The Beatles' Last Trip to India: Fame, Meditation & The Unravelling Of A Band
The Beatles did not find lasting peace in India, but they found something more enduring: a body of work that captured uncertainty without resolving it.
In February of 1968, at the height of their fame, the Beatles boarded a plane bound for India. They were the most recognisable faces on the planet, their music saturating radios, bedrooms, and public life, yet they arrived in Rishikesh seeking something stubbornly intangible.
Success had delivered them everything it promised and very little that it could sustain. The world expected spectacle; the four young men wanted silence. What they found instead was a brief, strange interlude—part retreat, part unravelling—that would leave behind some of the most enduring music of the twentieth century and quietly mark the beginning of the end.
Their destination was an ashram perched above the Ganges, run by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose teachings on transcendental meditation had begun to circulate through Western “counterculture.” India, to the Beatles, existed both as a real place and as a projection—a landscape onto which exhaustion, hope, and dissatisfaction could be mapped.
The Western press followed eagerly, framing the journey as a kind of pilgrimage, though the tone often veered into disbelief. Why, many wondered, would four wealthy, famous young men abandon comfort for austerity, guitars for meditation cushions?
The answer had been forming for years, particularly for George Harrison, whose fascination with Indian music began in 1966 when he purchased a sitar on a whim. That instrument led him to Ravi Shankar, the virtuoso who would become both teacher and spiritual guide.
Through Shankar, Harrison encountered Hindu philosophy not as fashion but as discipline, a structure for thinking about ego, suffering, and impermanence. The influence seeped into the Beatles’ music, inaugurating what critics later called the band’s “sitar phase,” though the phrase often flattened something more earnest into a trend.
Source: Madras Courier/madrascourier.com
