Robert Nickelsberg for TIME

Dressed in a sequined jacket and a silk turban, the magician wiggles his fingers over a wicker basket. The crowd stares transfixed as he mutters feverishly, swaying to an amplified soundtrack of banshee-like wails that invoke the ancient snake-charmers' call to the cobras. Hesitantly, a thick rope peeps over the edge of the basket--and then creeps slowly up to the sky. The crowd gasps as the rope grows taller and taller, defying gravity. A child runs up and climbs the stiff rope. He jumps off, the magician flashes his hands and the rope drops into a limp coil on the ground. The Great Indian Rope Trick, long dismissed as a myth, has worked. The magician, Padmarajan, smiles broadly and takes a bow.

Though wizardry holds a cherished place in Indian myth, the only magic acts most citizens see these days are cheesy shows at clubs and birthday parties, where men in top hats pull scraggly doves from pieces of cloth or produce eggs from empty bags. In a bid to revive the craft, more than 150 magicians met last week in the southern city of Cochin for Om Hreem '99, a convention named after the Indian term for abracadabra.

Holding court in the city's biggest auditorium, the participants bring out fresh tools of the trade, show off new acts and collectively mourn their vanishing art. Boasts B. Dayanand, a senior member of IBM (the International Brotherhood of Magicians): "Magic is the second-oldest profession in the world." The practitioners debate the big questions: Is it right to work with live animals? Is the commercialization of trick tools a bad thing? Should the state give welfare benefits to down-at-the-heels magicians? The latter question grows ever more relevant, as India's tricksters slip deeper into a rut of multiplying ping-pong balls, feather dusters that change color and tired stunts involving playing cards and currency notes. "There is no development or research," laments Anthony Joseph, who organized the meeting. "Magicians are not coming out with novel ideas."

PAGE 1  |  2