Fakirs and fakers

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.

There’s no clear line in Indian history between the conjuring trick as entertainment and magic as religious ritual; between the austerities of the sadhu or the yogi and the feats of the street performer; between the equivalent of a court masque and a political or devotional ceremony. Here is an astonishingly tangled and promiscuously syncretic history, going back thousands of years and twisting through Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic traditions long before its encounter with the West.

For those who think of Buddhism as a rationalist religion with no hocus-pocus, we are reminded that (in Suzanne Mrozic’s words) Buddha ‘could barely take a step without the earth quaking, gods raining down flowers from the heavens and divine music sounding in the air’.