Can there be a definitive history of magic in India? This book tells the mesmerising story

[Judi Lynn]

John Zubrzycki’s book traces the journey of what we know as magic from the Harappan Civilisation to the current age.

Jul 29, 2018 · 08:30 am
Vipin Krishna

“To tell the story of Indian magic is to hold a mirror to India’s religious traditions, its society and culture,” journalist John Zubrzycki writes in his comprehensive history of magic in India. The country certainly has its fair share of vanishing coin tricks (think demonetisation), disappearances and elaborate escape routines (think Nirav Modi and Vijay Mallya) and conjuring tricks (think violent rumour-driven mobs and institutions of eminence). But these magic tricks, rather than entertaining us prove to be the duplicitous effects of political misdirection, and it is almost this distinction between magic as entertainment, and the story of magic as vexing reality that Zubrzycki recounts in Jadoowallahs, Jugglers, and Jinns.

Zubrzycki cites anthropologist Jan Van Baal at the very beginning of his book: “Magic is a dangerous word, more dangerous than magic itself, because it is such a handsome term to cover everything that we fail to understand. The term is used far too often as a vague kind of explanation, but in fact it explains nothing.” The definition-cum-premonition is somewhat true. As Zubrzycki makes clear by the end, not understanding comes at the cost of an arrogant division that must be affected between science and spirituality, and between east and west. A magic trick performed in three acts, Zubrzycki plays raconteur in the book to the birth, disappearance, and reappearance of modern Indian magic

The Pledge
The story of magic itself begins, as Zubrzycki tells it, from the very auspices of the Harappan Civilisation. Even though the book’s build-up is slow, it meticulously winds its way through this history – the concept of “maya” as a native connotation of the word “illusion” from the Rig Veda and its use by Indra through “cosmic sleights of hand” (the word “Indrajaala” is still used to denote magic in parts of the subcontinent). The seventh century Hindu sage Samkara used a “wonder show”, the centrepiece of which featured the (soon to be famed) rope trick to explain “maya”. Magic features in other religious texts as well. In the Pali translated Dhammapada, the Buddha challenges his detractors to a show of magical powers by growing a mango tree instantaneously. Curiously, it’s a trick that has made it into the modern Indian magician’s repertoire as well.

More:
https://scroll.in/article/888223/can-there-be-a-definitive-history-of-magic-in-india-this-book-tells-the-mesmerising-story