Chanting and chillums on Telegraph Ave by way of Kathmandu

There’s a scene in Hare Rama Hare Krishna where the film’s hippy antiheroine, Janice (Zeenat Aman), lifts a chillum to her lips, takes a massive hit of hash, then turns to her estranged brother, Prashant (Dev Anand), and tells him to take a puff. She extends her perfectly manicured hand, offering a hit off the bell-shaped pipe, no doubt full of charas, a traditional mix of hash and tobacco   

“If you want to be with us, be one with us,” she says, her eyelids heavy. 

Just one year prior, Aman was crowned Miss Asia Pacific 1970. She was a newcomer, but her role as Janice, the pot-smoking runaway from Montreal, solidified her place in Bollywood history. A good Indian girl wouldn’t be caught dead doing the things Zeenat did on camera: stealing, smoking pot, getting drunk, sleeping around. But Janice wasn’t like other girls, and playing her took a woman willing to court controversy. 

That image of Zeenat in a sea of hippies, smoking hash out of a chillum was both powerful and confrontational, a simultaneous sign of the erosion of traditional ideals, the Westernization of Indian youth, and the liberation of young desi women. At the time, Indian traditions were spreading like wildfire through American counterculture, due in part to the influence of religious leaders like A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder of The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (aka the Hare Krishnas). Swami Prabhupada brought his own brand of Hindu spirituality to New York in 1965. By the time Hare Rama Hare Krishna hit screens in India in 1971, dropouts and celebrities alike where chanting the Maha Mantra, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, and smoking charas like sadhus. 

More than 50 years since Swami Prabhupada set foot in New York, the influence of the Hare Krishnas has begun to fade. You can still catch them serving vegetarian meals at Govinda’s, chanting at parades, or passing out pamphlets near college campuses, but the US is no longer a Krishna stronghold. According to The New York Times, a series of controversies stateside, including murder, racketeering, and child molestation, led many American followers to jump ship. Today Western appropriation has moved from Krishna temples to yoga studios, but you can still catch the vibes, embodied by an unknown desi beauty queen getting high AF in a drug den in Kathmandu, if you know where to look.

A good Indian girl wouldn’t be caught dead doing the things Zeenat did on camera. But Janice wasn’t like other girls, and playing her took a woman willing to court controversy.

Last week we went in search of offerings for a mandir inspired by Zeenat Aman’s iconic character. We’d collected everything we needed, shy of one crucial element: a chillum. So we headed to the East Bay’s head shop hotspot, Telegraph Ave. With all of the options available for consuming weed today, we assumed finding a traditional, bell-shaped chillum would be easy. Turns out we were wrong. We visited a couple of Nepalese head shops just off of the street’s main drag, but their chillums were largely of the one-hitter variety – not nearly big enough to hold a Janice-sized wad of charas. 

So we continued up the street to the heart of Telegraph. When we saw Annapurna we were sure we’d found the place. The name, the logo, the smell of burning incense in the air, the glass cases overflowing with smoking accessories and ephemera: this had to be the spot. The shop’s wild-eyed owner, Al Geyer, has been on Telegraph since Allen Ginsberg was chanting the Hare Krishna, and it shows. Stepping inside Annapurna was like stepping back in time to an era where the hottest thing out was an orange robe. 

Geyer told us that he hadn’t seen a chillum in years. He used to import them directly from India, taking trips regularly to source art and accessories for the hippies on Telegraph. As it turns out, he opened Annapurna in 1969 after returning from a trip to Kathmandu, where two years later Zeenat Aman would take a giant rip from a chillum and change Bollywood cinema forever. 

We never did find what we were looking for that day, but we did catch an unmistakable vibe.

Two Steps Up a boutique importing Nepalese crafts on Haste Street just below Telegraph preceded the opening of Anapurna c. 1969