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This thesis examines the factors that drove the exchange of magical knowledge and methodology between India and the West during the period from 1813 to 1940. Indian magic had a profound influence on European conjuring traditions, with numerous magicians drawing inspiration from Indian tropes. This ‘implosion of peripheries into centres’ was not unidirectional. The publication of journals, instructional literature, the establishment of magic societies and encounters with touring Western performers, enabled the development of a class of professional Indian magicians. This thesis builds on earlier work on Oriental magic and its influence on the West by investigating the two-way nature of this process. It argues that the binaries between what was considered Eastern and Western magic began breaking down soon after troupes of Indian magicians started arriving in Britain in the early 1810s. The development of ‘world magic’, namely, the commodification of exotic forms of magic in advertising, their appropriation in stage performance and their modification to suit Western tastes and expectations, can be traced back to these early encounters. This thesis will employ the tools of the transnational turn in scholarship to examine both the legitimate and illegitimate trade in secrets, the adaptation of magic feats, the appropriation of elements of magical performativity such as names, honorifics, costumes and stage settings, as well as the means by which these were transmitted This process involved a massive and sustained transfer of knowledge, people and ideas that took advantage of, and was sustained by, imperial networks of commerce and communication. Cultural trends that aligned India with the mystical and the magical, made it an indispensable cultural resource. The quest for originality, the driver of innovation in performance magic for centuries, coupled with the demands of audiences for the ever more exotic entertainments, further enhanced India’s attractiveness. At the sa

Untouchable migrants made up a significant proportion of Indian labour migration into Singapore in the 19th and 20th centuries. During this period, they were subject to forms of caste prejudice that powerfully reinforced their identities as untouchables overseas. Today however, untouchability has disappeared from the public sphere, replaced by other notions of identity, leaving unanswered questions as to how and when this occurred. This study takes this “disappearance” as a starting point to examine a history of untouchable migration and identity negotiation in Singapore amongst Indians who arrived in Singapore between its modern founding as a British colony in the early 1800s through to its independence in 1965. I argue that that practices of untouchability evolved in close relation to growth of translocal solidarities amongst migrants, their responses to life overseas in a plural colony, and the spread of transnational ideologies and movements. Untouchable identity was negotiated in relation to the development of competing Indian and Tamil identity discourses in Singapore during the colonial period, the Japanese Occupation of Malaya and the post-war period of decolonisation. In this study I argue that caste identities amongst Tamil migrants were eventually replaced by a linguistically defined ethnic Tamil identity in the 1950s and 1960s that was shaped by the emergence of the Dravidian movement in Singapore in the 1930s. This process intensified within the post-colonial logic of the emerging independent Singaporean state’s policies governing inter-racial relations.