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    PC Sorcar, rope tricks & snake-charmers: When Indian magic conquered the West

    Synopsis

    The story of Indian magic cannot be told without examining its place in the globalisation of popular culture.

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    A troupe of Indian show people. Postcard printed by Gobind Ram and Oodey Ram, Jaipur, c 1900. Photos Courtesy: Jadoowallahs Jugglers And Jinns (Pan Macmillan India)
    By John Zubrzycki

    Midway through researching my book Jadoowallahs Jugglers and Jinns, I came across a report in the India Office Records at the British Library in London. It was compiled in 1858 by Captain DN McKinnon, the commanding officer of the isolated outpost of Hingoli in Central India. One of his peons told him he had seen a pale-skinned girl dancing in a troupe of magicians, or jugglers as they were usually referred to, at the weekly market. The peon was certain the child was a European.

    “I immediately ordered an enquiry to be made when it was reported they had left the place some days ago,” McKinnon wrote to Colonel Cuthbert Davidson, the British Resident in Hyderabad. “I sent two Sepoys to search for them who traced them to the village of Peergaun, and brought into the Cantonment the child, a girl of about nine years of age, a pure European child. This I believe without any doubt.” The child was removed from the troupe and a man and a woman claiming to be her parents placed in detention. She was washed and clothed and was being cared for by the ladies of the cantonment “where she seems very happy”, Mc-Kinnon added.

    To research the history of Indian magic is to be taken down some unexpected pathways. Discovering that a European child had either been abducted or found abandoned and raised to be a dancer in a troupe of jugglers, recalled reports of children being reared by wolves in central India — reports that would become the basis of the story of Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book.
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    ‘Karachi’(Arthur Claude Derby) performs the Indian Rope Trick at West Hampstead in 1934 (Harrry Price Collection, University of London)


    Then I found out she was not the only one. A few days later, McKinnon’s agents discovered another European woman living in the nearby town of Sawargaon. She was between 25 and 28 and was married to a juggler, but could not remember how she got there. “The poor woman has been so long with the natives that she is in the habits as one of themselves,” McKinnon wrote after she was brought to Hingoli. “But her accent is so different from theirs that anyone hearing her speak would remark on it.”

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    A snake charmer “tames” a cobra with his pipe (Watercolour, 19th century, Wellcome Library, London)

    The pantheon of India’s street magicians — jadoowallahs, tamashawallahs, jadugars, madaris, mayakaris, maslets, qalandars, sanpwallahs, sanperas, katputliwallahs, bahurupis, peep-showwallahs, the list goes on — ranges across creed and caste. Stronger than religious ties is their association with the barah pal, the brotherhood of twelve, an ancient collective of strolling players that includes jugglers, snake-charmers, animal handlers, puppeteers, ventriloquists, storytellers, impersonators and acrobats.

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    Poster for American magician Carl Hertz’ The Great Indian Rope Trick.

    Regardless of their background, members of this peripatetic brotherhood can share a cooking hearth made out of three stones whenever their wanderings bring them together.

    Economic changes are breaking down what were once strong bonds between these communities. But their arts of legerdemain live on as an integral part of the social, cultural and religious fabric of India as they have for millennia.

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    Publicity calendar for the 1956 Australian tour of Gogia Pasha, “the last of the great magicians” (Alma Collection, State Library of Victoria)

    In India, the boundaries for what constitutes ritual or sympathetic magic — rooted in religion, nature rites and belief in the supernatural — and magic for the sake of entertainment have been deliberately, and very effectively, blurred. A Hindu or a Muslim holy man will vanish objects, pass skewers through his body or walk on hot coals to convince alms givers of his spiritual powers. The street magician will copy those feats or add similar ones such as being buried underground or lying on a bed of nails, for the same pecuniary ends.

    PC Sorcar’s 1960s showbiz extravaganza started with the ritualistic drawing of a mandala on the stage and the lighting of an oil lamp before a portrait of Goddess Durga. Dressed as a mock maharajah, India’s most famous magician then presented a programme that had more bling than a Bollywood movie but was as authentically Indian as chicken tikka masala.

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    Souvenir programmes of PC Sorcar, “The World’s Greatest Magician” (Private collection)

    In researching my book, I found evidence of magic almost everywhere I looked: in the verses of the Atharva Veda, the stories of Somadeva and the poet Dandin’s descriptions of Pallava society with its statues of Kama, the god of love, and his consort Rati making erotic sounds — to name just a few.

    Archival material in New Delhi, Mumbai, London, Cambridge and other libraries revealed the wonderful “Professor Ahmad”, court conjurer of the princely state of Charkhari who, in 1904, entertained Habibullah Khan, the Amir of Afghanistan, at a state dinner in Agra with his Marvellous Sphinx trick. He was followed by the Suratborn Nahar Perianan Alvaro, who was invited to Kabul by another Afghan ruler, Nadir Khan, to present his “stupendous, hypnotic, mystifying galaxy of the supernatural” show before an audience of grizzly tribals for the country’s independence day celebrations.

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    Studio portrait of a juggler performing the sword-swallowing trick at Madras, taken by Nicholas & Curths c 1870 (India Office Records, British Library)

    And then there was the story of Amar Nath Dutt, who was duped into going to New York by a curry cook posing as a prince from Baluchistan. After being dumped on the streets of Queens, he dabbled in conjuring, joined Madame Cama’s revolutionary cell in Paris and was sent back to America to be trained as a bomb maker. He ended up using his pyrotechnic skills to bring dazzling Indian deceptions to the Western stage as Linga Singh, becoming the most famous Indian magician of the 1920s and 1930s. The archives also illuminated the darker side of India’s magical history.

    After being recruited by corrupt or incompetent impresarios for great world fairs and exhibitions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of jugglers, acrobats, dancers and musicians were abandoned in cities such as London, Brussels and Berlin, forcing the India Office to arrange for their repatriation.

    In 1900, a prominent lawyer from Allahabad wrote the following letter to the Protector of Emigrants in Bombay. “I have just learnt that in order to send a party of Indians consisting of performers, musicians, acrobats and artisans to the ensuing Paris Exhibition it is necessary to obtain a permit from the Protector of Emigrants. As I am about to send such a party, I beg to state the necessary particulars for your information.”

    The letter writer was Motial Nehru, patriarch of South Asia’s most powerful political dynasty, who had taken time out from his successful legal career to follow in the footsteps of the world’s greatest showbiz entrepreneur, Phineas Taylor Barnum.

    Nehru’s letter would prompt the Indian Government to consider an amendment of the Emigration Act of 1883 under which magicians and other entertainers were officially banned from emigrating because they were considered labourers — a ban that their recruiters often evaded by passing them off as domestic servants.

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    Snake charmer, calendar art, c 1930s (Priya Paul Collection)

    In what was one of the most unusual cases to come before a viceroy, Lord Curzon had to decide whether magic constituted manual labour because it involved sleight of hand. Fortunately, sense prevailed and conjuring was recognised for what it was: entertainment, opening the way for thousands of “spectacular performers” as they were termed to dazzle the European public.

    By then, the wonderworkers of Madras, Delhi, Lucknow and Lahore were synonymous with the greatest possession of the largest empire in the world. Accounts of ropes being thrown in the air and remaining upright without any visible support, yet strong enough for an animal or even a man to climb up; of fakirs being buried alive for months and brought back to life; and of conjurors instantaneously raising mango trees laden with fruit from the bare earth, filled the pages of newspapers and journals.

    In December 1899, London’s Strand Magazine declared in its typically unequivocal tone: “Ask the average man for what India is most celebrated, and chances are ten-to-one that he will ignore the glories of the Taj Mahal, the beneficence of British rule, even Mr Kipling, and will unhesitatingly reply in one word, ‘Jugglers’.”

    To tell the story of Indian magic is to hold a mirror to India’s religious traditions, its society and culture. Magic permeated the Vedic period, Sufis and yogis staged miracle contests to see whose jadoo was more powerful, Buddhists and Jains resorted to spells and incantations to win philosophical debates.

    Indian fortune-tellers were in great demand in ancient Rome. The Tang emperors of China employed Indian alchemists who peddled secret formulas that promised longevity and sexual prowess. After watching the tricks of conjurers, the 6th-century sage, Sankara, used their principles to explain the concept of maya or illusion.

    During the Abbasid caliphate, the booksellers of Baghdad sold Indian conjuring manuals translated into Arabic. In the late eighteenth century, Muscovites were startled by the appearance of a yogi who kept his arms raised above his head as a penance. He was midway through a decades-long pilgrimage that took him through Ceylon, Malaya, Afghanistan, Persia and Mesopotamia and back down the Silk Road to Tibet.



    The story of Indian magic cannot be told without examining its place in the globalisation of popular culture and the interplay between Eastern and Western traditions of performance magic. In 1813, the enterprising captain of an East India man docked on the Thames with a troupe of jugglers. Their appearance at Pall Mall would change the face of Western conjuring forever.

    Other troupes quickly followed and, in the late 1810s, a South Indian named Ramo Samee started performing in America, Europe and England, becoming one of the most famous magicians of his day. Within a few decades, continental conjurers were blackening their faces and performing the Basket Trick and levitation acts.

    One of those who smeared his face with boot polish was Charles Dickens, who in the tiny village of Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight in 1849, took to the stage as Rhia Rhama Rhoos. The name was a corruption of Khia Khan Khruse, who billed himself as ‘The Chief of the Indian Jugglers’ and was Samee’s rival in the late 1810s and early 1820s. Unbeknown to Dickens, his real name was Juan Antonio. He was Portuguese.

    By the time professional Indian magicians, with their Western-style routines and matching outfits, began travelling to Europe and America in the early 1900s, they found the market flooded with the likes of Samri S Baldwin, “The White Mahatma”, and Gustave Fasola, “The Famous Indian Fakir”. Even Harry Houdini started his career posing as a “Hindu fakir”.

    (The author is writer of Jadoowallahs Jugglers and Jinns)



    ( Originally published on Jul 21, 2018 )
    (Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)

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