Street performers

They announced their arrival in our street with loud drumming and clattering on a tom-tom and tin plate: three street performers from Chhattisgarh - a girl and her two brothers - who somehow eke out a living performing rope-walking acts on the street.

The wooden frame supports, the balancing pole and rope were carried by the older boy. His younger brother carried the smaller tools of their trade - the vessels to be balanced, a tin plate, a steel wheel rim, pickets and a hammer carried in a plastic washing-up bowl - and the girl, the star performer, carried a multi-coloured blanket fashioned from innumerable scraps of cloth.

The performance began with the younger boy banging on the tin plate whilst his brother set up the tight-rope. During this time, their sister sat crouched under the blanket, as if - by his banging hard enough on his plate - her brother would lure her out and onto the rope to perform for the people who were by now gathering from nearby houses.

The frame and tightrope in place - an exercise that took altogether no more than five minutes to put in place - the girl hopped up onto the rope and walked the length of it holding her heavy balancing pole. In the middle she stopped and swayed violently - and deliberately - from side to side.

Just beyond the rope was a wall studded with shards of glass. I think that her brother had erected the rope far enough away from the wall to prevent his sister from falling onto it had she slipped. I also believe that this was pure chance on his part and not part of his calculations. Had she fallen towards the wall, instinct may still have inclined her to reach out for support.

Thankfully, apart from some of the balanced cups on her head falling off as she was putting them in place, there were no mishaps. This tin-cup balancing was the next part of the act and that was followed by one perambulation with a tin plate under one foot and then finally, one walk-through using the bicycle wheel frame. I should think the whole act lasted no more than five minutes as well and, when it was over, the younger boy came round with a cup collecting money.

Some of the crowd melted away at this point in time - as street-performer crowds do everywhere - but someone gave the boy five rupees, another one two rupees, another one a single rupee coin. I gave the girl a hundred rupees and as her older brother was packing the supports and rope away he asked my wife for another hundred. "If you can give a hundred," he said, "you can give two hundred." Actually, he's right. I could have given an extra hundred but on this occasion I didn't. And his request is really no different from the approach taken by almost every single charity in the UK - including the three that I've worked for. You learn early on that your current donors are your best supporters and that it is more cost effective for you to ask them to give again, rather than recruit somebody new.

But what a dismal response to those three performers' act and as I said to Shilpi, it would surely make more financial success for the performers to position themselves somewhere where there are more tourists; somewhere where foreigners with easy money would put their hands into their pocketrs and pull out a 100 or even a 500 rupee note and not miss it at all. But I suppose that those self-same areas are patrolled by guards or policemen who would just as likely reward the performers with a cuff round the ears and certainly a percentage of their take.

And so instead they patrol the back streets with their battered accoutrements and their sullen, care-worn expressions.

Originally published on Blogger on 12th August 2008. I've lost the images that originally accompanied this article so here's a Bangalore street performer from 1928, borrowed from the Columbia University website.