Magic, magicians: India
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
John Zubrzycki’s backgrounder
A lot of Western magicians stole or appropriated Indian tricks October 7, 2018: The Times of India
John Zubrzycki was enchanted by the profusion of jugglers and performers on Calcutta’s streets during a visit in the 1970s. That fascination translated into a scholarly work on the history of Indian magic. The Sydney-based author of Jadoowallahs, Jugglers and Jinns: A Magical History of India tells Sonam Joshi that there is more to Indian jadoo than P C Sorcar
What sparked off your interest in the history of Indian magic and can you tell us about the first trick you saw?
I used to see a lot of magicians when I was in India in the late 1970s, but the encounter I remember most was outside Alipurduar railway station in 1979 when I saw the basket trick being performed. A young boy climbed into a round basket and an old man chanted incantations and plunged a sword through the wicker. The blade came out bloody but the boy later emerged unscathed. It was quite spectacular. Later, I realised that a lot of Western magicians were appropriating Indian costumes and tricks in the early 20th century. Even Harry Houdini started his career posing as a ‘Hindu fakir’. You also had a new class of Indian magicians who had learnt Western magic and gotten so good that they were travelling to the West and wearing top hats and coat tails. While writing the book, I saw lots of magic that I have no explanation for but I know it is all trickery, based on human ingenuity.
How did Indian magic come to dominate the Western imagination from the 19th century onwards?
India was seen as this far-off place where real magic existed, and its reputation only grew as Western magicians started returning with tales of the extraordinary feats of India’s street magicians. A traditional Indian magician neither had the luxury of a stage nor props that can make objects disappear. He had, at most, a bag. A Western magician needed special lighting, trap doors, curtains and mirrors. An Indian magician seemed more mysterious. But there was also a certain East vs West rivalry. Western magicians tried to assert their superiority by stealing or buying tricks from impoverished street magicians, or exposing their secrets through writings. Indian magic was considered primitive, crude and unchanging while Western magic was thought of as sophisticated and modern.
Under British rule, Indian entertainers were often taken to the West on exploitative terms. How did some become successful performers in their own right?
Street magicians were recruited for world fairs and exhibitions from the 1860s, and it peaked around the turn of the century. They came from marginalised communities that were later classified as criminal tribes. Sometimes, corrupt impresarios just abandoned them on the streets of European cities. Those who found success (see box) did so through skill, ingenuity and a lot of chutzpah.
How did P C Sorcar change the rules of the game? You’ve argued that he owed his popularity to showmanship and selfpromotion…
Yes, there’s a certain truth in that. Sorcar brought Indian magic to the notice of the world stage. He was a master publicist. He would bombard newspapers, magazines and magic journals with reviews of his shows, brightly coloured posters and photographs, emphasising that he’s the world’s greatest magician even though he had no claim to call himself that. Back in 1956 when live TV was in its infancy, he understood its power. On a BBC programme, he deliberately let his show run overtime so that his assistant would be left cut in half by a giant hacksaw blade. It was all a trick of course but people thought they had seen someone murdered on their TV screens. The BBC had to issue a clarification but the story made the front pages, and his career never looked back.
A lot of his magic wasn’t considered that great but then he started elaborate and sophisticated stage productions with palaces, elephants on hire, music, dance and numerous assistants.
What place does magic have in the digital age?
Though it’s getting tougher for street magicians to survive, magic won’t die. Seeing a skilled magician do even the simplest of tricks instills a sense of wonder and makes us question what is real. This is something that will always resonate deeply even in this digitised and disenchanted world.
The state of India’s magicians
As in 2019
Atul Sethi, June 22, 2019: The Times of India
(Inputs by Ruchika Uniyal in Delhi, Mohua Das in Mumbai, Rohit Khanna in Kolkata, Sudha Nambudiri in Kochi and Shuchita Jha in Bhopal)
From: Atul Sethi, June 22, 2019: The Times of India
Chanchal Lahiri, aka Mandrake, got the headlines in death that eluded him when he was on stage.
“If I return, it will be magic. If I don’t, it will be tragic,” he had said when he was being lowered into the Hooghly river in Kolkata, bound in steel chains, to perform a Harry Houdini-style underwater escape stunt last weekend. The trick went horribly wrong for the 41-year-old magician whose body was fished out after a chaotic rescue operation that was beamed throughout the day on TV channels.
The incident in many ways has put the spotlight on India’s magicians, who are struggling to revive interest in their art form in the face of onslaught from multiple media, and the “extra something” they have to do to ensure that their shows remain, well, magical. Many of them are bereft of technology that a David Copperfield has access to or the backup of experts that a Criss Angel gets, and stare death each time they attempt to hang upside down over spikes, or escape from burning barrels. Still they persist.
Ask magicians who revel in deadly tricks on what makes them tick, and they say they count on four ‘P’s — passion, planning, preparation and precaution — to deliver the perfect performance. And a heavy dose of luck.
Veteran Kolkata magician Prince Sil says that Mandrake’s death probably happened because he was “wearing too heavy shoes which obstructed his manoeuvre of going against the tide and freeing himself from the chains.”
Sil recalls his own brush with death while performing the ‘Bullet Catching’ act— in which the magician catches a bullet fired at him with his teeth. “When I thought of doing the trick back in the early 1970s, the only method that was known to magicians was the one used by American magician Chung Ling Soo — who died while performing this trick at London in 1918. I needed to improve on that and make it safer.”
Using indigenously-developed methods, Sil says he went through six years of trial and error before he came up with his own template for Bullet Catching, referred to as the ‘cursed trick’ for its propensity to go wrong. “I’ve done more than 1,000 performances since then and each time it was equally deadly,” Sil says. In 2006, during a show, the act went out of control and Sil was critically injured when the bullet hit the protective glass shield he was wearing.
Call it the rush of adrenaline, or the desire to do something different that motivates these Houdinis. Take Mumbai-based Rajesh Kumar for instance. A magician’s career was the last thing on the mind of this science geek who was always cynical of conjurers in their ostentatious clothing. The perception of magicians changed for him when as a 15-year-old he spent an entire night watching master illusionist Criss Angel for the first time. Auditioning for a television show on magic a few years later, Kumar wondered if he could do what Angel had done – escape from a small cement box strung up above New York’s Times Square before it crashed to the ground. In an attempt to reinvent Angel’s original illusion, Kumar had himself handcuffed, put inside a box with an RDX explosive with 30 seconds to get out before it exploded. “I stepped out and bang, the bomb took off,” he recalls. So did his career as a magician.
Rajesh, now a popular name, has tried it all. He’s hung upside down over spikes, and swallowed needles – where the slightest slip could be fatal. “I can’t tell which is the most dangerous of them all. The RDX escape box is as risky as 20 needles going into your throat,” says the 25-year-old.
There’s a psychological side to it as well. As Nirmal Kumar Sarang, a third-generation illusionist who has performed daring escapes from a wooden box set on fire, puts it, “People love those acts the most in which a magician’s life is at risk.”
That perhaps explains why 27-year-old Karan Singh -- who calls himself a ‘psychological illusionist’ and routinely surprises Bollywood celebrities with his brand of intuitive tricks of penetrating people’s minds -- has not been able to resist death-defying feats. “I put five air-guns on stage. Someone from the audience walks up, takes a bullet and loads one of the guns. I’m supposed to shoot four of them point blank at my forehead, hopefully the blank ones,” he says.
And how do these illusionists prepare for their shows? “Practice, practice, and more practice”, says Sarang. “It’s the only way you can minimise risks and overcome fear.”
Before a show, Kumar claims to spend at least 30 hours on set perfecting an act and sometimes 60 to 80 hours during the making of a prop. “Some can take up to a year to perfect, ” he adds.
More than any other preparation, says Kerala’s leading magician, Gopinath Muthukad, success in any death-defying trick is all about controlling the mind. Muthukad, one of the few who has successfully replicated Houdini’s feat of unshackling a chain with half a dozen locks and escaping from a burning pyre, says that he makes his mind “go totally blank” when he does the escape act. “It takes continuous practice to make your mind go blank. It took me almost two years of practice to achieve this.”
But not every magician feels daredevil acts are necessary. Delhi-based magician Rahul Kharbanda says, “There has been an undue focus on performing dangerous acts lately, in an attempt to gain quick popularity. There is so much more to magic that can be explored, especially with the help of technological advances, but very few do it. Mandrake had performed the Houdini act successfully earlier, but didn’t have the same luck this time. He might not have been able to predict the flow of the Hooghly river or the transparency of its waters. All elements need to be taken into account.”
Legendary magician PC Sorcar Junior though says that despite all the challenges — many magicians have to import expensive equipment from abroad and funds are hard to come by — the future is bright for the country’s conjurers. “Why do you think about a David Blaine or a Franz Harary? I have found many Indian magicians much better than what the west can offer. Our home-grown boys and girls can go places.”
