60 yrs after Sorcar’s sawing trick, the illusionists are back

In 1956, P C Sorcar, the greatest magician in Indian history, was seen murdering a girl on television. In front of thousands of viewers, he sliced her in half like she was a sausage roll.

When the BBC show ended, the channel was inundated with phone calls. The last thing horrified viewers saw was a hapless Sorcar trying to revive the young girl. ‘Is she really dead?’ the hundreds of viewers who called in wanted to know. The next day, he made the front page and became a household name in England. It was a masterful trick to leave the audience with that singular image — of a slaughtered young girl on their screens.

He is not the only Indian to have performed this sleight of hand. It took sixty-odd years but we are now seeing a resurgence of illusionists holding forth from studios, on panel discussions and even streaming videos from their homes. For the last few months, we have been watching these performances every day. These magicians, wearing dark shirts, plain suits and even a sari or two, come in different shapes and sizes. We watch them perform their card tricks, one after the other. An ace up their sleeve, as jokers, kings and even queens are all marked, all shuffled together.

Magic is the art of deception. Each performer may give it their own dramatic twists, but the tricks are the same, or so I discovered when, along with signing up for a Margaret Atwood writing masterclass, I decided to dip into one for amateur magicians by Penn & Teller.
These terms, I learned are a standard part a magician’s lexicon, but through another sleight of hand, I will show you how our Indian illusionists give it their very own desi twist.

1. Production: This is when the magician shows you an object appearing in a previously empty space such as a coin from a person’s ear, a rose that appears in an empty palm, or a corpse that appears on your television screens.

2. Vanish: This is when the illusionist takes something and makes it disappear. These can be large objects like the Statue of Liberty which vanished, courtesy David Copperfield, or really small things like facts which can be made to fade away when they don’t suit our anchors.

3. Metamorphosis: The performer can also alter the appearance of objects. A flower turns into prasad, a suicide into a murder, and a girlfriend into a gold-digger.

4. Transposition: In this, our magicians take multiple things and make them change places. Have you wondered what your favourite jadugars have done with a 23.9% contraction in GDP? What about 21 million salaried workers losing jobs during the lockdown? Have you wondered what happened to the border skirmish or did China just roll over in defeat suddenly? What about India’s record daily spike of more than 90,000 new cases of Covid-19, which surpassed runners-up Brazil and put it in the prestigious No 2 slot on the outbreak chart?

Or, have you the audience been sitting back and enjoying this complex and decidedly difficult-to-pull-off trick. Four important issues have been replaced by another bunch — a supposedly ineffective Mumbai Police, a movie mafia, banned apps and a drug cartel hinging on 59 grams of cannabis.

5. Levitation: This can be done in a number of ways, some mechanical, like a concealed platform or an optical illusion. American magician Harry Kellar performed a trick with his assistant whom he introduced as a ‘Hindu princess’. He would levitate her, passing a hoop back and forth along her body to show that she was not being suspended. Our illusionists have broken this down to a simpler step. They are using a magic spell — ‘Na bhoole hain, na bhulne denge (we have neither forgotten nor will we let anyone forget)’ — which is pasted on posters and stickers pledging justice for ‘a promising young son of the state’. Instead of one person levitating, this is aimed at making an entire political party rise in the eyes of its prospective voters, timed as it is with Bihar elections just around the corner.

Sorcar was a skilled master of illusions. Dipty Dey, the girl he seemed to have sawed through on television, had not suffered so much as a scratch. Our illusionists, on the other hand, trying to wedge their odious, large feet, built for trampling and not treading lightly, into Sorcar’s fine shoes, tried to replicate this act. This was no trick though, and there were no safety protocols, no hidden switch that would let her escape unharmed.

They took a young woman and cut her in half. They sliced through her T-shirt, one that stated ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, let’s smash the patriarchy, me and you’, the blade going into her flesh, her very life draining away before a live audience of millions.
What do these magicians tell themselves when the camera is switched off I wonder? Do they justify it as mere collateral damage — one life in exchange for entertaining and distracting 1.3 billion for months?

Sorcar’s son, who took on the magical mantle from his late father, once made the Taj Mahal disappear. The monument re-appeared after two whole minutes. In an interview, while chuckling that if he could, he would make ‘bad politicians disappear’, he benevolently elaborated on the art of illusions, ‘We trust our eyes too much and tend to believe what we see. The idea is to trust our logic.’
Our eyes though seem to be riveted towards the performers on our flickering screens. We watch them pull squealing, frightened rabbits out of their hats, unaware that they are simultaneously pulling a woollen topi over our heads as well.