Unearthing Hare Rama Hare Krishna: Bollywood's psychedelic cult classic
As a work of art it’s a mess. As a cautionary tale it’s a failure. As a multi-sensory celebration of the psychedelic 70s, however, Hare Rama Hare Krishna is fucking magical.
What started as a product of one man’s bruised ego turned into a cultural sensation, a movie so singularly fascinating, so fantastically influential that it still holds up half a century later. The looks, the vibes, the cheesy, screw-ball comedy, the banging soundtrack: Hare Rama Hare Krishna wasn’t just another Bollywood musical, it was a whole other world, where former beauty queens wore miniskirts, smoked weed, and lived in polyamorous bliss with dope heads and grass fiends.
It’s not easy to watch the movie stateside. You won’t find Hare Rama Hare Krishna on any of the major streaming services and physical copies are elusive; DVDs go for just shy of $200 on Amazon and it’s wait-listed on DVD.com. Grass employed a certified movie nerd to rescue this gem from the far reaches of the internet. Even then, the English subtitles were far from perfect and poorly paced. It would be easy to write Hare Rama Hare Krishna off as a poorly-painted portrait of tired cliches, a kitschy pop culture momento forgotten to time, but it’s impact far outweighs its availability.
Hare Rama Hare Krishna wasn’t just another Bollywood musical, it was a whole other world.
The film opens on scenes of worshipers, chanting Hare Krishna, beating drums, and dancing in the streets. As the chanting wears on, Indian revelers turn to white fanatics, dressed in traditional clothing, playing traditional instruments, and repeating the traditional mantra. The focus moves from a snow white Krishna parade to a dimly lit house party where a lone Indian woman in a short, marigold orange dress, hair in pigtails, stands, back to the camera, rocking her hips back and forth to the film’s title track, while groups of hippies smoke, drink, and writhe around her.
Her name is Jasbir Jaiswal, the desi daughter of a wealthy Montreal businessman, and she’s just moments away from ditching her family, changing her name, and running away to live in a hippy commune in Kathmandu, Nepal. But first, a word of warning. As Janice sways gently to the now infamous anthem in the background, a narrator chimes in, setting the stage for a cultural conflict with the white-washing of Indian tradition at its heart.
“These people, whose religion is smack, grass, cocaine, and LSD. Whose temple is open physical relationships. These people are leading their lives only for the moment. They are all lost under the influence of intoxication and pleasure. They are lost to themselves, lost to the world, lost to their families, lost to society.”*
It soon becomes apparent, thanks to a cheesy childhood flashback, that the voice belongs to Prashant Jaiswal, a commercial airline pilot and Jasbir’s long-lost brother, played by the film’s director, Dev Anand. It was Anand’s own clash with hippy culture that led him to produce this anti-Western, anti-drug manifesto. He reportedly turned his ire on the hippies of Kathmandu following protests of his nationalistic film, Prem Pujari in Calcutta.
Anand focused his critiques on a rising religious sect known as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, a Hindu spinoff founded by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada that became inextricably linked to Western counterculture in the late 60s and 70s. By the time Hare Rama Hare Krishna was released, everyone from George Harrison to Alan Ginsberg was chanting the Maha Mantra.
Ultimately, Anand’s anti-hippy opus turned out to be a psychedelic celebration of drug culture and second-hand spirituality. With newcomer Zeenat Aman cast as the film’s antiheroine, the director’s mission to disgrace the hippies he so reviled was DOA. Janice and her merry band of impeccably dressed vagabonds made doing drugs look way too cool.
The vast majority of the film is spent in Kathmandu, where, disillusioned by her life at home in Canada, Jasbir reinvents herself as Janice, the hash smoking hippy feminist, with sticky fingers and a mesmerizing smile. When her brother flies to Nepal to rescue her, Janice’s past puts her on a collision course with her future. As children, Jasbir and Prashant were inseparable, but when their family was torn apart by her father’s infidelity, the two were forced to cut ties. Jasbir was sent to boarding school in Montreal while Prashant was flown to India to live with his mother. Inexplicably, the adults in this scenario felt it best to tell their children that the rest of the family had died, creating a fully unnecessary narrative of loss and childhood trauma that follows Jasbir to her untimely death.
Janice and her merry band of impeccably dressed vagabonds made doing drugs look way too cool.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s way too much partying to do before it all comes to an end. Hare Rama Hare Krishna’s plot isn’t particularly well thought out and the dialogue -- at least what we gathered of it from the subpar subtitles -- isn’t exactly memorable. But it isn’t the story that makes this movie, it’s the parties.
Throughout Prashant’s journey to Kathmandu, subplots abound. There’s his marriage to Shanti (the ever-stunning Mumtaz), a local dancer and shop girl; his friendship with Toofan and Massina, a benevolent tour guide and his teenage sidekick; and the scheme to frame him and his sister for the theft of golden idols from the city’s temples. In its two-plus hours, Hare Rama Hare Krishna covers a lot of ground, but it’s mostly a bunch of beautiful people in colorful outfits singing, dancing, and getting stoned.
The party scenes, which play out on the dance floor of the fashionable Soaltee Hotel and at an after-hours drug den fittingly referred to as “The Bakery,” are set against a soundtrack that’s instantly recognizable. You may not be able to watch Hare Rama Hare Krishna, but there’s a good chance you’ve heard a few of its hottest tracks. Dum Maro Dum, which loosely translates to “take another hit,” has been covered and sampled so extensively, that it may be one of Bollywood’s most influential exports. It even appeared on Method Man’s 2004 single, What’s Happenin’, featuring Busta Rhymes. Charanjit Singh’s droney synths layered over driving drums, psychedelic strings, and singer Asha Bhosle’s ear-piercing vocals, set the backdrop for one of our favorite drug scenes of all time.
Janice, in her signature giant pink shades, a magenta kurti, and multi-colored palazzo pants, sits in a sea of black, brown, and white bodies, passing a chillum and lip syncing to Bholse’s high-pitched singing. As the song progresses the energy grows and Janice starts working the room like a South Asian Fosse girl, jerking her body in ways both captivating and comical. It’s in moments like these that we find ourselves transfixed. Janice, with her blend of South Asian and hippy attire, transfixing a club full of stoned Westerners with Hindi lyrics about the wonders of drug use, is the embodiment of a new type of feminism: one that simultaneously bucks and embraces tradition. In addition to her signature shades, Janice sports a bindi and foolon ki mala, a string of marigolds used in Hindu ceremonies.
The night’s festivities have (unwittingly) been funded by Prashant, who is here to convince Janice to return to a family she still believes dead. Somewhere along the way, Prashant loses his wallet and Janice, proclaiming it a sign from the gods, spends the windfall with abandon. That’s right folks, she sings, she dances, she smokes weed and she steals from the rich to give to the poor. Who could ask for a better martyr?
Of course every party must eventually come to an end, and this is no exception. Having spent weeks trying to convince his sister to come home, Prashant summons his parents to see what’s become of their dear Jasbir. Upon arrival in Kathmandu, Mr. and Mrs. Jaiswal find their little girl all grown up and playing guitar in a floor-length Pucci-esque maxi dress. A field full of comatose hippies surrounds her.
The scene culminates in a brawl so poorly choreographed it might as well have been a tickling match. In his quest to save his sister, Prashant has made many enemies, and, just as Janice begins to recognize the err of her ways, they take action. The previously docile hippies transform into a (laughably) violent mob, attacking Prashant as his parents and his new bride look on in horror. The final scenes are a sloppy attempt at tying up a series of tangential subplots.
A disabled hippy covered in a giant orange sheet is implicated in a plot to frame Prashant for the theft of the golden idols; his accomplice, Shanti’s ex-boyfriend and Janice’s landlord, plummets to his death; and the hippies attempt, but fail, to tear Prashant limb from limb. Somewhere in the mess of these last few minutes, Janice is seen frantically smoking from a chillum and popping pills. In the final scene, Prashant calls his parents into a circle of hippies to meet their daughter. The camera pans from their stricken faces, to a pile of drugs, and a hand-written suicide letter before revealing the most stunning corpse we’ve ever laid eyes on.
In the end the conflict between her traditional past and her liberated future proved too much for her to take. Her suicide note ends in a plea: “Keep on remembering me and never stop loving me.”
It seems a small favor to ask for a character that’s given so much.
* Quotes have been paraphrased from poorly worded English subtitles. These are not direct translations and should not be quoted as such.