Bill Aitken, writer who adopted India as ‘father’ of hippies, dies at 90

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Bill Aitken, a self-described “founding father of the hippies” who hitchhiked from England to India in 1959 and became a literary guru for generations of wanderers with books that explored the subcontinent’s rivers and railways and the spiritual quest that shaped his life, died April 16 at a hospital in Dehradun, India. He was 90.

Mr. Aitken’s death, from injuries suffered in a fall at his home in the shadow of the Himalayas, was confirmed by Karan Madhok, editor of the Chakkar, an Indian arts journal.

His more than a dozen books – mixing travelogue, history, and doses of his dry wit and self-reflection – became staples in the contemporary Western syllabus of Indian adventures. Yet the Scottish-born Mr. Aitken was also widely celebrated in India’s literary circles as among the European writers who strove to see poetry in something as simple as a little-used rail spur or as grand as a mountain vista.

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In “The Nanda Devi Affair” (1994), Mr. Aitken described the life-changing moment in October 1961 when, as a young sojourner with no fixed plans, he first gazed upon the Himalayan peak rising more than 25,640 feet and decided to remain in India.

“There was something commanding in the Devi’s beauty as she lay before my eyes, essentially royal and feminine,” he wrote. “All the cliques about Nanda as queen surrounded by courtiers were appropriate for she towered above the rest with a regal detachment.”

In his later years, Mr. Aitken was an éminence grise of the hill station Mussoorie, which has drawn European writers since the 19th century for its panorama of the Himalayas to the north. He regaled visitors with stories and parables from his wide travels across India and recounted the kismet that led him from Scotland.

“I am one of those awkward customers who swims the wrong way,” he told author Malcolm Tillis in “New Lives” (2004), an oral history of Westerners who settled in India.

One day in 1959, when he was 25, he stood at the English Channel port of Dover in a kilt. He had just broken up with his girlfriend and had left his teaching job. For years, he had struggled with personal questions of faith and spirituality as a student of comparative religion, he recalled.

He decided he needed to roam and planned to hitchhike around the world. The kilt, he thought, was a nice touch of Scottish pride and the unusual outfit might help him get a lift. He set off on what would become the Hippie Trail a decade later: the overland circuit that brought thousands of adventurers – and probably even more copies of Jack Kerouac’s “The Dharma Bums” – to India before the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan closed the way.

He got rides on “an astounding assortment of transport,” Mr. Aitken told the Yorkshire Post, “that included lifts by a Danish scooterist, an Austrian TV salesman, a Greek melon transporter, an American oil rig team in Turkey.” He ditched the kilt in Istanbul. The heavy wool was not suited for the warming weather.

Weeks later, he arrived in Kolkata (then known as Calcutta), where he planned to catch a steamer across of the Bay of Bengal to Malaysia to continue what he called a “spiritual pilgrimage.” The snag was that he was nearly out of money.

He landed a teaching job and, while browsing at the Asiatic Society Library one day, he started reading the 1934 book “Nanda Devi” by mountaineer Eric Shipton, who traversed the summits that surround India’s second-tallest peak.

“Nothing now mattered save the urgent need to follow in Shipton’s footsteps,” he recalled. That led to the trip to the mountains in 1961, staying on the floor of a simple guesthouse after a supper of water and a lump of molasses. He awoke the next morning to see the clouds pull back to reveal Nanda Devi. He called it a “spiritual striptease.”

“The peaks and particularly Nanda Devi spoke so directly and emphatically that there and then I made the decision to leave Calcutta and come and live among them,” he wrote.

Mr. Aitken spent most of the 1960s working at ashrams within sight of the Himalayas. The first was run by the former Catherine Heilman, a woman from England who took the name Sarla Behn and was known as one of the “British daughters” of Mohandas K. Gandhi during the struggle for Indian independence from Britain in 1947.

Mr. Aitken then entered an ashram run by Krishna Prem, a former British military pilot during World War I who had been born Ronald Nixon. Mr. Aitken stayed seven years, becoming known locally as a skilled baker.

In 1969, he was asked to help sort out some legal paperwork of Prithwi Bir Kaur, a London-educated member of the former rulers of the Sikh principality of Jind, which became part of India in 1948. Mr. Aitken became her secretary and moved into her home, known as Oakless, which was filled with stately antiques and mounted deer heads from long-ago hunting expeditions.

They were companions until her death in 2010 and often embarked on long rail journeys across India with special attention to narrow-gauge secondary lines and outposts. The trips were recounted in books including “Travels by a Lesser Line” (1993) and “Branch Line to Eternity” (2001), written two years after Mr. Aitken and Mark Tully, then the BBC’s New Delhi bureau chief, founded the Steam Railway Society that saved several steam locomotives from the scrapyard.

Mr. Aitken used train travel as both a vantage point to observe India and also as a metaphor for his spiritual explorations, wrote best-selling Indian novelist Anuradha Roy in a 2001 essay in India’s Hindu newspaper. She described, with awe and reverence, how Mr. Aitken was able to wrap bigger questions of life around the chug of a slow-moving train or the chaos of a bus stuck in the mud. “A profound air of beatitude settled on both mind and body,” Roy wrote. “At such moments, you know exactly what eternity feels like.”

Mr. Aitken liked to joke: “I came to India to study comparative religion, but I found comparative railways much more interesting.”

Studied religion

William McKay Aitken was born in Tullibody, a village about 30 miles from Edinburgh, on May 31, 1934. He would often recall that on that same day in India, the mountaineer Shipton was part of team that was believed to be the first to cross the peaks ringing Nanda Devi. (A separate group of Anglo-American climbers reached the summit in 1936.)

As a child, he liked to climb to the top of the nearby hill. “I hated going to church but loved sitting on top of that peak,” he told the Indian site Firstpost. “I felt like one with the universe. And I thought, this is divinity.”

His father, a coppersmith, moved to England to find work, and the family was reunited in Birmingham after World War II. Mr. Aitken studied comparative religion at the University of Leeds and went on personal faith shopping as he worked his way toward a master’s degree.

“I had Holy Communion with the Quakers, the Mormons,” he recounted. “I went to the High Anglicans, the Low Anglicans.” Nothing seemed to fit. His planned round-the-world trek was a chance to sample other ways of worship.

His last book, “Sri Sathya Sai Baba: A Life” (2006), is a biography of the leader of a Hindu-influenced religious movement that Mr. Aitken followed. In “Seven Sacred Rivers” (1992), Mr. Aitken looked beyond the mighty Ganges to journey along India’s other waterways such as the Brahmaputra high on the Tibetan plateau and the Krishna that slices across southern India.

His other books include “Footloose in the Himalaya” (2003) and “Divining the Deccan” (1999) about accounts of his travels through India by motorcycle.

Mr. Aitken, who became an Indian citizen in 1972, commented frequently on environmental damage in India as the population swelled and use of plastics became common. In recent years, he assailed the Indian government for expanding military facilities in the regions near Tibet amid growing tensions with China.

“India’s own defense forces have caused much greater and irreversible damage to the Himalayan environment than any invader could,” he wrote. (In 1988, the Nanda Devi area became a UNESCO World Heritage site.)

Mr. Aitken, who had no immediate survivors, often allowed his home to become a hub of the cultural and literary community in Mussoorie. Yet he revealed his yearning for solitude when asked once about his favorite time of year.

The monsoon season, he told the Hindustan Times. “That is one time not many people knock on the door,” he said, “and one can sit quietly and write.”

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