September 2, 2018

HIPPIE MASALA: Forever in India is a documentary film by Ulrich Grossenbacher and Damaris Lüthi about six people who went on the overland trail to India in the late 1960s/early 1970s and decided to stay. Cesare from Italy became a sadhu (a religious beggar) and spends his days chanting in the company of his Indian peers. Meera from Belgium did the same, though as a woman her experience has been quite different. Hanspeter from Switzerland settled … read the rest.

HIPPIE MASALA: Forever in India is a documentary film by Ulrich Grossenbacher and Damaris Lüthi about six people who went on the overland trail to India in the late 1960s/early 1970s and decided to stay. Cesare from Italy became a sadhu (a religious beggar) and spends his days chanting in the company of his Indian peers. Meera from Belgium did the same, though as a woman her experience has been quite different. Hanspeter from Switzerland settled down the Himalayas, maintaining a dairy farm and going hunting and fishing. Robert from Holland got into trouble as a youth running away from home and selling drugs, but once he made it to India he established a career as a painter. Finally, Erica and Gillian are South African twins who now design clothes in Goa, though we mostly view these two lushes enjoying their drinks.

The film has a number of interesting moments. Hanspeter and Robert have Indian wives, and the documentary discusses in some detail the cultural clashes of marrying a local. Some of the subjects speak of conflicts with their family that led them to leave Europe.

However, what stops this from being a great documentary, at least in my opinion, is that it gives very little information on the years between the overland trail and wherever they are now, especially their changing attitudes to the counterculture of 40 years ago. Hanspeter, for example, complains about people seeking a good time in India and says "Couldn't you have a techno party in Switzerland instead of coming here?" but we don't get a deeper glimpse into how his feelings have changed. Furthermore, anyone looking for more trivia on the overland trail will be disappointed. The first couple of minutes of the film show some fascinating footage of e.g. the Pie Shop in Istanbul and roads in Afghanistan (I'd love to know where these came from), but none of the interview subjects go into detail on this great migration.

Ultimately this documentary will appeal mostly to those interested in how foreigners adapt to Indian society and how they are accepted by the local people around them. The fact that these are hippies who came on the great overland trail four decades ago is pretty irrelevant -- the same sort of documentary could be made about people who arrived on a jet plane in the 1980s or 1990s.

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