An Ode to celebrate 94 years of Ginsberg and Kashi in his “Promised Land”

By Prof. (Dr.) Kum Kum Ray

Banaras, India: Culture, experience, mind poetry. 
Allen Ginsberg, disillusioned with America.
Brought himself with his partner (Peter Orlovsky) to Banaras, seeking an irrational approach to life. 
An antidote to rationality.

To “make the refuse sanctified” (Journal 8) (1). 
The urge to sanctify, redeem what society has discarded as ugly, useless, profane. 
“The world is holy; The soul is holy; The shit is holy; The nose is holy; The tongue and cock are hard and asshole holy!”

Articulated his aesthetic and the ethnic artistic values. 
From Judaism to Buddhism, a gradual change from experience. 
He arrived in his “Promised Land’: India from modern-day Israel - the historically acclaimed Promised Land.
“I am deliriously happy. It’s my promised Land."
Kashi: the Spiritual land.
In Varanasi, there evolved a shift in his attitude towards death. 

Sitting for hours observing cremation at the Kanika ghat in Varanasi: To witness and smell the mortal flesh and see, “the inside of the human body, to see the face cracked and torn, fallen off, the brains bubbling and burning.” 

Ginsberg admitted, “Amazed by the openness and visibility of death, which is hidden and pondered and roughed and buried in a coffin in the west.”
In Kashi - the Hindu holy city of the Dead - the ghats lost their horror. 
Living in a rented apartment on Dashashu Medh Street.

Ginsberg and his partner recorded the complex drama that played out before their eyes:
The dignity and deeply felt emotion with which a son lights his mother's pyre. “The beauty of crowding, bathing nakedness” (Journal 154) of the devout Hindus.
The sheer energy of life in the midst of death was like burning away fear. I thought burning the dross inside me” (Journal 125), concluded Ginsberg.