The Beatles And India

Must Be Sitarday

The Beatles And India
Directed by Ajoy Bose & Peter Compton
UK 2021
Silva Screen

The Beatles And India is a relatively recent documentary which puts a microscope over the period where the fab four had an influential encounter with Indian culture between mid 1966 and mid 1968, in various ways. The film opens in an interesting manner, with a pre-credits scene utilising footage from World War II to depict Liverpool during the blitz. One of many talking heads on the picture remark that a particular house around that time always had Indian music on and it was because George’s mum would play it when she was carrying him to term, as she liked it and found it had a calming effect on her. 

After the opening credits, we switch to more stories detailing George’s continued passion for the music of India and his attempts to learn it and use it as an influence on the songs he brought to The Beatles’ albums. It’s here that you get the impression that, in terms of new recordings for this specific movie, you’re not going to get any truly famous talking heads but, you know, sometimes that actually makes for a more interesting and unbiased account of a subject matter... much in the way that an ‘unofficial’ biography of a person with interviews focused at the periphery of that person’s life can sometimes bring a clearer picture than that of an officially sanctioned piece. So, yeah, I have no problems with the fact that we are told a story by the son of a man who brought a replacement sitar string, in an emergency, to a recording session of Norwegian Wood. It’s the little stories like this which mean the most, sometimes, in a world where, frankly, all of the big stories about the famous pop group have been told a gazillion times over. 

We then go to quite a favourable look at how George became friends with Ravi Shankar and the enthusiasm and trust that George placed in the man while studying how to play the sitar with him. We then get to the time when The Beatles and their respective wives and girlfriends signed up to learn transcendental meditation from the Maharishi Maresh and went to India to study, which also acted as a way of coping, it’s implied, with the suicide of Brian Epstein that same month. 

Along the way, various stories are told, all with a blend of historical interviews with various people involved at the time... including John, Paul, George and Ringo, of course... and various bits of footage from the time. And also, like I said, lots of modern footage of both how the place looks now (it’s abandoned, run down, neglected and dilapidated... but they still run popular tours there as a historical Beatles site) and with people who were there for certain things. So how a specific shot of the four studying their meditation was gained, is told by both the journalist and the photographer who managed to get inside the compound. 

We also get some interesting stories as to how the group separately split from the Maharishi due to a combination of enthusiastic business opportunities on the side of the guru and a kind of misunderstanding of a deliberate sabotage of the relationship involving a rumoured sexual liaison which, it’s suggested here, was engineered by a confidante of one of The Beatles, who wanted this period in their career to end. 

Some of the themes touched upon is the misunderstood conception that the drug scene and the transcendental meditation scene were somehow both two sides of the same coin and how that was a completely false notion (honestly, I’m not sure why anyone would have assumed that... I’ve been listening to their music for over three decades of my life and I’ve never made that connection). There’s a nice quote from Shankar where he explains he doesn’t like his audience to be high on drugs... he’d rather get them high with his music, rather than rely on illegal chemical reactions. 

Also, there are some observations from an ex-KGB agent who was sent in under cover to try and find out what was going on... apparently a few governments got nervous at the thought of this popular group spending a period exploring a way of life alien to themselves for a good couple of months. So that was another good indicator of the perpetual blight of government paranoia right there. 

Of course, what you don’t hear at all in the documentary... and this is a downside... is any music from The Beatles. That would have been far too expensive to licence. Instead we have a fairly pleasant indian sounding score by Benji Merrison which is currently being sold as part of a double CD with another disc of covers of Beatles songs ‘inspired’ by the film. None of these songs, I think, are actually heard in the film but the last ten minutes or so are interviews with younger musicians who have been influenced by the group. I think this is Silva Screen’s sneaky way of justifying being able to sell more units of the soundtrack album with covers of their songs, to be honest but, hey, I’ll definitely be picking one of these up myself at some point soon, I think.

All in all, while not exactly the most brilliant documentary film I’ve seen on the lads, The Beatles And India is a fairly interesting and mostly harmless one so, if you are interested in the group beyond their music, you should probably add this one to your list. I’ll leave you with a quote now from one of the musicians from near the end of the documentary, who is saying how fresh their music still sounds and how influential it still is... “The world would have been, like, so sh*t without them.”