R.I.P. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 02.06.08 | 11:50 AM ET

The 1960s icon and one-time Beatles guru helped put Rishikesh on the counterculture map and inspired countless young Westerners to wander East across the Hippie Trail. He died Tuesday at his home in the Netherlands at the age of 91. Just how great was his influence on travel?

A 2006 London Times review of Rory MacLean’s “Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India”—due out in the U.S. next year—helps put it into context:

By 1967, the year that the Beatles went to meditate with the Maharishi in Rishikesh, the Indian government estimated that there were 10,000 “youthful” foreigners in the country. Five years later the same number crossed the border from Pakistan in a single week, and in 1973 the French reckoned that India was where 250,000 of its citizens had taken up temporary and sometimes permanent residence.

Of course, the influx of visitors wasn’t all a result of the Maharishi’s influence, but along with the sounds of George Harrison’s sitar and a wide range of other influences, the Maharishi played a pivotal role in Westerners’ attraction to the East—a topic writer Gita Mehta famously explored in Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East.

We recently noted plans to turn the Maharishi’s Rishikesh ashram into an eco-hotel.

Time magazine cover from Oct. 13, 1975.