Secrets of the East

When I was a boy with my nose in a comic book, only one image was needed to call to mind the vast subcontinent of India -- a "fakir" sitting cross-legged on the ground, playing a "flute" (actually, a "pungi"), a basket resting on the ground immediately before him.  And out of the basket -- a seemingly hypnotized cobra, weaving its body to and fro.

It was the persistent image that one was apt to see in American comedy movies -- if Abbot and Costello never encountered a snake charmer, they should have.  But it was those comic books that really imprinted the image -- a snake charmer said all you needed to know about India, or about the mysterious Orient in general.

Closely related to this image, in my mind, was the Indian rope trick -- same fakir, same pungi, but in place of a snake, a rope was weaving its way, snake-like, into the air.  The rope trick often was used interchangeably with the snake charmer by the popular media to evoke "exoticism."  But it was the cobra that fascinated me as a kid; I wasn't really sure exactly what was going on with the rope trick.

Nor have I given the matter much thought since.  One can only focus on so many mysteries in a short lifetime.

But today I encountered a discussion of the rope trick, at least at second hand, that fired my imagination.¹  A soldier in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Frank Richards,² recalled a conversation with one of his batallion cooks who claimed to have witnessed the trick.

When he [the cook] had counted out thirty rupees he [the fakir] produced a coil of rope from his basket and uncoiling part of it threw it in the air.  The coils straightened out and the rope, which was about thirty or forty feet in length, hung in the air with one end of it about two feet above the ground.  The fakir now told a small native boy who was with him to climb the rope.  After he had climbed to the top of it he pulled the remainder of the rope up with him.  The fakir made a few passes with his hands and boy and rope vanished in the air.  Then he told the onlookers to look towards some bushes about fifty yards away, out of which sprang the native boy who had climbed the rope.  ...  There were many natives attached to the battalion who were spectators of the performance.  They said that fakirs of his class were only seen once during a man's lifetime, and that the men who had witnessed his performance would never see him again, once he had left the camp.

A couple of Richards's fellow soldiers told similar stories of encounters with different fakirs.  Richards offered several possible explanations, including various mechanical techniques for getting the rope to rise in the air, or, more marvelously, the fakir's use of mass hypnosis on his audience.

[Reportedly,] once somebody took a camera snap of the fakir performing the trick, and neither boy nor rope appeared on the finished photograph --only the fakir gesticulating and the audience with a glassy look in its eyes.

A number of websites attempt to explain the rope trick.  Sometimes they describe successful exposure of a specific performance -- usually one performed on stage -- as merely "a clever piece of deception," using wires and smoking chemicals.  I'm not sure anyone has clearly revealed the secret behind the trick as performed by religious fakirs, outdoors, where there has been no obvious access to mechanical or chemical enhancements.

The little boy in me -- the Tintin, if you will -- wants to believe that mysteries still remain to be discovered in the East.  Lamont Cranston's "power to cloud men's minds."  Chandu the Magician.  The hypnotic gestures of Mandrake the Magician.  The trained scientist in me, of course, says "Absurd."  But those infantile connections in the brain, formed in earliest childhood, murmur: "But wouldn't it be cool!?"
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¹The Raj: An Eyewitness History of the British in India, ed. Roger Hudson (1999).

² Frank Richards not only wrote a book describing his years serving in India (Old Soldier Sahib, 1936), from which the quotations in this post were taken, but also wrote what has been praised as "perhaps the finest memoir of the Great War to be written by a ranker." (Old Soldiers Never Die, 1933)