trance was just beginning to emerge as a genre in the West, and he was prepared to
take advantage of the future he accurately saw coming, a future of packaged tours,
label hype, and marketed identities. As he saw it, the obscurity necessary for a
genuinely esoteric underground was no more. “Soon we’ll have a global digital
network where everyone will know where everybody is all the time.” He looked at me
impassively “What you’re here to write about is already dead and gone.”
It’s a common story in subcultural scenes, especially musical ones: the better days
were before. But in Goa this familiar hepcat tale directly recalled the religious
paradigm that lurks beneath it. Though generally focused around a charismatic
leader, the early days of a religious movement are typically characterized as
possessing a directness and spontaneity later lost as the movement’s forms and dogmas
become routinized while spreading into larger populations. In its need to generate
images of Goa’s spiritual authenticity, the psy-trance scene has partly transformed
the object of its desires into a simulacrum.
Johan’s comment brought on the predictable melancholy of belatedness. Anjuna
now seemed to me like a freak Club Med, with yummy restaurants, “authentic”
primitive digs, and a currency that might as well have been monopoly money. I grew
tired of interviewing DJs, most of whom displayed the same snotty power games
endemic to Western club scenes, although here they were supercharged with the
esoteric withholds of a gnostic elite. And the superficiality of the scene’s purported
relationship with India, either its culture or its people, grew more and more
dispiriting. I began to sympathize with one gray-haired Frenchman I met, who first
came to India in the early 1970s and had become a master of sarod. “These new
people have no idea,” he complained. “They didn’t come overland, they didn’t have
to find their own food, and they never really got lost.”
But the trance transmission was not done with me. One hazy, hot afternoon, I
was hanging around the Speedy Travel agency waiting for a fax. A steady stream of
freaks bought tickets for Hampi, in the neighboring state of Karnataka. “It is a very
ancient place,” a bronzed Dutchman rolling a Drum told me, describing what
sounded like a Hindu Stonehenge 300 kilometers to the east. “I hear some German
with a bus will throw a full moon party in the temple there.”
That was all I needed. A week later, a creaking local bus spat me out at Hampi
bazaar. Named after Shiva’s consort Parvati, Hampi is not exactly an “ancient” place
—the Hindu city fell to rampaging Moslems during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. But
the ruins that spread out for miles around the small, freak-filled village exuded a
haunting, archaic calm. Green parakeets roosted in silent temples encrusted with
jesters and monkey gods. Rice paddies lined the nearby Tunghabhadra River, which
snaked past huge mounds of desert boulders. Across the river, a number of sadhus
tended Shiva shrines and passed the pipe with hearty Caucasians who had turned
their backs on the minimal comforts of the village.
I spent the days poking through ruins, munching cashew curry, or dozing on the
mats at the Mango Tree, a simple and peaceful outdoor hash cafe on the banks of
the lazy river. Local tourist regulations insisted they post an antidrug sign, but the
staff kept slipping their “Smoking Psychotropic Drugs Not Allowed”
266 GOLDEN GOA’S TRANCE TRANSMISSION