Magicians and performers of Delhi's magicians' ghetto

The Magicians and performers of Delhi's magicians' ghetto are a close-knit community of illusionists, street artists, and entertainers whose precarious settlement becomes both a refuge for Saleem Sinai and a miniature arena for India’s political conflicts. Their story moves from suspicion of bad luck to a brief flowering of popular success, then to ideological division and the violent clearance of their home during the Emergency. They survive not as an intact settlement but, in part, as a dispersed community able to evade the authorities through the legendary mobility of its slum.

Community and livelihood

During Saleem’s first stay in the colony, the performers fear that he has brought calamity with him. Resham Bibi warns that his arrival will bring desolation, pestilence, and death, and urges him to leave. Picture Singh, the ghetto’s respected leader, rejects her demand and insists that Saleem is his honored guest, free to stay as long as he wishes. The quarrel gives way to a striking reversal: over the following days, the artists’ work prospers. Jugglers keep a thousand and one balls aloft; a novice crosses hot coals; Saleem hears that the rope trick has been performed; and the police fail to carry out their customary monthly raid. Servants of wealthy households also arrive seeking entertainers for gala evenings. Resham Bibi’s prediction seems to have been turned upside down, and Saleem is dubbed Saleem Kismeti, or Lucky Saleem. She apologizes, while Picture Singh asks whether he will soon leave. Saleem has to answer yes.

When Saleem returns to the colony on February 23, 1973, he comes back after abandoning his hopes of a career in public service. He finds immediate belonging among people who are, for the most part, Communists. Raised in what he calls Businessism, he now turns toward revolutionary politics and imagines a new mission of communicating directly with the masses. He earns his living entertaining Indian and foreign tourists by using his exceptional sense of smell to uncover their secrets. Picture Singh offers to share his shack. Saleem sleeps on sackcloth among baskets holding snakes and tolerates hunger, thirst, mosquitoes, and the winter cold. His literacy as well as his unusual nose makes him useful to Picture Singh, and he becomes a kind of aide to the community’s leader.

Picture Singh and the life of the colony

Picture Singh is the ghetto’s acknowledged chief and a celebrated snake-charmer, but his authority extends beyond performance. People bring their disputes and problems beneath the shade of his enormous black umbrella, where he can settle quarrels and restore harmony. He also incorporates a lecture on socialism into his snake performances. Saleem regards him as an exceptional figure, while the colony’s dependence on his mediation makes the umbrella both a practical emblem of leadership and a recurring sign of communal shelter.

The performers’ artistry rests on a sharp distinction between illusion and reality. In one demonstration, Picture Singh plays until a cobra rises from its basket and dances upright, then offers a Congress youth the flute and invites him to try. When the youth admits he cannot do it, Picture Singh explains that some people are better at the craft than others, even if it may be comforting to believe otherwise. Saleem understands from the episode that the artists can bend reality in the service of their art without losing their grip on what is real. Their skill is not simply a claim that anything can happen; it depends on knowing the difference between performance and fact.

Political divisions within the community

The colony reproduces, in miniature, the divisions of India’s Communist movement. The performers’ trades align them with different political positions: conjurers and prestidigitators support Mr. Dange’s Moscow-oriented official Communist Party, which backs Mrs. Gandhi during the Emergency; contortionists lean toward the Chinese-oriented left; fire-eaters and sword-swallowers applaud Naxalite guerrilla tactics; and mesmerists and fire-walkers favor Namboodiripad’s position, rejecting both the Moscow and Beijing lines as well as Naxalite violence. Card-sharpers include Trotskyist sympathizers, while some ventriloquists support parliamentary Communism.

Picture Singh stands above these factions as the colony’s patriarch, but his capacity to reconcile them is increasingly strained. Political disputes that once came beneath the umbrella grow more bitter, and Saleem’s description of the ghetto as free of religious and regionalist bigotry does not mean it is free of conflict: the community’s disagreements reveal how readily political difference can divide even a small, shared world. Picture Singh tells Saleem that, during the 1971 general election, a quarrel between a Naxalite fire-eater and a Moscow-line conjurer ended in the conjurer’s death. The episode turns ideological disagreement into an especially stark instance of the violence it can unleash.

Clearance and dispersal

The colony’s destruction begins under the language of civic improvement. Vans and bulldozers arrive, and a loudspeaker announces an authorized operation to move residents to a new site because the slum is deemed a public eyesore. A tent, camp beds, and surgical equipment are set up; young volunteers arrive in large numbers. The residents soon understand that forced sterilization is also part of the operation. Alarm spreads through the community, and the clearance becomes a confrontation: children throw stones, Picture Singh rallies the performers, and the group resists the agents attempting to carry out the campaign. He turns the umbrella that had once sheltered reconciliation into a weapon-like banner of resistance.

By the end of the day, the settlement in the shadow of the Friday Mosque has been erased by bulldozers. Some residents are captured and taken to the barbed-wire camp at Khichripur, across the Jamura River, but the authorities do not catch everyone, including Picture Singh. A new, elusive settlement is reported near the New Delhi railway station; when the authorities search, they find no trace of it. Reports place the mobile community elsewhere, including Mehrauli and the gardens of Jantar Mantar, but each time the pursuers arrive, the performers have vanished. The displaced artists’ survival takes the form of a moving slum, which does not come to a standstill until after the Emergency ends.

Saleem’s place in their fate

Saleem’s relationship with the performers is framed by the contrast between Resham Bibi’s warning and the community’s early good fortune. He becomes a guest, then a source of good luck and a working member of the colony; yet he later interprets the warning as having been right in a larger sense. During the clearance, Major Shiva comes to seize him, while the beautification and sterilization operation diverts attention from the true objective: Saleem’s capture. He believes the authorities want him because his telepathic connection has given him the names, addresses, and faces of the Midnight Children. The performers’ shelter has thus become the setting for a political operation that destroys their home and removes the person who may know where the children are. Their community survives in dispersed form, but the colony that gave Saleem refuge does not.