Chapter 26 - Leaving the West Behind: The Beatles and India

Summary

To address the question of the Beatles’ relationship to India is to begin by trying to understand what it was like for Western listeners to hear the sound of India in the band’s music for the first time. While it is easy to verify items on the long list of their breakthroughs – for example, Artificial Double Tracking or the double fade-out ending – open to debate is whether or not George Harrison’s sitar part on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” was the first appearance of an Indian sound in a rock song. Not as debatable is that those sitar notes, strange as they may have seemed to many English and American fans, were not the first aural sign of Indian music in the Beatles canon. The Capitol Records soundtrack of Help! (August 1965), which preceded “Norwegian Wood,” the second track on Rubber Soul, by four months, contained incidental music with Indian instrumentation. But overarching this discographical detail is the fact that the Indian influence, though not consciously explored by the band before 1965, had been with the four Beatles, coming of age as post-war subjects of the British Empire, all along.