Ishamuddin Khan once made a rope rise into the air before thousands of spectators on a Karnataka beach. Today, at 55, he spends more time with photographs and yellowed newspaper clippings than with paying crowds. His trade, passed down through generations of India's Madari community, is disappearing - not because the skill has been lost, but because the conditions that once sustained it have changed beyond recognition.
A tradition without a safety net
The Madaris trace their craft back centuries, performing magic, juggling and acrobatics in open public spaces across Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Telangana. Knowledge moved from father to son, uncle to nephew, with no formal institution to certify or protect it. That model worked when public squares, fairgrounds and open streets were freely accessible. It has struggled since those spaces began shrinking under new patterns of urban development, security concerns and private enclosure.
Gated residential societies, fenced parks and tightened security around commercial centres have all reduced the physical room available for informal performance. Puppeteer Anurupa Roy points to closed developments that simply bar outsiders, cutting off audiences that once gathered freely. Researcher Komita Dhanda notes that even established street theatre groups face repeated obstacles securing permission to perform in city centres.
Legal grey zones and shrinking income
India has no federal framework governing busking or street performance, unlike some countries where licensed busking schemes give performers defined rights to collect voluntary payments in designated areas. Instead, Indian performers operate under a patchwork of state-level rules covering public order, obstruction, noise and use of public land. Lawyer Kaushik Mitra notes that this leaves street artists exposed to municipal regulations and anti-begging statutes simultaneously - a legal grey zone where the line between performing for donations and soliciting alms is rarely well defined.
That ambiguity has real financial consequences. Shahim Khan, who still performs with his young daughter in Delhi's industrial areas, says his earnings have collapsed from roughly 1,000-1,200 rupees a day before the pandemic to 200-400 rupees now, as venues become harder to access and audiences thinner.
Covid accelerated a slower decline
The 2020 lockdown halted public performance entirely. Many magicians left Delhi and other cities for their home villages; a significant number never returned to the profession. Dhanda describes the pandemic as a turning point that hit street magicians particularly hard, compounding a decline already under way from changing entertainment habits and the rise of short-form digital content competing for public attention.
A craft at risk of disappearing
For Khan, the deeper worry is not nostalgia but continuity. "A trick can survive only if someone learns it," he says. His son Altamash trained as a performer in his teens but now earns a living decorating parties with balloons, his juggling skills visibly rusty from disuse. The story repeats across Madari families: skills once transmitted with confidence across generations now risk ending with those who still remember them, as the economic case for learning them weakens year by year.