India’s Last Magician Slum Will Soon Disappear

There is a place in India where magic never died, but now that place itself is threatened.

Magician Ishamuddin Khan stands on a rooftop in the Kathputli magician colony outside West Delhi. He is one of the few people in the world who can perform the Indian rope trick, hailed as the world’s greatest magic trick. Courtesy of Joshua Cogan

There is a place in India where magic never died. At dusk, Christmas lights ignite its buildings like starlight, and music begins a slow rhythm into the festival of towering puppets and tricks from magicians passed down through generations.

India’s last magician slum in the Kathputli Colony, outside West Delhi, is a final visage of an age of wonder and magic. Yet soon it will all be gone. The land was sold to developers, and the colony will be bulldozed for a mall. Its colorful occupants will be moved to low-income high-rises.

Filmmakers Jim Goldblum and Adam Weber, and Emmy-award winning photographer Joshua Cogan, are recording the final days of the community in their upcoming documentary, “Tomorrow We Disappear.”

“You just can’t believe what these people can do,” Goldblum said.

The main character they follow is a magician named Ishamuddin Khan—one of the more famous performers in the colony. He is one of the few people in the world who can perform the Indian rope trick—making a limp rope rise from a basket and suspend itself 20 feet in the air—which he has performed around the world, including at a show for Pen & Teller at the Taj Mahal.

Khan had wandered into the jungle when he was young, determined to make it on his own. In the jungle, a lot of interesting things happened, “including learning magic from some local magicians there, which he brought back,” Goldblum said.

The other artists are no less impressive. A puppeteer they met makes 15-string puppets. Goldblum notes this requires “five strings on each hand, the elbows, shoulders, and one behind the neck.”

“He won the Indian Academy Award for traditional arts. He’s a phenomenal puppeteer,” Goldblum said.

A magician tradition

For hundreds of years, traveling artists in India united the country under a common culture. They were the storytellers and musicians who kept the country on the same page. “The idea of a unified India is attributed a lot to these folk artists,” says Goldblum.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKnfseEmgwE[/video]Yet as the world changed, so did the role of the roaming artists. They settled in a jungle in West Delhi in the 1950s, built their homes with their bare hands according to their needs, and named it the Kathputli Colony—Kathputli referring to the colorful marionettes of India, and the ancient tradition of folk tales and stories they represent.

The colony is now home to some of the world’s greatest street magicians, acrobats, and puppeteers.

Kathputli was once well outside the main city, until it was engulfed by Delhi’s insatiable growth. “The land has gotten really expensive all around it, and there’s no solution for it because India can’t let a prized piece of land go to what are essentially squatters,” Goldblum said.

The slums are not looked on well either. Amid India’s growing economy, they are seen as black spots on their global image.

This is due, in part, to Kathputli’s mixed atmosphere—a sharp contrast between beauty and ugliness, and of joy and sorrow.

“You’re kind of getting hit by all senses,” Goldblum said.

“You‘ll smell the most beautiful thing you’ve smelled in your life,” like an ancient recipe passed through generations for hundreds of years. “Then you’ll smell the worst slum smell you’ve smelled in your life,” he said.

“The volatility of it, the sort of beauty and despair, is constant. You’re really just overwhelmed in a lot of ways,” he said.

Co-filmmaker Adam Weber added, “We did fall in love with the place, but we were also really frightened by it.”

They say it’s a place of wonder and trauma—a microcosm of what’s happening everywhere in the world where traditional cultures are being lost.

Next: The day the magic died ...

The day the magic died

People with nowhere to go are often hard to kick out, as the Indian government has found.

“The town has been bulldozed already and they were kicked out and thrown out in the street,” Weber said. After that, they moved back in and rebuilt. “I think there has been the threat of this happening since then, and it has been in people’s minds.”

But things are somewhat different this time. The land was sold to a major real estate company doing rehabilitation projects around the country—and this time they’ve all received eviction notices.

When the filmmakers were there last spring, one of the residents received a phone call—from the government or the company they weren’t sure—offering a piece of land several miles away as a “temporary relocation until they figure out exactly what to do,” Weber said.

“What India is showing to the world is that ‘we’re eradicating our slums,’ because they want to present themselves to the global economy as a new India, a modern India where you can work and globalization is going on, and all these things,” Goldblum said.

To do this, they’re building high-rises for people they’re clearing from the slums. “But as they do that, the population of the slums triple overnight because people think ‘oh, free housing,’ and it’s almost impossible to do censuses,” he said.

The influx of people has created new problems. The artists are at the core of the slum, but now they’re surrounded by tent camps that weren’t there three years ago. The newcomers have brought with them typical slum blights of drugs and crime.

People in India know about what’s happening with the slums, but opinions typically aren’t positive. Weber and Goldblum said they had trouble even getting someone from Delhi to take them to Kathputli. “They wouldn’t have any part in taking us to a place where they thought we were probably going to be mugged,” Weber said.

“It is very much a place that houses these great, traditional artists … but it is also representative as a slum, and what’s surrounding it is a very different place,” he said.

The artists are also thinking about their own future. Movies and modern music have pulled away interest from Indian magic and stories told through puppets.

Moving to a high-rise would, for some, end their art. They built the slum with their own hands. Some have open roofs for puppets four times the size of a regular person. Acrobats string tightropes between buildings. The magicians have multitudes of props.

But they are looking at their families, and at the future of their children. The slum lacks running water. There is no sanitation. Electrical wires—pulling energy from neighboring areas—run through cesspools in alleyways.

The older generations have also lived hard lives. “They’ve never been appreciated. They’ve been kicked out of their home once, and they’ve been threatened every day since then,” Goldblum said. “They have to make a choice of whether ‘Do I want my children to have to live like I’ve lived.”

“There are a lot of things going on. It’s not just about living conditions,” he said. The larger issue is an issue of identity. “If the colony goes away, the art goes away. It retreats to the neighboring villages for a while, but eventually this will spread there too.”

And this is where it all could end—when the people are gone and the lights fade. Towers go up, and what was once a place of wonder is replaced with shops for cellphones and computers.

“I think culturally, it is vanishing,” Weber said. “It is going away.”