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BOOKS
Magic
Realism
A Traveller's
Tale Of The Great Indian Illusion
By
Ravi
Shankar
Net Of Magic
By Lee Siegel Harpercollins
Price: Rs 295
Pages: 637
Reading
Lee Siegel's 20th century jaadunama on the Indian deus ex machina,
it is charming to realise that the world's fascination for esoteric India
has not waned. Net of Magic, published in western academia in the 1990s,
and onstage in India now, is a fascinating travelogue of Indian magic-a
colourful journey that snakes through reality, myth and the history of
Indian conjuring. Siegel, once a member of the International Brotherhood
of Magicians and a thaumaturgist himself, is a dedicated journeyman of
India. Each sojourn of his has a different quest, a different avatar.
He has travelled before to record India's comic traditions and its danses
macabres, so it is no surprise that Indian magic would attract him to
a search for its mysteries.
Siegel's
predecessors have been many, ranging from the illustrious IBN Battuta
to J.H. Hunt. The book is anecdotal and full of personal observations
and experiences. He writes with the flair of a novelist, the eye of the
historian and the attitude of the critic. We discover that Battuta was
weakhearted, and upon witnessing the great Indian rope trick in the Mughal
emperor's court, where pieces of dismembered limbs fell from the skies
to the accompaniment of bloodcurdling cries, swooned. He also fainted
on seeing a levitating yogi at Tughlaq's court. India's legendary tricks
like the rope trick and the mango tree trick are debated, with different
explanations in different situations. The reader's journey becomes mythical
and magical, theurgist Dhanamitra's story and the fable of Sankaracharya
become real in a strongly crafted illusion of words.
Magic as
the supreme art of illusion comes through in the psychograph of the narration:
the Ignis Fatuus which generates fear, the binding compulsion of all magic.
The duplicity of delusion-where magic masquerades as magick, and the conjuror
becomes a wizard-is what Siegel chronicles. The decapitation and resurrection
of little children, the suicidal chicken and the bloody needle through
the arm trick which the professor imports from America. These evoke the
primordial fear of blood and death, and man's delight in his own fear.
The celebrities
are all there: from Seshal, the floating brahmin of Madras who was the
rage of the 19th century European press, to P.C. Sorcar, undeniably the
most famous Cagliostro of modern India. Siegel shows a writer's intuitive
empathy with the joys, deceptions and frailties of human desire and the
picture he draws of the magician Naseb and his entourage is touchingly
affectionate. Historically, the decline of the street magician began with
the first Taliban, Aurangzeb, who banished him from the court into the
vagrancy of the streets. The modern magician, though dismissive of this
legacy, admits that the street magician's "bone was the first magic
wand".
In spite
of scholarship, research and understanding, Siegel, too, falls into the
same trap most western writers on India tend to-of being patronising.
The inability to understand the semi-western existence of the average
Indian, with his quaint middle-class u-turns of phrase and dress, turns
Siegel into an unwitting caricaturist-whether it be when he speaks of
M.T. Banerjee in Las Vegas, or Lal and Shyamal in Calcutta. For someone
who seems as erudite as Siegel, this illusion of ignorance is quite unnecessary.
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