P. C. Sorcar

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The only people on my "must meet" list were Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa native who had climbed to the summit of Everest with Edmund Hillary in 1953, and P. C. Sorcar, the most celebrated magician in India.
-	John A. Keel, Jadoo, Julian Messner, 1957.

The question naturally arises. Is this a picture of the Indian magician, P. C. Sorcar, Sr., P. C. Sorcar, Jr., or P. C. Sorcar, Young? That is, is this the father or one of his two sons who are also performing magicians?

Well, it's the father, P. C. Sorcar, SR. And John A. Keel did indeed visit and interview the celebrated magician in his Calcutta home in 1955. John, who was a skilled amateur magician himself, was interested in learning the secrets of the tricks that originated in the Indian subcontinent and as performed by the "fakirs"¹ found on the streets and bazaars.

Protul Chandra Sorcar was born in 1913 in the Indian state of Bengal, which is now in modern Bangladesh. As a kid, he became fascinated by magic but this was something that proper parents frowned on for their kids. So young Protul attended university majoring in mathematics. But he wanted to be a magician.

In India in the early 20th century to become a practicing magician was relatively simple if not lucrative. You could simply go to the streets and start your act.² But as in Europe and America, "civilized" venues were arising and Sorcar began performing in local nightclubs, theaters, and circuses. Sorcar also found a teacher and mentor in Ganapati Chakroborty, one of the first Indian magicians to cross into the style of modern stage illusionists.

It was also in the early 20th Century that Western magicians were making world tours that took them to India and other countries in Asia. Naturally Sorcar made it a point to make their acquaintance when they came to India. During World War II he also entertained Allied troops and contributed articles to magicians journals. So by the turn of the half-century Sorcar's name was well known to conjuring professionals.

In 1950 Sorcar received an invitation to perform at the convention of the Brotherhood of Magicians (BM) and the Society of American Magicians (SAM). This took him to Chicago and he cut quite a figure in his maharajah's apparel. One of the tricks he performed was what he called "Eyeless Sight" which by some accounts did not come off that well.

At first Sorcar had some difficulty in gaining the respect of his Western colleagues. Some of their criticism seems strange. They said that he was a self-promoter and that he had the effrontery to bill himself as "The Greatest Magician in the World". The critics also claimed that his tricks were taken from other magicians, and his performances were too flamboyant.

That such comments arose from practitioners of a profession composed of fervent self-promoters who strive for flamboyant performances, where there were more "Greatest Magicians in the World" than you could shake a stick at, and who routinely looked to other performers for ideas and tricks seems strange in the extreme. So we have to admit at least some of the adverse comment seems to be resistance from the "in-crowd" toward someone they saw as an outsider. An Indian magician who also performed Western magic seemed to be encroaching into their territory.

Although Sorcar did tour America, he mostly performed in Asia and Europe. Certainly he was well-known in England where he caused quite a stir. In 1956 he appeared on the BBC television, Panorama. There doesn't seem to be a tape of the show and the accounts differ a bit on what happened.

One story from his time in England is when Sorcar performed the trick of cutting his assistant in half with a buzzsaw. Unlike the standard "sawing a lady in half" with a hand saw, Sorcar's act was performed "without a box" and the wheel seemed to be slicing directly into her body. But just as the buzzsaw was seen to penetrate the stomach of the supine lady - who was in fact his young assistant Deepti Dey - the presenter, Richard Dimbleby, jumped in front of the camera and said they were signing off.

The other account is that after the buzzsaw went back and forth through the Deepti's abdomen, Sorcar then asked her to arise. But Deepti just lay there apparently unconscious and then Richard jumped up and said they had to say good-by.

But whatever happened, a lot of the viewers thought that the trick had gone awry and that poor Deepti really had been cleft in twain. Phone calls swamped the BBC swtichboard.

Although the usual explanation was that the show had simply run out of time, others postulate that Sorcar, a true master of timing and (we must admit it) self-promotion, made sure that the trick wouldn't be completed while the show was still on the air (if that's what happened) or decided to have Deepti pretend not to wake from her "hypnotic trance" (if that's what happened). But whatever of these variations happened (if either), Sorcar figured that the outcome would insure packed houses at his three week stint at London's Duke of York Theatre. And indeed it did.

In Jadoo John wrote that Sorcar looked askance at the "basket tricks" of the jadoo-wallahs³ and preferred the large stage illusions. But it isn't easy sorting out "authentic Indian magic" from tricks that were developed by American or European conjurers, if indeed there is any meaning to the question. The truth is magic tricks from India have been filtering over to Europe for thousands of years.

Indian entertainers could be found in Egypt in the days of Alexander the Great and Indian fortunetellers were prevalent in Rome before the days of Julius Caesar. Traveling troupes from India brought jugglers and magicians to the streets of Europe during the Renaissance and in the early 1800's magicians were being carried to England by ships returning from India. The first Indian stage magician reached America before 1820.

By the late 19th century, magicians from America and Europe began to emulate the Indian performers and were dressing up like Indian mystics. One of Harry Houdini's early jobs was performing as an Indian fakir in the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. It was in this guise that he met Howard Thurston who was an announcer for the Dahomey Village (a "living" exhibit purporting to show life in Africa). Western magicians quickly adopted the tricks imported from India, so in some ways you can say that the big European acts were Indian imports.

A search of newspapers reveals that Sorcar received relative few notices in the American press, certainly not compared to Harry Houdini, Howard Thurston, and Harry Blackstone. But there was a brief article about one of his purely Indian tricks. This was - as one writer put it - the "grisly feat" performed in 1952 when he summoned 20 audience members to the stage during a performance in Singapore. There he apparently cut off the tongue of an assistant and restored it. Three of the on-stage witnesses fainted, and this trick is not performed much today.

This is not to say that there are no tricks invented by European and American magicians, and Sorcar would readily adapt such tricks to his own show. The buzzsaw trick was in fact invented and patented by the American magician, Horace Goldin. It was made most famous by Harry Blackstone, Sr., and refined by his son, Harry Blackstone, Jr., and others.

Many American kids first learned about P. C. Sorcar when they read John Keel's Jadoo which was re-issued in paperback editions in the 1960's and 70's. In the early 1950's John had been serving in the US army in Germany and was assigned to the American Armed Forces Network (AFN). After his discharge he continued working at AFN as a writer and broadcaster.

John left his job in 1954 and began freelancing articles for the various - quote - "mens magazines" - unquote. These magazines - now long vanished but once a staple of Middle America's drugstores and supermarkets - blared themselves to the world with titles like Courage, Escape to Adventure, A-OK, Man's Exploits, and Gusto. Inevitably the cover would be a professionally rendered painting of a man fighting off the likes of stereotypical "savages", brutishly bald-headed and monocled Germans (this was, after all, shortly after World War II), or man-eating beasts which included but were not limited to lions, tigers, sharks, snakes, weasels, and lobsters. Most of the time the poor fellow was accompanied by a buxom young lady who had lost as much clothes as the then fairly strict censorship laws permitted.

One of the tricks that John was particularly interested in learning was the "Eyeless Sight" which was soon and somewhat anachronistically renamed the X-Ray Eyes. This, too, was a truly indigenous Indian trick, and John had seen it performed by an Indian magician at a USO show when he was in Germany.

In a typical performance, a large mass of bread dough is flattened and placed against the magician's eyes. Then a blindfold is wrapped around his head holding the dough in place. For extra measure a cloth bag is placed over the magician's head.

But the magician can still see. He copies what is written down on a blackboard and can identify objects. John knew of one case where the blindfolded magician drove a motorcycle on the streets of Paris.

The X-Ray Eyes was performed on American television by the Pakistani magician, Kuda Bux. From the 1950's through the 1980's he appeared on The Tonight Show (then hosted by Steve Allen), Captain Kangaroo, I've Got a Secret, The Art Linkletter Show, and The Mike Douglas Show. Kuda's method used the bread dough and his whole head was enveloped in gauze bandages, dispensing with the hood. Kuda also admitted the trick was something anyone could do but it took much practice.

Sorcar didn't divulge the secret to John, although he acknowledged he was able to see, although his vision was restricted downwards and limited to about twenty feet. But not long after the interview, John stumbled onto a young Indian doing the trick along the Hooghly River, which is the distributary of the Ganges that passes through Calcutta. Five rupees later he had the secret and which he revealed in Jadoo.

The trick, possibly because it is so difficult to do well, is still rarely seen in magic performances today. One magician who does the act, is Sorcar's son, Prodip Chandra Socrar, who goes by the name P. C. Sorcar, Jr. Sorcar, Jr., performs the X-Ray Eyes in a most energetic and amusing manner. Even if you've read John's book, Sorcar, Jr., does the trick so skillfully it's hard to catch him in the subtle moves that are supposed to make it possible for him to see through the blindfolds.

The other trick John wanted to learn is without doubt the quintessential Indian illusion. That's the Indian Rope Trick. The problem with this is that no one can seem to agree if the Rope Trick really exists. During his interview, Sorcar told John that the Rope Trick was impossible.

Naturally such a sweeping statement requires qualification since it's easy enough to find documentation of where the trick was performed by a number of magicians. Sorcar himself performed the trick and as did Howard Thurston. And there are photographs of the trick from India taken during the early 20th century.

But as Sorcar put it to John, "Those are rope tricks. But not the Rope Trick!"

So just what is the Rope Trick?

One of the earliest and most complete accounts of THE Rope Trick was written by the Moroccan traveler and scholar Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta. Ibn Battuta - as his name is mercifully shortened - left an account of his travels from 1325 to 1352.

Traveling overland and by ship, Ibn Battuta journeyed through North Africa as far south as Timbuktu, then through what is modern Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. He continued through Palestine (including modern Israel) and Syria and north as far as Russia along the Black Sea, and he moved south through Iraq and through India. But at one point he ended up in China.

When Ibn Battuta reached Hangchow, he was the guest of the local ruler. Naturally at night there was a feast and entertainment. There, as Ibn Battuta described it:

At the banquet were Khan’s jugglers, the chief of whom was ordered to show some of his wonders. He then took a wooden sphere, in which there were holes, and in these long straps, and threw it up into the air till it went out of sight, as I myself witnessed, while the strap remained in his hand. He then commanded one of his disciples to take hold of and to ascend by this strap, which he did until he also went out of sight. His master then called him three times, but no answer came. He then took a knife in his hand, apparently in anger which he applied to the strap. This also ascended till it went quite out of sight. He then threw the hand of the boy upon the ground, then his foot, then his other hand, then his other foot, then his body, then his head. He then came down, panting for breath, and his clothes stained with blood. The man then kissed the ground before the General, who addressed him in Chinese, and gave him some other order. The juggler then took the limbs of the boy and placed them one to another. He then stamped upon them, and the boy stood up complete and whole.

Admittedly there's some vagueness in the "wooden sphere, in which there were holes, and in these long straps," and "the strap" remaining in his hand. Some have questioned whether this really is a description of the Rope Trick. However, Ibn Battuta also talks about the assistant and the magician climbing out of sight, so it's hard to see that this is anything but the Classic Indian Rope Trick.

Part of the confusions may lie in the English translations. The word here is rendered "strap" which implies a flat thong. But another later translation used the world "cord". And indeed the Arabic word حَبْل (hablun) can mean rope, cord, or tether. So the trick performed before Ibn Battuta seems to have been the magician did not have the rope in a basket or lying coiled on the ground. Instead he came out with the rope - possibly made of leather - in his hand and he then tossed the end with a wooden ball up in the air. But rather than fall back to earth, the rope kept climbing until the magician just had a small length of the rope left in his hand. From that point on the action was as described.

The characteristics of the "real" Rope Trick, then, are:

1. The trick is performed outdoors.
2. Both the magician and a young and small assistant are involved.
3. The rope rises until it's out of sight and the assistant climbs up first.
4. After the assistant climbs up and is out of sign, he angers the magician who climbs up after him, sword or knife in hand (or teeth).
5. Once the magician is out of sight, there are sounds of a struggle. Then bloody body parts - supposedly of the assistant - fall to the ground.
6. The magician climbs back down smeared with blood and the body parts gathered up and arranged together.
7. The young assistant suddenly springs to life, and the trick is over.

Perhaps what distinguishes the REAL Rope Trick from its poor imitations now seen on stage is that it's performed outdoors and both the magician and the assistant both climb up the rope and disappear from sight. As far as is known, such a trick has never been replicated.

As to how rope tricks, but not THE Rope Trick, are performed, a discerning viewer would likely not be fooled. The simplest way is to have the rope placed in a basket. Then a pole which has been disguised to look like a rope is pushed up through a hole in the stage and between the weaves in the bottom of the basket. Alternatively the rope can be raised by an "invisible" wire, and then an acrobatically skilled assistant climbs the rope and after a suitable time aloft climbs back down usually to polite applause.

As with the X-Ray Eyes, John learned the secret of the Rope Trick from a sadhu who said he had performed the trick in his youth. John had been traveling near Hyderabad when he found the man sitting along the side of the road. The sadhu had heard of John and the two men struck up a conversation.

According to John, the true Rope Trick is always at night and out of doors. Optimally there is high ground on two sides of the area, and a wire or cable is stretched from one hill to another. If there are no surrounding hills, then there have to be higher structures on either side of the performing area.

The audience sits on the ground surrounded by torches. The idea is the flames produce "night blindness" and limits the vision of the viewers. An alternative is for the audience to sit beneath a canopy which would block the view of higher elevations.

The rope itself - as in the description by Ibn Battuta - has a wooden ball at the end. This gives added weight to make it easier to throw the rope and also provides a place where a string can be attached.

Before the beginning of the performance, a thin string had in fact been looped over the suspended wire with the end reaching to the ground. The other end - off stage and out of sight - would be manipulated by an assistant on the ground.

A skilled sleight of hand artist could attach the string to the ball without the audience noticing. But one way to make the sleight even easier is for the magician to first throw the ball upward only to have it fall back to earth. He keeps up the attempts until the audience starts to get bored.

After the attention of the audience has sufficiently wavered, the magician surreptitiously hooks the string to the wooden ball. At the next toss, the off-stage assistant pulls on the string and so the rope rises until the end is out of sight. The other much smaller and lighter assistant is ordered to climb up. After a show of reluctance he does.

When the assistant gets to the top, he secures the rope to the horizontal cable, likely with the leather thongs that Ibn Battuta mentioned were on the wooden ball. Then when the assistant doesn't come back down - in some versions he shouts insults - the magician, now apparently enraged - can now climb up the rope.

At the top the two performers make sounds that simulate a struggle. The magician, who wears loose and voluminous robes, throws down previously concealed fake and bloody body parts. The assistant then climbs on the back of the magician and hides himself beneath the robes.

After the magician reaches the ground, he gives a vigorous tug on the rope and pulls it free from the cable. While this is going on, others from the troupe gather around which allows the younger assistant to slip from the magician's robe and lay down on the ground unseen by the audience. Then as the other assistants crowd around and pretend to arrange the body parts, they're actually concealing them in their own robes. Then they move off stage and take the fake parts away while the young boy lies there in an apparent heap.

At this point the magician gestures or gives the assistant a kick, and he suddenly springs to life. Such, we learn, is the famous Indian Rope Trick.

The discerning reader can find considerable difficulties with such a scenario. Even if the trick is performed at night, the height that the rope has to rise for the magician and his assistant to be invisible would seemingly have to be impossibly high. As a consequence, raising the rope would require the use of a thin string of considerable length and strength. Today, of course, there are "invisible" stage wires which are less than 1 mm thick but can support over 200 pounds. But such conveniences weren't then available.

Next the rope had to be attached to the wire in a way to securely support the weight of the magician and his assistant but also be capable of being detached with a pull on the rope. Again with the materials of the time, this seems unlikely. So we must, at the very least, relegate this trick to the "don't-try-this-at-home" category.

John wanted to write an article about the Rope Trick but his agent said a simple description probably would not produce a saleable story. So John decided to perform the trick before an audience - or at least the part where the rope rises into the air by the method described.

John invited a group of reporters to convene near a golf course next to a hotel. John and an assistant had previously set up a network of black thread which was hidden by trees in the background but would still let the rope rise about fifty feet.

All went well - at first. John let the reporters examine the rope and then - in a bit of a departure from the usual procedure - he asked then to briefly turn their backs. During the brief interlude, he hooked up a thread to the rope and all was ready.

Monsoon season was supposed to be over, but a cloud rolled in and dumped a deluge down on the spectators. Everyone had to run back to the hotel. When the rain subsided, they all reconvened.

John saw that the threads had all been twisted and tangled and his assistant was nowhere to be seen. Still, somehow he was able to get the rope to rise about four feet.

Shortly after the debacle - which was reported accurately yet sympathetically in the Indian papers - John came across a troupe that did a variation of the Rope Trick. He managed to get some photographs of the leader standing by the rope where a young boy had climbed up about ten feet. It was, as they say, better than nothing.

In May, 1957, Sorcar appeared on an American television show, the Festival of Magic. For the program magic tricks were organized by Milbourne Christopher and the Festival of Magic was the first television program to feature stage magicians. The host was Ernie Kovacs.

Milbourne was not only an expert magician himself (he performed the "Bullet Catch" on the program⁴), but he was a prolific writer and scholar on magic and magicians. Ernie was one of the most popular comedians in the 1950's, and he provided some comic interludes between the acts. Interestingly in a day when female magicians were a rarity, this show featured the Belfast magician, June Merlin, with her act that featured both live mice and rats as well as a male assistant.

Sorcar's performances not only included sawing a lady in half with the buzzsaw but he also performed the "Temple of Benares" trick where a lady assistant sqeezes into a miniature temple and swords and driven through the sides and roofs. Naturally she either disappears or simply emerges unscathed. Of course, variants of this are performed by many other magicians but usually now use a cabinet or a basket. Another of Socar's trick reported by the papers - although not on the "Festival of Magic - was vanishing an elephant. By 1963, his troupe included 30 assistants which included his three sons and two daughters.

Sorcar's final performance was January 6, 1971, in Asahikawa, Japan. He had not been well and his doctor advised him against traveling. He had completed the show and had just walked into the wings when he suffered a heart attack. P. C., Jr. was acting as an assistant and took over for the rest of the tour. It didn't take him long to achieve fame in his own right.

Sorcar, Jr.'s, daughter Maneka is also a magician and in 2000, her dad made the Taj Mahal vanish from 400 meters away and she made it reappear. Of course, you can find many an explanation on How They Did It. But if any of the ways you read about really are How They Did It, they aren't telling.

References

"PC Sorcar: India's 'Maharajah of Magic' Who Terrified the UK", John Zubrzycki, BBC News, June 3, 2018.

"P. C. Sorcar", Totally History.

"Magic Maker", The Rotarian, May, 1963, pp. 47.

Empire of Enchantment: The Story of Indian Magic, John Zubrzycki, Oxford University Press, 2018.

Jadoo, John A. Keel, Messner 1957, Tower (paperback) 1966, Re-issued and expanded, Anomalist Books 2013. The newest edition, also available in hardback, softcover, and a Kindle e-book, has text that was excised from the original manuscript. There are also additional photographs, a sample of John's travel notes, and John's own review of the book. The 1966 paperback edition, titled Jadoo - Mysteries of the Orient and its subsequent reprints, was abridged from the first hardcover edition. It left out bits and pieces including the chapter telling of John's difficulty with the British authorities in Singapore.

"How The 'Maharajah of Magic' Hypnotised All of UK & Japan With a Sensational Trick", Divya Sethu, The Better India, April 16, 2021.

"She Turns Rabbits Into Mink Coats", [Washington, D. C.] Evening Star, February 27, 1957, p. B-17.

"Mr. Christopher Astounds", [Washington, D. C.] Evening Star, March 31, 1957, p. 4.

"Plenty of Action in This Courtroom", [Washington, D. C.] Evening Star, May 16, 1957, p. A-35.

"There Is a Magic That Is Unique to India," English Magician Drummond Money-Coutts", Anjuly Mathai, This Week, November 21, 2021.

"Realistic Magician's Act", The Nome Nugget, February 15, 1952, p. 7.

The Travels of Ibn Batūta, Samuel Lee, Oriental Translation Committee, 1829.

John Keel: Not an Authority on Anything, http://www.johnkeel.com/.

"Why It's So Hard to Make a Living as a Snake Charmer Nowadays", Brad Tuttle. Time Magazine, Feb. 23, 2012.

The Last Greatest Magician in the World: Thurston versus Houdini and the Battles of the American Wizards, Jim Steinmeyer, Tarcher, 2011.

"Magic Memoirs: A Son Pens His Tribute", Telegraph India, December 5, 2018.

"Award-Winning Magician P.C. Sorcar, Jr., To Cast His Spell on Bollywood Now", Shreya Thakur, The Times of India, October 17, 2017.

"Taj Mahal Disappears Under Magic Spell", BBC News,November 10, 2000.

"Taj That Vanished", Colors of India.

"Festival of Magic", Ernie Kovacs (host and writer), Milbourne Chrisopher (performer), Richard Cardini (performer), Robert Harbin (performer), June Merlin (performer), Rene Septembre (performer), Lee King Si (performer), Mrs. Lee King Si (performer), P.C. Sorcar (performer), Charles Dubin (director), Mort Abrahams (producer), George Bassman (composer), Producer's Showcase, May 27, 1957, Internet Movie Data Base.

The Odds Against Me, John Scarne, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1966.

"Levitation", Secrets Explained.

"Kuda Bux", Internet Movie Data Base.