Show JUGGLERS OF INDIA How Male and Female Wizards Work in the Land of Blavatsky HOW OUR NOVELS ARE PIRATED Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophlcal Masters at HomeThe Basket Trick and the Jlango Tree BOMBAY May 241SS9 Special Correspondence Corres-pondence of THE HiitALi > India is the land of Madame Blavatsky of Mr Isaacs and of the light of Asia It is here that the esoteric Buddhists look for their instruction instruc-tion and many of the theosophical societies of America have Indian teachers with whom they correspond and from whom they expect to get some of that WONDERFUL SWEETNESS > AND LIGHT which is supposed to exist in its purest form in this land of mystical thought Through them they would learn tow to annihilate space to disembody their souls for the moment and send them on terial errands to other parts of the world They would master that wonderful concentration concentra-tion of soul which enables its possessor to I dissolve matter into the elements from which it was made by a word and by another word Presto to turn it back into the solid or liquid form from which they decomposed it One of them who is now traveling in India and searching for the masters tells me he has heard of Indian In-dian theosophists who by a wave of the hand can change a glass of water into the oxygen and hydrogen of which it is formed and by the same motion dissolve the glass particles into their original elements Another wave and the glass containing lie TEU REAIPKUISBEKOHE TOUR EYES just as full and in exactly the same condition condi-tion as it was before I asked this man whether ho had seen such a miracle performed per-formed He replied no and upon further fur-ther conversation I found that he had as yet seen nothing which could be called superniural I have had several talks with the masters mas-ters said he and I have been told that I would receive a manifestation It may come within a few days and it may not come for a week and I hope there will be no natural law to prevent it I will wait in India until I receive it This was three weeks ago and at last accounts ac-counts the man was waiting yetI yet-I have received several letters from America asking me to look into this wonderful won-derful Indian theosophy I have looked but it may be that I lack faith I have talked with several of the masters They are bright intellectual acrobats and some of the greater of them are more gross than spmtuelle I have also iISUSSEI MADAME 1IIAVAT8KY with the English residents India among whom sne has lived and I have yet to find one who thinks her anything else than avery a-very clever fraud It may be the case of a prophetess being not without honor save in her own country but I give you her reputation as I find it here I am told that an expose has lately been made of her manifestations and those tricks of hers which she is reported as performing are tome to-me no more wonderful than the jugglery which I see here on the streets every day Might it not be that her study of Indian philosophy was accompanied with the teaching of Indian jugglers j I know not idg J tj JI g but I do know that the street jugglers j of thce Indian ttvns could by mixing mystical philosophy with their slightof hand performances easily humbug the eyes of that large class of people in America who are ever praj iLg tor some new thing in religion and in psychological thought Let me give you 4 P1CTCKE OF AN INDIAN JUGGLE One stands outside my hotel window as I write He is performing his tricks in the dusty road without a table cabinet patent boxes or any of the accompaniments of the American wizard His sole possessions consist of three small baskets ranging in SiZe from half a peck to a bushel a couple of cloths and a tripod made of three sticks each two feet long and held together by a string at the top Three little wooden dolls with red cloths tied around their necks and each not over a foot long are the pods which enable him to do wonderful things He has a flute in his mouth and a little drum in his hand He is blackfaced and blackbearded and his shirt sleeves are pulled up above his elbows His only assistant is a little turbanel boy who sits beside him whom he will shortly put into a basket not wore than two feet square and with him will perform the notedbasket trick of India This trick is one of the TTOXDEHFrlJCGGIIVG TRICKS THE WOULD The boys hands are tied and he is put into a net which is tied over his head and which encloses his whole body so that he apparently cannot move He is now crowded into this basket The lid is putdown put-down and tight straps are buckled over it The juggler now takes a sword and with a few passes of these little Hindoodoll babies over it and the muttering of incantations as a preliminary thrusts the sword again and again into tho basket There is a crying cry-ing as though someone was in terrible pain It is the voice of a child and the sword conies out bloody You hold your breath and did you not know it to be a trick you would feel like pouncing upon the man After a moment the basket becomes still the juggler makes a few more passes unbuckles un-buckles the straps and shows you that there is nothing within it He calls baba baba I and in a distance you hear the childs voice How the boy got out of the basket or escaped being killed by the sword und where the blood came from I do not know I only know it was a slightofhand performance and wonderfully well done THE MNGO THICK IS PERFoRMED with the three sticks in the shape of a tripod The juggler takes a pot of water and pours it over a little pot of earth lie then holds up a mango bulb about the size of a walnut and putting this into the earth he throws a cloth over the tripod He now blows upon his horn makes mysterious passes and after a few moments raises the cloth and you see tho mango tree sprouting forth from the soil More passes and more music follow and the cloth is pulled down again After a few moments during which the showing of minor tricks goes on he pulls out the pot and the plant has grown about a foot above it There is more watering and moio incantation and his final triumph comes in showing you a bush nearly a yard high containing greatleaves This he will pull up by the root and show you the seed at the bottom It is a wonderful wonder-ful trick and how the man is able to manipulate man-ipulate the different plants with nothing else but a thin cotton cloth to help him which by the way he allows you to examine ex-amine is hard to conceive JIB HAS A DOZEN OTHEll SLEiGHTOFHAX IKKFOltMANCES equally as wonderful He puts a little shell into his mouth and appears to choke as he draws out coin after coin and balls of stono almost as big around as your fist He spits fire as does tho American wizard pulls miles of string from his stomach sticks pins through his tonguo without hurting himself and ends the performance with a snake trick which is tome the most won t dcrlul of all f In doing this snake trick ho asks for apiece I L a-piece of paper and asks you to hold out i l your hand You do so and he places the I paper upon it Ho then begins to play upon his pipe and dart out his eyes as though he saw something near your hand His whole frame becomes transformed and f he dances around you like a wizard playing all tho time and keeping his eyes on your hand Now he starts back and points at it You iDolr and see nothing and he begins to play louder and dance wilder than ever I rEilEMBEIt his ARMS ARE DAnE to the elbow and both ofh hands 210 upon his pipe Suddenly he drops tie pipe nnd continues his dance with incantations Ho points to the paper again and while you look and see nothing he claps his hand I cobras which raise their hooded heads and dart out their fangs in different directions and squirm and wriggle as he holds them up before yon You jump back for the bite of the cobra is deadly and I am told that the snakes used have in some cases not had their fangs drawn A juggler was killed a week ago in Benares by tho bite of a cobra which he was using in this way and they are the most terrible snakes I have ever seen At another prefonnauco of this same kind I was present with a party of four and we all decided to ascertain ascer-tain if we could how this trick was done I stood upon on a chair overlooked the man as he snatched up the snakes but I could not see where they came from and I only know that he had them and that they were so big that he crowded them with difficulty into a little round basket the ize of a peck measure ThESE JUGGLERS ARE WONDERFUL SNAKE ciuuMnrs They make the snakes do as they please I and the snakes they use are of the most deadly kind I was told by an Englishman at Benares of an incident which happened there a short time ago A juggler was preforming snakes and a Hindoo standing by said that the fangs of the snakes had been drawn and that any man could do the tricks that he was doing The juggler replied re-plied that they were not The Hindoo protested pro-tested and in spite of the warnings of the juggler seized one of the snakes It was a cobra and it sunk its fangs into his arm A moment later the man dropped to the ground saying he was poisoned and in two hours he was dead I am told that the cobra will not bite unless he is angry and that it is only when ho is in this condition that his mouth fills with venom The jugglers rely upon this fact and by petting the cobras make them so docile that they can work with them without great danger I SAW TWO OMEN JUGGLERS AT JEYPOR They were bright intelligent looking girls one of whom appeared almost old enough to be the mother of the other They did many wonderful things one of which was mixing up sand in water and putting the hand into the discolored fluid they brought a handful of sand which they filtered through their fingers as dry as before it went in The youngest of these girls was prehapsfifteen She was tall wellformed and finelooking She had bracelets on arms and on feet and her eyes were as beautiful as those of a gazelle One of her tricks was the lifting of a heavy chair by her e lids the thought of which almost makes my eyes sore The chair was a heavy mahogany one which belonged to the room in which I was staying She I tied two strong strings to the top this and affixed the ends of these strings to her eyes I by little round metal cups each about the size of a nickel These fitted over the eyeballs eye-balls and under the lids and she bent over while they were so fastened Raising herself her-self she pulled up the chair with these strings with THE MUSCLES OF HER EYELIDS and carried it free one side of the room to the other It was a horrible sight and as she took the metal cups from her eyes they filled with water and she almost sank to the floor I told her the trick was disgusting and that she ought never to try it again Still for this and the rest of the show these girls were well satisfied with two rupee ru-pee > about seventy cents Thesewomenjugglers came from Je pore and they arc a fair type of the girls of western India I am surprised at the variety of races you find here in India and there are more people in Hindostan than in all Europe The costumes of the women differ in different provinces and in the Andaman islands in the bay of Bengal where the great prisons of the English are located the native women are CIAD IN FIG LEAVES AXD A BUSTLE OF WICKER These people have only names for common gender which are applicable to either sex and they use a noise like crying to express friendship or joy Some of the hill tribes of India look very much like negroes and there are in India tribes which are little more than savages In central India only seventeen years ago there was a tribe of about ten thousand whose women wore no clothes The sole covering of the females consisted of a few beads around the waist with a bunch of leaves tied before and behind be-hind and they were clothed finally by the order of the English government Au English Eng-lish officer gave strips of cotton to the women and they put them on Since then many of them have gone back to their beads and leaves On the slopes of the Himalayas there are many curious tribes Some of the tribes near Darjeeling reckon a journey by the number of quids of tobacco which the chew upon the way and SOME OF THE MOST GORGEOUS SPECIMENS of Hindoo jewelry Ihave seen I saw on the women of the Himalayas I remember one mountain pink who had fifty rupees strung around her neck and whose limbs were loaded down with silver She had gold plates twice the diameter of a silver dollar upon her ears and her mouth sas covered bv a flat gold nose ring Some of these Himalaya tribes have one wife to four men and polyandry is common Here at Bombay are the prettiest women of India They are the parsees With delicate olive brown skins they are tall and wellshaped have beautiful eyes and fine i intellectual i faces They dress in silks of the most delicate colors and the dress seems to consist con-sist of one large piece of silk welch is wound around the waist and then carried up over the body and the top of the head so that the face looks out and thewhole hangs in a beautiful drapery Many of them I noted have SILK STOCKINGS AND SLIPlEKS TO MATCH the color of their dresses and they are the brightest and prettiest women I have seen The parsecs are sun worshipers There are only about seventy thousand of them in India and fifty thousand of these are herein here-in Bombay The men dress in long preacherlike clothes of black with hats shaped like coal scuttles and they are very fine looking Their dress when not in business is often of the whitest of linen coats and shirts They are the best business busi-ness men in the world They own millions of dollars worth of property here in Bombay Bom-bay an 1 are largely interested in the trade of India They are more akin to the Christians Chris-tians than the Hindoos in their methods of living They believe in spending their money dwell in good houses and drive about in line carriages They are charitable chari-table as well as rich and some of the finest of the public buildings of Bombay have been built by them They are of Persian descent and have temples in which burns the sacred fire of Zoroaster SPEAKING OF BOMBAY AND BUSINESS one of the most prosperous institutions of the city is its tramway managed by two Americans who are I think from Boston Their names are Clark and Kittridge and they have an excellent property Bombay is now over a million in population and these street cars on the same plan as those of America are driven by turbaned Moham medans and the fares arc collected by dark skinned Hindoos All races ride on them and the nativesof India patronize them by the thousands daily Looking at them it is a wondT to me that some means of cheap locomotion has not been introduced the cities of China It is true that many of the streets of some cities are too narrow for street cars but those of Peking are wide and the street travel there is the worst in the world THERE ARE VERT FEW Sin S-in business in India Hero in Bombay which is the biggest city of the country there is only one firm of American merchants mer-chants Farnham Company and the other Americans are chiefly missionaries The Waterbury watch and the Singer sewing sew-ing machine have Bombay agencies but these are managed by the English and I am told that the New York Life Insurance company has also an agency here A Chicago Chi-cago firm is preparing to come to India to build elevators over the country for the storage of the immense wheat yield which is now at the mercy of the weather and which has none of the conveniences of shipment of our American wheat I find American patent medicines in every drugstore drug-store and I see that Harpers Magazine is for sale in tho Bombay bookstores At all the railroad stations there are news stands and the most popular selling books furnished by these are cheap pirated editions of American writers I bought Low Wallaces Fair God yesterday for 15 cents and Ben Hur is sold for the tho same price There is an English edition of Anna Katharine Greens Lcavenworth Jaso at 12 cents copy and tho works of Uncle Remug are for sale in a covers tie English and Mark Twains books are sold here for a song You can get Long fellows poems for a dime and Emersons essays are sold in cloth for 20 cents a copy Frances Hod son Burnetts novels are also sold at onefifteenth the price they bring in America and the lack of an international copyright law works against the profits of our writersas it does against those of the English I HAD A CURIOUS ILLUSTRATION of the prejudices of the Hindoos in regard to caste this afternoon The native sweetmeats sweet-meats of India are by no means bad eating and I had stopped before an intineran sweetmeat merchant and was bargaining withhim for some candy As I did so I happened to touch some of tho stock on his basketlike table and he begged me to be careful as the Hindoos would not buy any thing a foreigner happened to touch Nearly every Hindoo cooks for himself while traveling as he would lose caste if ho ate anythingcooked by a man of a different caste from himself and on some of the boats saw Indian rajahs who ate nothing from the beginning to the end of a voyage ion i-on this account In the jails of India wine are managed by the English the cook is always a Brahmin of the highest of the Hindoo castes The lower castes will eat after his cooking and are not thus defiled If a cook was chosen of a lower caste many of them would starve rather than cat I am told that prisoners have been flogged and have starved to death rather than eat from tho hands of a man of a lower caste THIS CASTE PREJUDICE ENTERS INTO EVER THING in India It forces the foreigners to keep a dozen servants to do the work of a house hold and I am told that it is almost impos sible for a family to get along with less than thirteen servants I met last week an English preacher who had an income of 1500 a year and he told me it was absolutely lutely impossible for lim to live in India without thirteen servants Said he They are paid but low wages but there are so many of them that the sum total is large You have to have a man for everything you want done and he will do nothing else than that one thing The man who washes the dishes will not make up the beds and the cook will not attend to the washing of the dishes If you keep horses you must have a groom for every horse and for every two horses you have to keep a man to cut grass for them The woman servant who waits upon your wife does not consider it her businessto wait upon you and the servan who do tho other work about tho house expect you to have a body servant to run your own errands If you ask a man to do anything out of his regular business he says it is contary to his caste and you then know that you have o submit There are hundreds of castes in India They are based on religious differences on trade arrangements and on social distinctions There is a caste of barbers of beggars of thieves and of water carriers There arc the Brahminsthe Sudrasthe cowskinners the corpse bearers and dozens of others divided and subdivided until only the Hindoo can tell you their numbers and differences FRANK G CARPENTER |