I was browsing William Makepeace Thackeray’s wonderful and strange The Book of Snobs (1848), and I came across the following odd passage in the midst of a rant about a lady-friend’s poor table manners:
I have seen, I say, the Hereditary Princess of Potztausend-Donnerwetter (that serenely-beautiful woman) use her knife in lieu of a fork or spoon; I have seen her almost swallow it, by Jove! like Ramo Samee, the Indian juggler. And did I blench? Did my estimation for the Princess diminish? No, lovely Amalia!
But, my dear fellow, who precisely is “Ramo Samee, the Indian juggler”? It turns out he was a real person, who came to England around 1819, and lived there with his wife (identified only as “Mrs. Samee”) until his death in 1851. The juggling history website I looked at also speculates he may have gone to the U.S. and performed as “Sena Sama,” in 1817, though that’s only speculation. Ramo Samee is considered by some the first modern professional juggler in England, and he was far and away the most famous practitioner of the art in his era. He inspired royalty, journalists, and famous essayists like William Hazlitt. And yet, when Ramo Samee died he was so poor that his wife needed to advertise for financial assistance just to have him buried (cremation, I suspect, was probably not an option). Today he is, aside from the appreciation he gets on a handful of juggling history websites, completely forgotten.
Needless to say, I am pretty ambivalent about Ramo Samee (or “Ramaswamy,” probably the more accurate spelling), just as I am about Sabu, Dean Mahomed, and scores of other Indian artists and hustling “Gurus” who work “exotic” stereotypes for western applause. In the African-American tradition this type of performance is called minstrelsy, and it is seen as a shameful kind of pandering to other people’s stereotypes.
But Ramo Samee might be a slightly different case at least in the sense that the kind of sword-swallowing and juggling he did is in fact a real historical profession in India, which goes back hundreds of years. So while clearly part of Ramo Samee’s appeal was his exotic otherness, he was doing what he did best — what he had been raised to do. And observers like Hazlitt really did find him to be a performer of astonishing skill. So even if I can’t exactly celebrate Ramo Samee’s life as a triumph, he is nevertheless an interesting figure to learn about and consider. A brief side-note on juggling, which as I said has a long tradition in India. In Hindi street performers like Ramo Samee are often called Jholewale (Jholewallas), perhaps after the bags of tricks they carry with them. The word “juggle” sounds like it might come from Hindi, but it actually comes from Latin — joculare, the root of the English word “jocular” and “joke.” Earlier in history, a “juggler,” I gather, would have been any jester or clown. The word “juggle” only came to refer specifically to tossing balls in the air sometime after Ramaswamy. (According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “juggle” didn’t take on that specific meaning until around 1897; here Wikipedia may be off).
Besides Thackeray’s Book of Snobs Ramo Samee’s name also shows up briefly in Thomas Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851), with reference to street performers (though Ramo Samee was, at his peak, well above a street performer). And Ramo Samee’s name also appears in theater notices here and here.
But far and away the most interesting and detailed reference I’ve seen (to a performer who isn’t named, but must be Ramo Samee) is in William Hazlitt’s essay “The Indian Jugglers” (from Table Talk, 1828). Hazlitt was impressed by Ramo Samee’s juggling not in the casual, “oh, go check out that Indian juggler; he’s pretty good” kind of way, but in the astonished, “holy crap! what am I doing with my life?!?!” kind of way:
Is it then a trifling power we see at work, or is it not something next to miraculous! It is the utmost stretch of human ingenuity, which nothing but the bending the faculties of body and mind to it from the tenderest infancy with incessant, ever-anxious application up to manhood, can accomplish or make even a slight approach to. Man, thou art a wonderful animal, and thy ways past finding out! Thou canst do strange things, but thou turnest them to little account! — To conceive of this effort of extraordinary dexterity distracts the imagination and makes admiration breathless. . . . [T]he precision of the movements must be like a mathematical truth, their rapidity is like lightning. To catch four balls in succession in less than a second of time, and deliver them back so as to return with seeming consciousness to the hand again, to make them revolve round him at certain intervals, like the planets in their spheres, to make them chase one another like sparkles of fire, or shoot up like flowers or meteors, to throw them behind his back and twine them round his neck like ribbons or like serpents, to do what appears an impossibility, and to do it with all the ease, the grace, the carelessness imaginable, to laugh at, to play with the glittering mockeries, to follow them with his eye as if he could fascinate them with its lambent fire, or as if he had only to see that they kept time with the music on the stage — there is something in all this which he who does not admire may be quite sure he never really admired any thing in the whole course of his life. (link)
In short, “hot damn!” In fact, seeing the Indian juggler do his thing pushes Hazlitt the rhetorical equivalent of a life-crisis:
As to the swallowing of the sword, the police ought to interfere to prevent it. When I saw the Indian Juggler do the same things before, his feet were bare, and he had large rings on the toes, which kept turning round all the time of the performance, as if they moved of themselves. — The hearing a speech in Parliament, . . . stirs me not a jot, shakes not my good opinion of myself: but the seeing the Indian Jugglers does. It makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this! Nothing. What have I been doing all my life! (link)
Screw Parliament, and forget the writing life, let’s go see juggling! To continue:
Have I been idle, or have I nothing to shew for all my labour and pains! Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them? (link)
I often ask myself the same questions. And finally:
Is there no one thing in which I can challenge competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact perfection, in which others cannot find a flaw? The utmost I can pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow can do. I can write a book: so can many others who have not even learned to spell. What abortions are these Essays! What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the best I can do. (link)
You have to wonder whether Hazlitt wasn’t himself on the verge of giving up writing to move to Tamil Nadu to learn the art of Indian juggling.
Here is an image of Ramo Samee at the Royal Coburg Theatre in 1822, probably at the peak of his game:
(Click on the image to see a high-res version)
While the numerous mentions in the work of serious writers like Hazlitt, Thackeray, and Mayhew suggest that Ramo Samee was an impressive and respected figure in his prime, his obituary, published in a London paper in 1851, tells a rather different story:
THE LATE RAMO SAMEE AND HIS WIDOW
Sir: Your early insertion of the widow’s appeal, under the above head, in last week’s paper, reflects the highest credit on you, and in remembrance of the plesure I experienced in the early days at his performance, I beg to hand you 10s from ten friends, collected in the neighbourhood of High Holborn, towards alleviating the sufferings of the poor widow and family . . .
[Surely the managers of theatres and other establishments who have derived so much advantage from the talents of the deceased, ought to contribute to lift his widow, a most respectable woman, from the severe grip of absolute poverty. Poor Ramo is to be buried today, and his funeral expenses have to be defrayed by instalments. The trifle obtained has been handed to Mrs. Samee. –ED] (link)
And that, I’m afraid, is where it ended for Ramo Samee, the famous Indian juggler.
“Needless to say, I am pretty ambivalent about Ramo Samee (or “Ramaswamy,” probably the more accurate spelling), just as I am about Sabu, Dean Mahomed, and scores of other Indian artists and hustling “Gurus” who work “exotic” stereotypes for western applause”
Cool post Amardeep, I had no idea that these people existed…hmmm…uhh…NO WONDER !!!!!!! None of them won a Spelling Bee or anything of that sort !!!!
Glad you find it interesting — I’m always a little worried about going off the edge into historical obscurity.
Before there were televised spelling bees, there was juggling, sword-swallowing, and yes, the oldest cliche of them all, snake-handling. (Also the occasional genius village mathematician.) We seem to be perpetually performing rather unlikely feats for a fickle audience.
(Dean Mahomed — who invented the westernized concept of “shampoo” — is perhaps a more complex, multi-faceted figure all things considered.)
Since the name is pretty much Tamilian, “Ramasamy” or “Ramasami” is probably much more accurate in terms of how it would have been pronounced, given that the root of the name “swamy” is from Sanskrit and not from Tamil. While it is debatable whether juggling could be called “exotic”, it certainly gladdens my southie heart that there was at least one southie who dabbled in the “exotic arts” 😀
Thanks, I didn’t know that! So maybe “Rama Samee” is actually pretty close to how would have spelled it — not a very big distortion.
As for his exoticism, judging by how floored Hazlitt was by his performance, Rama Samee was probably something to behold — a juggling mahaan. Hazlitt’s response isn’t “wow, look at the exotic foreigner with his funny brass balls,” it’s, “O M F G! Look at that guy juggle! Compared to him, I am a speck, a waste of space, a zero…”
Amardeep:
“I’m always a little worried about going off the edge into historical obscurity.” Indian history textbooks fail to say what ordinary people did in the past. That’s a gap you are filling. It’s great to know that our ancestors were lively, creative risk-takers.
VERY neat post, Amardeep! I feel an overwhelming need to give Hazlitt a big bear hug. And am sad to hear of Ramo’s family’s plight. This world is a cruel world.
Amardeep, don’t forget about Ramo’s contemporary. Kumar Pallana. Seen juggling in that awful Tom Hanks movie The Terminal.
Amardeep,
Both Ramasamy and Ramaswamy are used in Tamil Nadu, the latter may be a recent version (I am making a wild guess here). The swamy version usually being used by more educated people. I have not seen Ramasami being used as a spelling, though ‘Sami’ usually refers to ‘God’ or more commonly attached to the village diety. ‘Sami’ is also used by a lower caste peson in a village to refer to a higher caste person, or to the landlord as a form of honorific (maynot be the right PC word) like ‘Master’. Just a small cultural tidbit.
Actually–and I hope I don’t start any flame wars–I’m rather fascinated by the gurus and hustlers and snake charmers, for conning so many gullible Westerners out of their colonialist cash. Not everyone could get ahead by being a doctor in Victorian England.
That said, Ramo Samee sounds like an artist with a definite, not a hustler. (Magicians I have met consider themselves artists, so why not jugglers?) But his impoverished end seems to indicate that he did not get as far as he should have…
Thanks for the article–will file Ramo away in my encyclopedia of Indo-Victoriana…Always interested in seeing more!
Actually–and I hope I don’t start any flame wars–I’m rather fascinated by the gurus and hustlers and snake charmers, for conning so many gullible Westerners out of their colonialist cash. Not everyone could get ahead by being a doctor in Victorian England.
Neeraja, I wouldn’t worry too much about flame wars on this thread — with a post above 1000 words in length, I’m just happy to have readers. 😉
I’m obviously fascinated by this guy too, despite my ambivalence. There weren’t a lot of Indians in the west at the time — probably most who were there worked on merchant vessels and were transient. The ones who stayed in England or the U.S. at the time had to find a hustle.
And what he did was different from what snake oil salesmen and cult leaders did (and still do). Ramo Samee had a real skill, and it was basically inevitable that he would be known as “the Indian juggler” as a sheer matter of marketing.
So, hm, maybe we should celebrate him just a little bit…
Some thoughts: While “Samee” probably does have its origins in Swamy, Sami etc, is the willingness to keep this name (and certainly the spelling of it with the ‘ee’) part of self-stereotyping/stereotyping/self-exoticising ? I also wonder if the American use of “Sambo” plays into any of this.
Thanks for the post!
As in, does Samee’s Samee-ness play into the later use of “Sambo” 🙂
I think the “ee” and “oo” spellings were more or less standard until after independence. An Indian was a “Hindoostanee,” and so on. It wasn’t meant to be historically insulting, though the doubled vowels make the words look awkward in English. I’ve kept the original spelling in this post as “Ramo Samee” just as a matter of fidelity to the history, but a case could definitely be made for updating/correcting the spelling to “Ramasami” or “Ramaswami” (that is, if we can decide which it should be).
As for “Sambo,” interestingly enough the Sambo story was actually probably meant to be set in India — there are references to tigers as well as ghee. It was only with the American edition of the book that the illustrations were clearly made to look like ‘blackface’ caricatures, and the story took on its status as a kind of American racist legend.
But I don’t know if there’s any etymological connection to Samee or Swami.
It’s interesting that people on this board can instantly identify what part of India a surname comes from. I imagine it’s not too dissimilar from a European being able to place, for instance, the surnames Carlsen, Jackson, Schmidt, and Massimino as Norwegian, English, German, and Italian.
I guess it only seems interesting to me because Westerners tend to think of India as one homogenous country when it is anything but.
Lovely off-the-beaten-track post, Amardeep.
Growing up in South Andhra Pradesh, I have seen a fair share of sword swallowing sadhus, jugglers and the like.In the tribal areas forming a part of AP, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa etc, some of the tribal communities still have families that practice these traditions, including some black arts.
But to read about some one who has gone to England during the Victorian age and plied his trade..wow..thats a cool bit of history you have discovered.
I don’t know if this is the same site where you got the information, but this site has jpegs of some really old illustrations.
See this picture depicting a Hindoo Sword Swallower circa 1822.
The Hall of Fame shows a lot of sword and snake swallowers during the middle to late 19th Century and early 20th.Only some of them are Indians. And apparently, from India, this art spread to Greece and Rome via China. My theory is that these artistes may have travelled with the caravans through the Silk Route through to Turkey and thence to Europe. What a journey it must have been? What kind of stories and experiences would have been possible? Amazing.
Neeraja, I really don’t want to start a flame war, but some how you seem to have the knack of saying exactly the kind of thing that I find..well, if not objectionable, at least something that I feel like pointing out.
I don’t know about the Gurus and hustlers ( Most Gurus seem to be hustlers to me), but the snake charmers and other folk artists (if I can call them that) definitely did not con ‘gullible westerners of colonialist cash’. Firstly, they were/are performing artists and people pay a pittance as admission fee to come and be entertained by them. Secondly, these performers learnt and perfected their trade in the village fairs of the sub-continent, entertaining the villagers (thats not a con either). Thirdly, I think most of them did not end up becoming rich, because they were no better than salaried employees at best and contract laborers at worst, of the Barnum and Bailey Circuses of those days. The fact that Ramo Samee died in poverty shows that even after performing for the European royalty and American neo-rich for decades, he did not succeed in relieving them of any ‘cash’ what so ever.
One final thought: Most of these performers smoke hash after the day’s shows (what I remeber as a curious kid) in their chillums.I donno what it does to their reflxes after a few years. And they don’t have an iota of the financial worth of some of the tricks they know. I am not talking about Ramo Samee here. I am talking about the few surviving folk performers of such arts.
Correction: Instead of ‘And they don’t have an iota’ in the above post, please read: they don’t have any idea..’ Thanks.
Amardeep: This is a great post. Not only it delves in the derivatives but the history is fascinating. I have always wondered of the Indian influence (besides the economic aspect) on the English society in England during the Raj days.
While “Samee” probably does have its origins in Swamy, Sami etc, is the willingness to keep this name (and certainly the spelling of it with the ‘ee’) part of self-stereotyping/stereotyping/self-exoticising ?
I’m sorry, Ms Fink Nottle, but this seems to me more a question of conventional orthography than “self-exoticising.” Neither Sami nor Samee is “Indian.” They are both spelling conventions, and the latter simply happens to have fallen out of favor (like Hindoo, etc).
In my view, we’re being altogether too harsh on Samee who, at least by the account above, perfected his art to a far greater extent than most of us will ever manage. And managed to do so with his dignity intact. And did so in Victorian England, no less. Shucks, if he could put Hazlitt (the great William Hazlitt!) into paroxysms of self-doubt, God only knows what his effect on mere mortals would have been.
He might not have garnered much in the way of financial reward, but there is no doubt in my mind that his life was a “triumph.”
Kumar N., thanks for your comments. I had a feeling it might be a tribal thing in South India in some way, but I haven’t found anything solid on it. Do you know the name of one of these groups? Is there possibly a caste name? (Probably it’s dying out a bit now.)
On the story of how Indian juggling and general magic spread around the world, it might have something to do with the Roma people (aka the Gypsies), who have been linked genetically and linguistically to India. They have been widely known as entertainers and circus-people, though I don’t know how much of the traditional desi ‘mayajaal’ has remained in their acts.
Mr Kobayashi, you make an assumption: I would not necessarily assume ‘self-exoticising’ as being a criticism, but simply as being a strategy…to fit/position oneself/tap into extant expectations etc. This can and has been done creatively and intelligently by many…including Samee.
I have a lot of friends who are jugglers, and of course being the bay area, the fire arts are huge.. .fire dancers, fire swallowers, fire breathers, etc.. I know many people who would probably have seriously considered it as a real profession were it not so incredibly hard to make a living that way. I definitely think such a performer might have been regarded with true, sincere respect and awe, like any other performer.
great post amardeep. i grew up in andhra pradesh too and my mother’s ancestral village had these nomadic tribes who lived on the ‘fringes’ of the village and they would entertain us with their juggling acts. (no sword eating though. they however did once upon a time apparently). they belong to the “dommarollu” caste and here is more info on them: http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=2004062001750200.htm&date=2004/06/20/&prd=thlf& also, ‘swami’/’samee’ also means ‘god’ in telugu and other south indian languages and is often used to refer to the “masters,” as rightly pointed out by someone else here.
Hi Amardeep,
This is a really interesting piece; I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and checking out the links. Do write more about such people of South Asian descent who have been pushed to obscurity. They were, after all, the flag-bearers of the South Asian Diaspora! Moving on, could someone suggest any books written by Indian authors, about fighting for the British or INA? I have read N.N Pillai’s Autobiography entitled Njaan, meaning: Me in Malayalam. He was a prominent actor and playwright, besides being a “freedom-fighter”; he fought for the INA against the Japanese and his experiences seemed to happen in a surreal world far removed from where I exist. I would appreciate your valuable suggestions. Peace.
UberMetroMallu, Glad you enjoyed it.
On the INA and Netaji, a recent book that talks about that chapter of Indian history is The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh. It’s a little on the long side, but there’s lots of good stuff there about the Indian connections to Burma as well as the diaspora in places like Malaysia.
Swati, thanks for the info. and the link. That’s very helpful!
Yes..the street jugglers in AP belong to a caste called ‘Dommari’; caste members are called ‘Dommarollu’, as Swati mentioned.
But I have not seen them do sword swallowing.The Dommarollu travel as a group of 1 or 2 families. It is the children who do most of the tricks, while the elders play supporting roles, playing the ‘dappu’ (small percussion instrument), singing songs and collecting the coins from the audience. In the evenings, some of the Dommari women go from door to door, begging for food. These days, these Dommari performances have become very rare. I have seen similar performances in Tamil Nadu towns as well.
The sword swallowers are generally seen at folk festivals in various parts of the country.They are typically either tribals or Saivaite sadhus/fakirs.The Kumbh Melas are the best places to find practitioners of these almost extinct arts.At the Maha Kumbh Mela at Prayag in UP(considered the largest human gathering in History), one can see literally dozens of these people, doing all these feats, and not expecting any thing but appreciation, and may be some food from the generous pilgrims.
Amardeep, the next Maha Kumbh Mela would be in January 2007.So, if you or any one else is interested, you could plan a visit to India to coincide with the Kumbh and can see all this and much more.
Maybe the story of Sultan Khan would be interesting. He was an illiterate servant of a Maharaja . During 4 years of his stay in England he won the British championship thrice.He has a plus record against Capablanca,Marshall and Tartakower. Sadly his master took him back to India.[Link]
Madaris are still there but I feel their number is decreasing .Every year in winter hundreds of Madaris descend to Eastern part of India with truckloads of paraphernalia. They put up camps on open spaces. They show all kinds of magic. They claim to cure all types of diseases(with expertise lying in curing hydrosil and erectional dysfunction as per my information). Then from bigger groups they split into smaller ones visiting every locality and neighbourhood in the town.They usually have a langur with them.PETA has started a campaign against them.
When I was a kid the beating of a Madaris dugdugi brought terrific excitement in me. Nothing could hold me back from reaching the Madari. When I reach there along with my sister ignoring warnings from my Mother I would find hundreds of people already there. Then I would push and jostle through the crowd to get the best vantage point. And the show began thereafter.
They showed juggling,magic,gymnastics and what not! But the show with animals(dogs,monkeys,birds)were the biggest draw for us.
Blue Mountain,
Mir Sultan Khan was in the employ of a Maharaja, but I don’t think he was illiterate. May be he did not speak or write English very well. But I believe even before he left for England in 1929, he was a Ustad (Master) in Shatranj/Chathuranga (the original Indian form of Chess).
In the four years he lived in England, he not only defeated people like Capablanca, and won the Championshp twice, he also played the top board for England in two olympiads.
According to today’s ratings system, his ELO rating would have been upwards of 2550, making him Asia’s first grand master.He was from that part of Punjab, which lies in today’s Pakistan. Incidentally, another servant of the same Sargodha Maharaja, Miss.Fatima, won the British Woman’s Chess Championship in 1931, but never got the recognition that Mir Sultan Khan got.
Kumar N and Amardeep –
Thanks for posting links to my sword swallowing site (www.swordswallow.com and http://www.swordswallow.com/halloffame.php). I have been searching for this supposed tribe of sword swallowers in Andhra Pradesh ever since I lived there in 1978. I would appreciate any help you might offer as I would like to do a video documentary of sword swallowing with these people. Please contact me with any information you might have at Halfdan@aol.com.
Thanks!
Dan Meyer Halfdan@aol.com Dan@swordswallow.com Executive Director Sword Swallowers Association International http://www.swordswallow.org http://www.swordswallow.com
In the memours of Mrs Sarha Rice Parker Goodwin of Portsmout NH she mentions “going to the Assmeble House to see Ramo Samee with his company of Hindoo jugglers. He swallwed a sword and pulled yards of ribbon out of his nostrills”
Thought you might like to know this. I play Mrs Goodwin at Strawberry Banke Museum in Portsmouth NH