Sponsorship Link
It’s hard to believe that we are coming up on the tenth anniversary of the tragic death of George Harrison.
The former Beatle’s passing -- at the premature age of 58 from lung cancer on Nov. 29, 2001 -- came less than three months after the monumental 9-11 terrorist attacks, which may have somewhat overshadowed the importance of his untimely demise.
/
As a lifelong Beatles’ fan, George was one of the most important and influential pop culture figures of my life -- however, as a person of East Indian descent, my view of ‘The Quiet Beatle’ is rather complicated.
For better or worse, George Harrison inadvertently became the greatest promoter of Indian culture and Hinduism to the Western world during the 20th century.
This had its good and bad aspects.
Follow us
Must Read
First, a little background.
By most accounts, George first became interested in Indian music when he picked up a sitar during a break in the filming of The Beatles’ second movie, “Help!,” in 1965. (I have never been completely satisfied by this story, since, like many tales about The Beatles, it may be apocryphal).
If you recall, that movie (which The Beatles reportedly disliked and didn’t take too seriously) featured an absurd ‘plot’ that included cartoonish villains who looked vaguely like Indians. The film also had certain other Indian symbols and ambience. (By this reckoning, if ‘Help!’ had depicted, say, Chinese or Arab villains, perhaps 1960s history would’ve been dramatically different).
In any case, an interest in the sitar (which made its wobbly Western pop music debut in the song ‘Norwegian wood’ later that year) led to a meeting with Indian musician/virtuoso Ravi Shankar, which in turn led to George’s infatuation and ultimate deep immersion into Indian culture, food and Hinduism.
These chance events would ultimately make a significant impact upon The Beatles, and, by extension, Western pop culture.
By the late 1960s, The Beatles had engineered another pop culture revolution (at least in Europe and North America) by wearing Indian-style clothing, spouting religious and philosophical aphorisms that seemed to borrow from ‘Eastern’ thought, and later even visiting India for a highly-publicized training session to learn Transcendental Meditation with the fraudulent ‘mystic’ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
For John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, their interest in Indian/Hindu culture was rather fleeting and temporal -- although it may have led John and Paul to become vegetarians. Ringo (God bless him) just went along with the fad, wore colorful clothes for a while, but remained, at his essence, an ordinary, unpretentious Northern English lad who never really changed his working-class attitudes and customs.
But for George, India completely overhauled and changed his life permanently. He learned to play the sitar, he read Hindu texts, he meditated, he chanted, he frequently visited India, he dressed in Indian-style clothes, and he became deeply involved in the ‘Hare Krishna’ consciousness movement.
And because he was a Beatle -- part of the most popular, powerful and influential pop culture force the world has ever known -- his thoughts and activities influenced millions of others around the globe.
