Narrating the ‘Hippie’: Bengali Perceptions of the Trail

With this paper, I will attempt to shift the focus of the Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s from the Global North and examine how it affected cultural norms and perceptions in the Global South.My presentation will look at the 'Hippie Trail', a colloquial way to refer to a travel route taken by many European and North-American youths to the East at the height of the counterculture movement.The East served as an allegory of varying meanings but travelers often came by land from a European center like London and Amsterdam to anywhere relatively east, often ending in South and Southeast Asia.In this presentation, I try to understand the perceptions of the trail in the Bengali cultural milieu through the literary representation in Satyajit Ray's detective Novel, Gangtok-e-Gondogol.