Use Your Delusion

Magician Samrat Shankar doubles as a pseudo shrink

A country in which elected leaders think donkey sacrifices and naked yoga constitute a strategic response to defecting legislators, it comes as no surprise that the afflicted should turn to a silk-turbaned magician for solutions to their woes. That would be Jadugar Samrat Shankar, a Sri Ganganagar-based magician, who, over his 50-year career, has performed “28,000 shows in the world”. When he’s not making elephants and Maruti 1000s vanish, or riding down arterial roads blindfolded, Shankar is using his ‘Magic for Purpose’. As his website puts it modestly: ‘With his magical powers and strength of Yoga, he helps people with various physical, psycho-social and developmental disabilities, to overcome their disabilities.’

Clad in a black-and-white striped safari suit, Shankar describes his ‘treatment’ with matter-of-fact cheer, complementing his descriptions every so often with swift little tricks executed with flamboyant gestures. “Seventy-five per cent of magic is haath ki safai (sleight of hand),” he says, pretending to rip up the photographer’s Rs 500 note and smoothing it out into an accordion fan of Rs 500 notes. “And 25 per cent is mass hypnotism, sammohan.” Using the first as a distraction, to put the ‘patient’ at ease, Shankar then deploys the second, convinced that his hypnotic skills help dispel superstitions. “I use magic and meditation to help them get rid of blind faith,” he says, “Aur treatment ho jata hai. They get fully cured.”

Many of his patients, says Shankar, come to him depressed, or alcoholic, or with obsessive compulsions—for example, ceaselessly washing their hands. The most common, though, are the suicidal. “Like this 20-year-old boy who came to me,” says Shankar, barely pausing to make an almond materialise in this reporter’s fist. “He’d failed his exams two or three times. He said, ‘I can’t study, I don’t have the heart to go on living.’ I told him his will power was weak, that he should meditate, and that’s how courage returned to him.”

Others come to him claiming they are in the grip of incurable illnesses due to evil spirits. “I convince them to reject superstitions, to have faith in their fate. In a maximum of two to three visits, they are perfectly fine.”

About The Author

Shruti Ravindran