge in the coddling arms of the very establishment they were once so eager to escape.

However, quite a few chose to remain in Goa, struggling to eke out an existence through means both fair and foul. They withstood the decimating effect of ever-more-potent drugs, a widespread backlash against the hippie ethos and harassment and beatings from the local police, and for a while they even flourished.

The truly committed continued on a more wholesome path towards eternal self-discovery and reincarnated themselves into the scrappy survivors you currently see hopping around the islands of Ibiza, Bali and in bohemian enclaves in California and Southwest England. Amongst all of these, India retained its narco-spiritual preeminence.

Meanwhile, in the wider, squarer universe, many of the hippie staples were assimilated into the mainstream, including cooperative business enterprise, alternative energy, the free press movement, organic farming, and a general focus on ecology.

It was these stragglers who gave Goa its enduring mystique, and ensured its global significance as a Mecca for the alternative, encouraging successive generations of a rebellious and nomadic youth to adopt its sandy beaches as a safe haven for counterculture, from the New Age devotees of the 1980s to the psytrance pioneers of the 1990s and on to the yogaphiles of today. 

Part Two: Last hippie standing

Despite reliance on the hippies for the source code for these latter-day cultural phenomena, Goa -- and the world -- remained ungrateful. ‘Hippie’ quickly became a narrow pejorative term, used only to connote irresponsibility and participation in recreational drug use. As Francisco Sardinha, the then-Chief Minister of India’s own sunshine state confessed candidly in "Last Hippie Standing", Marcus Robbins’ 2001 documentary (full version here, 45mins), “We became strict… we didn’t need people to come here to add to our poverty… the hippies had no money… (and) the system needs money.”

This tragic attitude is not just simplistic in its treatment of all hippies as drug-addled dead ends, it also makes regressive and dangerous assumptions about their irrelevance in today’s burgeoning and profitable tourist trade. By continually striving to up sell the once-exotic destination to eager throngs of middle class tourists, the Government overlooks the fact that their arrival and the commensurate departure of the great unwashed has slowly begun to erode the very charm and character that had made Goa a singular drop-off (and drop-out) point on the world’s tourist map.

Brigitte, an archetypal French hippie and a mainstay of the Anjuna scene, disagrees that the notoriety they earned was harmful, first making it a point to distinguish herself and her forebears from the wild children keenly detailed in Cleo Odzer’s scurrilous tell-all book from 1995, "Goa Freaks: My Hippie Years in India". Brigitte says the intemperate Freaks gave the entire tribe a bad name by plunging headfirst into the trafficking (and use) of class A narcotics to support their dissolute lifestyles. 

There is a poignant image narrated in the book, of a foreign junkie who dies and falls into a well, poisoning the water for the hapless villagers, which sums up the effect that the bad eggs had on the local population.

Brigitte meanwhile claims that the ‘good hippies’ actually helped form the basis for a healthy tourist trade, by forcing their families out here on visits, by providing jobs and setting up the template for businesses run by locals today and by adding the color and chaos sought out by the tourists who still come to Goa to bask in its fringe credibility. 

Sadly, the government refuses to share this opinion. As it continues to slam shut the window of opportunity on the fans of easy virtue and alternative lifestyles, many in the cognoscenti argue that the thrill is gone. 

The accumulated energy, or vibe, which was once the lodestone that drew the hippies here, is definitely off kilter. In its place, a dark underbelly churned up by rampant growth is becoming more apparent every day. The popular Northern beaches resemble Dunkirk under siege -- with sexual and racial violence at every turn. Lawlessness rules the headlines and where the law is enforced, as with the 10:30pm deadline on outdoor parties, it has strangled the exuberance of the holiday spirit. 

Devas notes this humourous confession from an old hippie on his Facebook page: "[In] The old days it felt like we would live forever. We wouldn’t start parties till after midnight and they would end the following midday. Now it ends before eleven, it has shrunk like our lifespans! Hahaha."

And bigotry is everywhere. This weekend, the government revoked the license it had granted to the organizers of the ChakraView music festival -- bowing to a media campaign that dubbed it as a rave and trance party where drugs could "possibly" be sold. Even the humble bikini has attracted the displeasure of the administration as it tries, heavy-handedly to limit the spread of the sleaze, which it has itself fostered.

But there’s always hope.

For every ultra-conservative Sardinha there is an avant-garde Goa Gill, a world-famous DJ and father of the Goa trance movement, who defends the unique appeal of the place, confessing, “I always looked at a Goan party as not just a party. It is an initiation. It is always special. It isn’t about drugs.” Gill, who draws a direct line from his music to its antecedents in the spiritual experimentation of the hippies, takes his brand of Goan mysticism on the road and turns on packed, well-paying crowds across the globe, throughout the year.

Meanwhile, NGOs with such stark assignations like Save Goa are stepping in to fill the administrative chasm, eager to broach the subject of sustainability. The media is also growing teeth, thanks to the efforts of independent online activists and sites like Goanet, around which the diaspora is slowly rallying.

The local villagers, who have long understood that there is a symbiotic relationship between the ‘foreign devils’ and the sustenance they have grown used to, are finally putting pressure back onto the establishment. Goa chief secretary, J P Singh says, “We don’t want to use a sledgehammer where only a hammer is required,” acquiescing to the need to involve the community and its sensitivities when dealing with the issue of law and order.

Part Three: Redux

Last week’s Goan happening -- titled GoAhead -- was mobilized thanks to the community-enabling power of the internet . One of the many positive outcomes was a fund raised to support the ailing Eight Finger Eddie, the celebrated founder of the flea market, proving that even today the dispersed hippies can come together to stand behind a common cause, just like in the 1960s. A hopeful youth, having been abandoned in the heady and irresponsible rush of those times appealed to the community to help him locate his father. Others spent crucial time rediscovering old friends and lovers and marking obituaries for those lost. 

At the nostalgia-soaked venues like Tito's, there was plenty of evidence of youth and longevity, with hippie kids and other neo-hippies forming a large part of the crowd.

"I arrived early which at first was awkward but gave me time to get settled before everyone arrived at sunset, four or so hours fashionably late," recounts Devas on his Facebook posting. "It was pretty classic when people started arriving en masse, [it] felt like the hippy Oscars, with cameras flashing every which way, an epic explosion, funny to think what they would of thought of this thirty years earlier but this is where the world is now, people wanting to share the digital moment." 

Conspicuous by her absence was Alessandra Piccione, a young Canadian playwright who, remarkably with no knowledge of the current gathering, wrote an award-winning screenplay last year titled “The Reunion”. The story speculates about the collision between a 21st century woman and the holdouts of the 1960s, at a hippie reunion in Goa.

Alessandra says that, beyond the obvious theme of the inheritance of the hippie agenda, the film “questions what it was all about… and ultimately, transcends the clash of these arguments, cultures and philosophies. In the end, the characters are humbled by simple things that take them beyond the limits of their own egos.” 

Brigitte, who was part of the organizing group (you wouldn’t dare call it a committee) at the recently concluded Goa hippie reunion, brushes aside concerns about the redundancy of the hippie movement by saying that “we are energy people, open to the world and to life and we do not fear change.”

This energy, long dormant, seems to be trickling back into Goa at long last.

Indeed, in America, where the hippie scene originated, there is a new frugality and a renewed search for spiritual succor and the healing hand of community -- albeit spurred on by the current financial turmoil and a severe economic crunch, which won’t last. Nevertheless these new values are gaining currency with the global affluent. Couple that with the spiritual effect India seems to have on anyone who hazards a visit and Goa, with progressive governance, could reclaim it’s proper seat in the world.

The reunion was a big success. Could a revival be far behind?