Print Magic and Secularisation in Late Colonial India

Abstract

Abstract A new genre of magic publications became prominent in the vernacular print culture of India in the aftermath of the First World War. It consisted of cheap and easily accessible compendia combining many different genres of magic, from witchcraft and ‘service magic’ to clairvoyance, omens and auguries, spirit possession and folk medicine, offering both a sense of wonder and excitement and material benefits to their readers. Cutting across older religious boundaries between Hindus and Muslims and containing multiple cross-connections with Western parapsychology and illusionism, this material marked a new place for ‘magic’ within the experience of colonial modernity. As the first extensive exploration of this new body of Urdu source material, this article offers a wide and theory-guided exploration of what the prominence of this cultural genre means for the cultural history of the early twentieth century. Informed by both Alfred Schütz’s phenomenological toolkit and a broadly Marxian literary sociology, this article argues that the changing meaning of magic—which was both produced and reflected in these pamphlets—had important repercussions for how people understood the scope of ‘religion’, ‘science’ and even ‘economics’. While ‘magic’ was in certain respects secularised, it was by no means displaced from mainstream literate culture. More importantly, it never became an obstacle for capitalist development in the way suggested by Max Weber’s disenchantment thesis. Rather, this new form of print ‘magic’ could flourish in its own experiential ‘enclave’, and even develop multiple positive synergies with an emerging consumer culture.