INDIAN JUGGLERS.
BY AN ANGLO-INDIAN.
The exhibition of feats of legerdemain is at all times entertaining; and those who have had the pleasure of witnessing the performances of such accomplished professors of the art of magic as the late Wizard of the North, or Messrs Maskelyne and Cooke of the Egyptian Hall, London, are not likely soon to forget the same. In Britain, however, it is only now and again that a magician of the first class, who is likewise a native of the British Isles, appears. Eminent British jugglers are few and far between. But in the ancient East, magic is, and has from time immemorial been, much more generally cultivated. India, as every one who has resided in our great tropical dependency knows, counts its jugglers by thousands. Indeed, magic is there a recognised calling or business; it descends from father to son; and an Indian juggler, be he Mussulman or Hindu, would not dream of teaching his son any other business than his own—that of magic. And so it comes about that the supply of Indian jugglers is both large and continuous. The Indian juggler is a very humble individual; he does not appear before his audience in the glory of evening dress; his only costume is a cloth bound round his loins. And thus, if coat-sleeves or pockets at all assist in magic, the Indian juggler is at a decided disadvantage, for both his arms and legs are bare. He is a thin, an unnaturally thin, wiry-looking individual—the Indian juggler. I do not know why he should be thin, but I do not recollect ever having seen a fat Indian juggler. Fat natives of India there are in plenty, as those who have travelled on Indian railways know to the detriment of their olfactory nerves; but I cannot recall a single fat Indian magician. Again, the Indian juggler does not appear before his audience with the swagger of the man who knows his power to command the applause of crowded houses. On the contrary, he appears meekly before you at the foot of your veranda steps, obsequiously salaaming, quite prepared to be turned away with rough words, but hoping to be invited up the steps to perform; for he knows that if he once reaches the top of the veranda steps, he will, an hour thereafter, be one rupee, perhaps two rupees, richer, and he will thus have earned his living for a week. Not a very liberal remuneration this, you may think; and yet it is a fact that a juggler whose receipts amounted to ten rupees—say eighteen shillings in one month—would consider himself a fortunate man.
His performance is a remarkable one, though, perhaps, not more remarkable than a first-class exhibition of magic in Britain. But between the British and the Indian juggler there is one great and important difference. The former has all the usual elaborate paraphernalia of home magical entertainments—a prepared stage, back curtains, tables, chairs, boxes, &c.; the latter has nothing of the sort: all his appliances are contained in a cotton bag which he carries about with him; he is nearly naked; and his stage is the ground or the stone floor of a veranda. Very often two or three jugglers combine and pay visits to the bungalows, thus giving variety to the performance—for each juggler has his own tricks. Recently, I had a visit from an amalgamated troupe consisting of seven members—five men, one woman, and a boy. Probably the seven had conjoined their entertainments for that particular day only, and next day they might be performing separately again. If I give a description of what this party of seven did, you will have a fair idea of a juggling entertainment in India.
Two of the seven—one man and the woman—performed a single trick only, namely, the famous basket trick. The man took an oblong basket about two feet long, one foot broad, and, say, a foot and a half high. The woman was bound hand and foot with ropes, and put into a net made of rope, which was securely tied, so that she was practically in a sack of network. She was then lifted and placed into the basket on her knees. But a two-year-old child would have filled the basket, and the result was that the whole of the woman’s person, from the loins upwards, was above the basket. The woman bent her head; the juggler placed the lid of the basket on her shoulders, and then threw a sheet over the whole—hiding both woman and basket from view. In about a minute he pulled away the sheet, folding it up in his hands, and behold, the lid was in its proper place, and the woman was gone! The juggler now took a sword about five feet long, and with it he pierced the basket through and through in all directions, horizontally, diagonally, upwards, and downwards; but there was no sign of any one inside. He even removed the lid, jumped into the basket with his feet, and danced in it, until one came to the conclusion that, wherever the woman had gone to, she was not inside. The juggler again took the sheet, and after we had examined it, he spread it over the basket, holding it tent-shaped, the apex where his hand was being about three feet from the ground. In a minute he withdrew the sheet once more, and behold the woman was back in her old position on her knees in the basket; but the ropes and net had disappeared, and she was now unbound. This trick has a few variations, one of which is that after the woman disappears, the basket is handed round to show its emptiness, and some other trick is exhibited, in the middle of which the female performer reappears before the audience ere any one can notice where she comes from.
A third juggler now made his salaam, and began by performing the beautiful mango-tree trick. He took an earthenware pot, filled it with earth moistened with a little water, and placed among the earth a mango-seed which we had examined beforehand. This done, he threw a sheet over the pot, and almost immediately removed it again, when we beheld, to our astonishment, that the seed had in the space of, say, half a minute become a young mango-tree. Again the sheet was thrown over the pot, and on being a second time removed, the mango-tree had doubled in size. The same process was repeated a third time, and now the tree was covered with small unripe mangoes. This time the juggler plucked the tree up out of the earth, displaying the roots and the remains of the original mango-stone from which the tree was supposed to have sprung.
The snake trick, which was the next item in the entertainment, is one which has a peculiar fascination for native onlookers, for the fatal ravages of poisonous serpents in India for centuries have produced a horror of such reptiles among natives. Our juggler showed us a parched skin which had once belonged to a large cobra. We examined it carefully, and were quite sure it was a serpent’s skin and nothing more. He placed this skin in a circular straw basket about six inches deep. The basket was likewise examined, and we found no double bottom or any other peculiarity about it. When he put the lid upon the basket, it contained nothing but the empty skin—that we were equally well assured of. The wonderful sheet before mentioned was again brought into requisition, and was spread over the basket containing the dry skin. After the performance of some mystic manœuvres in the air with a little wooden doll, the sheet was withdrawn, the lid removed, and out of the basket arose a huge hissing cobra, his hood spread in anger, and his forked tongue darting in and out of his mouth. Some native servants who were looking on fled precipitately in all directions; but the juggler quickly took out an Indian musical instrument—not unlike a miniature set of bagpipes—and began to play. A change came over the spirit of the cobra’s spleen; his anger died away; he stood up with half of his body in a perpendicular attitude, and presently began to sway to and fro in a sort of serpent dance to the music. In a word, he was charmed—for snake-charming is a reality, and not a fiction, strange as it may seem to the people of Britain.
The government of India offers a money reward for every poisonous snake killed in the country; and the result is that there exists in India at the present day a class of men, called snake-charmers, who earn their living by going about in search of serpents. They play on the peculiar instrument before mentioned, and if any serpent is within hearing distance, it is irresistibly attracted to the musician. Serpents will leave the roots of hedges, holes in walls, come down trees, or forsake paddy-fields, if they hear this strange music. They erect themselves vertically before the player, who at once seizes them by the throat, and puts them in a large basket or bag he carries with him for the reception of unwise serpents.[1] What became of the dry snake skin, we could not tell; we never saw it again.
The next performer was an elderly patriarchal-looking man, who exhibited two trained tropical birds, the names of which I forget. These birds did some really astonishing things, and their master the patriarch must be a man of infinite patience. For instance, one actually loaded a small brass cannon set on a miniature gun-carriage, pushed the charge home with a small ramrod, and fired the piece off by applying a lighted match, held in its beak, to the touchhole, displaying not the slightest fear at the noise caused by the firing. The other bird would, if its master threw any small object into the air, seize the object in mid-air and bring it to the bird-trainer.
Numbers five and six—man and boy—of the troupe were circus-wallahs, and gave a native gymnastic entertainment, which, as it did not materially differ from a British performance in the same line, need not be detailed.
Number seven was a juggler of divers accomplishments. He swallowed swords, and put an iron hook into his nostril, bringing it out of his mouth. Neither of these feats, however, though undoubtedly genuine, is pleasant to look at. He blew fire and flames out of his mouth without revealing the origin or cause of the fire, and apparently without burning himself. He took about half-a-dozen stones of the size of, say, a hen’s egg out of his mouth; how they got there, or how his mouth contained them after they got there, was a mystery. He was talking just before he began; but on being asked a question in the middle of this stone performance, he could not speak. After discharging the big stones, he wound up by disgorging about a handful of old nails and miscellaneous rubbish!
A much more pleasant trick to look at was the one which followed. He took a cocoa-nut shell with one end cut off, and filled it with water. In the water he placed a little piece of cork, having a bent pin on one side, and two straight pins on the other side, so that the cork as it floated roughly resembled a lilliputian duck. The cork lay dead in the water, and it was difficult to think what magic could possibly be got out of it. Presently the juggler, sitting about two yards off, took out a musical instrument and began to play a lively tune. Instantly the imitation duck commenced to dance violently in the water, suiting its motions to the music. The dancing continued till the tune was ended; then the juggler ordered the duck to salaam; and he was at once obeyed. He even requested the buoyant cork to dive to the bottom of the water; and his request was immediately complied with. While the performance was going on, the cocoa-nut shell was standing almost at our feet, and the performer was not only sitting beyond reach, but both his hands were employed in playing the instrument.
One more trick will finish my list. Our juggler told a native servant, whom he did not know, to stretch out his arm palm upwards. Into the outstretched palm he placed a silver two-anna piece, and—holding out his own bony hand to show us that it was empty—he lifted the coin from the servant’s hand, shut his own fist, reopened it in the twinkling of an eye, and an enormous black scorpion dropped into the servant’s palm. The latter fled shrieking with terror, for, next to the serpent, the particular aversion of the Hindu is the scorpion.
This finished the performance. In the foregoing, I have given as fair a description as I can of an Indian juggling entertainment; and probably you will agree with me in thinking that the feats of the poor Indian juggler are quite as wonderful as those of a first-class British magician, while the former suffers from numerous disadvantages which the latter is entirely free from.