A fascinating exploration of Indian magic tricks
The Paul Daniels Magic Show, on a Saturday afternoon in the early 1980s, was a straightforward enough proposition. A wand, a waistcoat and a wig; pick a card, any card… Here was Western conjuring as entertainment, in the music hall and variety tradition. Not much to connect it to gods and spirits; little in the way of holy terror in the sequins of the lovely Debbie McGee.
But, as John Zubrzycki’s new book shows, with Indian magic it has always been considerably more complicated than that. India was mythologised as a land of supernatural marvels for as long as written history goes back. It was there that Herodotus located his giant gold- digging ants. Ctesas of Cnidus, in 400 BCE, described giants, manticores, fountains of gold and two- cubit pygmies with genitals that “descend even to their ankles”. The earliest first- hand account, the Indica of Megasthenes, was no less fanciful — mentioning men without mouths who can survive on the smell of food alone, and mystics who live for 1,000 years — but it also described ascetics, mendicant soothsayers and travelling medicine men of a sort who still exist, just about, to the present day.
For those who think of Buddhism as a rationalist religion with no hocus- pocus, we are reminded that Buddha “could barely take a step without the earth quaking, gods raining down flowers from the heavens and divine music sounding in the air”. Mohammed put djinns into the Quran. Fourteenth- century Sufi hagiography is full of stories of Sufi saints worsting yogis in miracle contests. And magic was central to pre- modern Indian statecraft, from fortunetelling and longevity spells to spying, police work, warfare and even oratory. The Indrajalavidvyasamgraha, a compilation of magical spells that claimed to “ensure victory in a debate”, anticipated the business model of Cambridge Analytica by several hundred years.
The reliability of all this, like that of Cambridge Analytica’s data wizards, could vary. In 1653, for instance, the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan put his son Dara Shikoh in charge of capturing Kandahar. Shikoh bet the farm on a fraudulent guru who promised he could reduce the fort to ashes if supplied with some wine and a woman. The magician “enjoyed the company of the woman for some days”, then legged it: “This soon became the talk of the camp.” Shikoh made a final attempt to raise morale by telling his troops he had had “dreams and visions of victory”, and ordered a frontal assault. The Persians held their fire till the attackers were good and close, then let rip:
By the end of the day a thousand men were dead and another thousand wounded. A humiliated Dara retreated to his tent while the Persians played victory music from the ramparts and sent out dancing girls to undulate in full view of the demoralised Mughal soldiers.
This history is chronicled in a vast library of texts, real and apocryphal, with titles such as A True Relation without all Exception, of Strange and Admirable Accidents, which Lately Happened in the Kingdome of the Great Magor; or, Magull, Who is the Greatest Monarch of the Indies: or Swallowing the Sword, the Rod Pebbles and Shells and Eating Soap and Glass with the Trick for That; or “Regulations for Oiling Camels and Injecting Oil into their Nostrils”; or “Omens from the Falling of House Lizards”. These texts are not short: the Ocean of Stories is “nearly twice as long as the Odyssey and Iliad combined”, and one edition of the 16th- century Dastan- e- Amir Hamza runs to 42 volumes and more than 52 million words. Zubrzycki shows every sign of having read all these, so you don’t have to. I n his introduction, Zubrzycki describes watching a troupe of a dozen or so jadoowallahs, or street magicians, performing on the outskirts of New Delhi. These days they travel by motorbike, communicate by Whatsapp and post their tricks on Facebook; but their repertoire “bore a striking similarity to what the Mughal Emperor Jahangir had witnessed in the early 17th century”.
There’s a core group of tricks that come up again and again: levitation; snake- charming; There’s a core group of tricks that come up again and again: levitation; snake- charming; fire- walking; beds of nails; cup- and- ball tricks; live burial; swordswallowing; the mango tree trick; the basket trick and the elusive Indian rope trick
fire- walking; beds of nails; cupandball tricks; live burial; sword- swallowing; the mango tree trick; the basket trick and various reversible dismemberments and decapitations. The most notorious, of course, is the elusive Indian rope trick, where a conjuror throws a rope or chain into the air, mounts to the top and disappears before descending — in the best version of it — in a shower of severed limbs which are, in due course, restored to wholeness. Everyone describes it; nobody reliable seems to have witnessed it first hand. Was it a myth — “the most famous trick never performed”? Two chapters, towards the end of the book, put the quest to perform or debunk the Rope Trick at the heart of the 19th- and early 20th- century love– hate tussle between Indian and Western magical traditions.
That tussle is what grounds the second half of the book, as things get a bit less bonkers and we head towards the lovely Debbie McGee. Western magicians started travelling to India to pick up tricks and performers. Nineteenth- century exhibition fever saw Indian juggling troupes appear in “human zoos” or tour the provinces. When their unscrupulous backers went broke, these performers were dumped on the streets, more often than not ending up in the Strangers’ Home for Distressed Asiatics in West India Dock. Here Zubrzycki touches on a social and political strand: nomadic conjurers were periodically associated with thieving and the necromantic arts; and colonial crackdowns on Thuggee would sweep them up.
The most successful 20th- century Indian magician, Sorcar, was an inveterate self- publicist who essentially packaged Western Magic Circle tricks with an orientalised Indian veneer. And not all swamis were swamis. The Chinese conjuror Ching Ling Foo was, gallingly, beaten to the title of “Original Chinese Magician” by Chung Ling Soo ( real name: William Robinson)
Here’s a strange, deeply learned but consistently entertaining salmagundi of marvels, myths and outrageous cons — a surefooted survey of a vast terrain, alive to the cultural and anthropological implications of the subject but majoring on fun anecdotes and bizarre tales. You’ll like it. Not a lot, but you’ll like it.