Introduction

Summary

For a crowd is one man, and the Dancing Fakir had hit upon an old secret of leading rabbles.

Captain John Eyton, The Dancing Fakir (1922)

Of faqīrs, sepoys and madmen

A visitor to the British cantonment of Aurangabad in the early years of the twentieth century may have been surprised at the sight of the naked Indian seen roaming most days round the orderly streets of the compound, occasionally calling out to passing soldiers or pausing to reload his pipe with cannabis. Had our visitor stopped to ask who this audacious fellow was, he may have received any one of a number of answers. Some person may have replied that he was a former soldier, invalided from the Army on account of insanity but whose presence in the cantonment was tolerated on account of his years of service. Another may have replied that the naked man was a holy fool, a gymnosophist celebrated across the land for his miracles; his errant behaviour was proof in itself of his communion with God. Some further respondent may have told our visitor that the dirty fellow was a mere beggar, an idle native who preferred the pleasures of the pipe to a proper day's work. Others still may have given the reflex response to visitors' curiosity about the many such figures seen in the streets of colonial India: he was a ‘fakir’.