Jadoowallahs, Jugglers and Jinns: A Magical History of India

443 Pages·2018·12.55 MB·English

by  John Zubrzycki

JADOOWALLAHS,
JUGGLERS AND JINNS
A Magical History of India
John Zubrzycki
PICADOR INDIA
To my children, Adele, Alexander,
Jonathon and Nicolas
‘Of the jugglers alone, a whole book might be written’
James Inglis, Tent Life in Tigerland, p.234
CONTENTS
Introduction: ‘So Wonderfully Strange’
1. Of Levitating Brahmins and Prophesizing Apes
2. Casting Indra’s Net
3. The Lovers of Jinns
4. In the Court of the Kings
5. A Bed of Nails
6. The Juggler’s Child
7. Tricks of the Trade
8. Crossing the Kala Pani
9. Spell-casters in the Strangers’ Home
10. Motilal’s Magical Menagerie
11. The Fakir Invasion
12. From Turbans to Top Hats
13. ‘The Most Famous Trick Never Performed’
14. A Rope Trick in a Snow Storm, a Fire Walk in Surrey
15. The Maharajah of Magic
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
INTRODUCTION
‘SO WONDERFULLY STRANGE’
D
ILSHAD Garden, on the eastern outskirts of New Delhi, is an unlikely
location to be probing the veracity of a four-century-old account of Indian
magic. To use the appellation ‘Garden’ was a town planner’s clever sleight of
hand. There are few open spaces in this congested warren of low-rise seventies-
style government housing. The grit and fumes of the Grand Trunk Road make it
even harder to imagine how northern India might have looked in the Mughal
period. My destination was a small park surrounded on three sides by ochre-
coloured flats. My guide was the infectiously enthusiastic Raj Kumar, General
Secretary of the Society of Indian Magicians, winner of the International Merlin
Award, master of the Rope Trick and levitation act, team leader at the Delhi
School of Magic, and founder of MAZMA, the Society for Uplifting Traditional
Magic & Performing Arts. It was late November, the middle of the marriage
season – the busiest period of Delhi’s always-hectic social calendar. Raj Kumar
was negotiating the maze of traffic, while fielding bookings for magic shows on
his super-sized smartphone. Talent scout and teacher, he had dozens of semi-pro
mystifiers on his books, ready to dazzle guests at weddings, corporate gigs and
birthday parties.
Waiting at the park were a dozen-or-so jadoowallahs, traditional street
magicians, who had come from Ghaziabad, just across the Uttar Pradesh border.
Raj Kumar proudly told me how he had pulled them out of poverty by buying
each a motorbike. Without their own transport, getting to the small towns and
villages where they can still perform is difficult. Making a living as a street
magician in New Delhi is tough. Begging is officially banned in the Indian
capital and under the law, street magicians are lumped together with beggars and
other vagrants, making them easy targets for the bribe-taking police. But this
was very much Raj Kumar’s territory and over the next two hours his rag-tag
magical assemblage performed unmolested, presenting a repertoire of tricks that
bore a striking similarity to what the Mughal emperor Jahangir had witnessed in
the early seventeenth century.
Jahangir presided over an empire at the height of its power and decadence. He
never went near a battlefield and rarely drew a sword, though in his memoirs he
admits to ordering one of his grooms to be killed on the spot and two palanquin
bearers hamstrung and paraded around his camp on a donkey, for disturbing a
nilgai during a hunting trip. The peace and stability his father, Akbar, had left
behind allowed Jahangir to indulge in shikari, sensual pursuits, poetry and
drinking – the latter being an addiction he spoke of with pride:
Encompassed as I was with youthful associates of congenial minds, breathing the air of a delicious
climate – ranging through lofty and splendid saloons, every part of which decorated with all the
graces of painting and sculpture, and the floors bespread with the richest carpets of silk and gold,
would it not have been a species of folly to have rejected the aid of an exhilarating cordial – and what
1
cordial can surpass the juice of the grape?
He was also a connoisseur of all things exotic: Zebras, turkeys and other
strange animals including a creature brought to his court by a dervish from
Ceylon with the face of a bat and the body of a monkey, minus the tail. His
garden bloomed with ‘the apricots of Suliman and Abbas’. It was scented with
sandalwood ‘peculiar to the islands of Zeir, or Zubberbad’.2 He owned the finest
elephants to transport the imperial assemblage – wives, almirahs, carpets, silver
utensils and a canopy of velvet wrought with gold, said to weigh several tonnes
that protected his peripatetic court from the rays of the meridian sun.3 He was
also fascinated by magic – once halting his convoy to watch the performance of
a Carnatic juggler who could swallow a chain three yards long. His obsession
with necromancy interfered with the day-to-day running of the court to such an
extent that a group of complainants wishing to report abuses of power by the
Governor of Bengal, had to dress up as magicians to get his attention.
Midway through his memoirs, as he contemplates a life well lived, a life of
‘gold, and jewels, and sumptuous wardrobes, and in the choicest beauties the sun
ever shone upon’,4 Jahangir digresses to ‘matters of less serious importance’.
There can be found in Bengal, he informs his readers, ‘performers in sleight of
hand, or jugglers, of such unrivalled skill in their art, that I have thought a few
instances of their extraordinary dexterity not unworthy of a place in these
memorials.’ He goes on to describe how a troupe of seven came to his court
boasting of ‘producing effects so strange as far to surpass the scope of the human
understanding’. Not only did they keep their word, ‘they exhibited in their
performances things of so extraordinary a nature, as without the actual
demonstration the world would not have conceived possible’.5 Over the course
of what would have been several days and nights, they effected no fewer than
twenty-eight tricks, a compendium of marvels that encompassed many of the
legendary feats of Indian magic – all executed with such skill and consisting of
such marvels, that the loquacious Mughal would often be lost for words.