Dr Sugata Nandi (West Bengal State University, Kolkata / IASH Fellow):
Insubordinate Enchantment: Indian Magic in Britain, C.1800-1940
With the beginning of colonization of India in the eighteenth century a pervasive interest in magical phenomena observed uniquely in India arose in Britain. Indian magicians who came to Britain in the early 1800s caused a sensation and by the mid nineteenth century European entertainers and entrepreneurs called gentleman magicians started to appropriate tricks typical of Indian magicians to establish their reputation as outstanding conjurers in a fiercely competitive British entertainment industry. Popular print of the time routinely offered stories of magic of India in fiction and reportage to its readers. This resulted in a mythology of Indian magic which made it border on being supernatural. In response to this stalwart stage and parlour magicians of fin de siècle Britain took to debunking Indian magic as a set of simple and unimaginative tricks, lies and hoaxes. Their efforts brought partial success and the belief in supernatural element of Indian magic lingered on in the West. The unresolved debate on the nature of Indian magic, I argue, was a manifestation of the tension within Orientalism, more specifically between knowledge of the first and second order on inscrutability of the Orient.