How the West’s fantasy of the fakir allows it to displace blame for its terrible acts of violence

On our way to Big Canyon Mountain, I come to see its cunning design. Not the ride, here at Disneyland Paris, but rather the queue for it. Halfway through a 90-minute wait, my children and I inch forward.

The line for Big Canyon Mountain inclines behind fences, then winds down a ramp. Banjo music twangs neurotically amidst cacti and slate rubble. Soon, I reassure my kids, roller coaster thrills will commence.

But what’s this? Turning the corner, we find people in cargo shorts and Mickey merch stretching into the distance. We are like cows paying to enter a chute. The difference is that our endpoint is not slaughter but its simulation.

Big Canyon Mountain recreates a 19th-century gold-mining camp in the American West. Disneyland’s staff here in Frontierland aid the conceit in period costume. At the wood frame entrance, they are in buckskin pants, soft suede moccasins, and lace-up shirts.

A man directs us in Francophone drawl – “par ici, this way” – wearing leather chaps and metal spurs. Another ride attendant in a checked prairie blouse and apron smock speaks into a walkie-talkie.

We shuffle forward to piped music of steam whistle locomotives. Above us loom Colorado’s arid rock formations, airlifted to former beet fields west of Paris. To either side of our iron-barred queue is mining paraphernalia from the Wild West: rusting boilers, antique sifters, wide-rimmed sluice boxes.

Notice boards show yellowed signs of gold nuggets found, and saloon help needed. Then, just as we approach the ride itself, a tacked-up sheet catches my eye:

“NOTICE: To Thieves, Thugs, Fakirs and Steerers”.

Now I am intrigued. In unembellished frontier font, it warns misfits and outcasts of the sheriff’s penalties. Some who are addressed – thieves and thugs – are familiar toughs of the gold rush. Others are obsolete hustlers: steerers were opportunists who ensnared mining neophytes in scams and inflated purchases.

But why are fakirs – Indian religious ascetics – conjured at this slice of Americana? I know, from India, the fakir as paradigmatic renouncer. In Delhi and Ajmer, I have seen fakirs bowed to and praised at Sufi shrines. I also know the western fable of the fakir as ash-smeared loony: an ascetic weirdo both feared and mocked.

For a moment, as the only Indian around, I feel hailed by the sign. Yet as a paying customer at Big Canyon Mountain, I am the fable’s hero: the prospector chasing gold nuggets.

I linger at the notice, figuring out my place. But the children behind me, impatient to ride, step on the back of my sandals. Pulled forward by the queue’s inexorable momentum, we are belted into the ride.

Growing up in western Canada, a highlight of my summer holidays was Edmonton’s Klondike Days. A funfair – borrowing Disneyland’s rollercoasters, cotton candy, and wiener meat of uncertain provenance – it sets up camp in the city each July.

The event channels and honours the Klondike gold rush, in the final years of the 19th century. One of several resource booms in North America around that time, the Klondike was the most fantastical. It spurred a hundred thousand punters, from across the globe, to play lottery in the Yukon’s frozen wastes, adjoining Alaska.

Edmonton was then a small, sleepy fur-trading post. At the end of the 1800s, it became a boom town, a way station to go overland to a place of plenty. Men from as far as Australia and Japan converged there, to buy donkeys, pickaxes, and provisions, and set off over the snowy mountain passes to the Klondike.

For most miners, the Klondike was a chimaera. Many died of dysentery, got robbed, suffered scurvy, or had frostbite. By 1898, barely two years after the stampede of prospectors began, the Klondike’s gold was finished.

Despite the pathos, the gold rush was a milestone in the region’s settlement. Indigenous groups, whose territories were now seen as atop underground resources, were sequestered in reserves. Their lands were usurped by foreign settlers who chased successive resource booms: coal, oil, diamonds. Edmonton soon acquired a stable quotient of Europeans as homesteaders, becoming Alberta’s capital in 1905.

Klondike Days celebrates this origin story, this frontier mythos, which I devoured as a child. Its presiding mascot – Klondike Mike, a grizzled, smiling prospector with a shovel, gold sacks, and floppy hat – was imprinted each July on banners throughout the city. My friends talked feverishly in the weeks beforehand of the rides we would take and the games we would play.

In the city, this zealous make-believe was everywhere. A downtown parade had dancing girls in lace-up boots and hoopskirts. Restaurants re-enacted the frontier saloon, complete with swinging doors and piano playing. Chuckwagon races had riders kitted out in ruffles and lace. Men in the frilly shirts of riverboat gamblers re-enacted horse-carried mail delivery.

For me, as a kid, the apex of this collective dream was the Chilkoot gold mine. Inside the fairgrounds of Klondike Days, it replicated a major access route towards the Yukon during the gold rush.

There was a large ersatz cliff, with waterfall and creaky wooden bridge and waterwheel. We were told that actual gold nuggets had been placed in the water. We paid the admission fee and were given wide-lipped metal sifters.

Nearby signs – “Beware of Falling Ore!”, “Mine Shaft Closed” – bolstered our play as prospectors trying to strike it rich. I looked, with an assiduous patience I never had for schoolwork, for flecks of real gold.

But we were tricked. What we found was just painted “fool’s gold”. At least we could trade them at the concession stand for Klondike dollars. I still have them: impressions of Klondike Mike and on the other side, Alberta’s European pioneers.

Back at Disneyland Paris, Big Canyon Mountain, after all that wait, seems to last seconds. Like much in life, the grind of anticipation gives way to a short burst of happening. On this ride we first descend, in our mining car, into the dark bowels of a mountain. TNT boxes and pick-axed interiors flank us.

Then there are explosions and smoke. Not real, of course, not like those in Gaza or Sevastopol. No, we are paying excessive fees and waiting excessively long for its safe simulation. Upside-down we go – my lunch almost goes – and then abruptly stop at the beginning. A man in spurs and sombrero whose name-tag reads Guillame releases our safety bar: “Au revoir”!

Now my eldest girl, Soraya, wants to try a nearby roller-coaster, modelled after the 1984 film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. We walk a few minutes and enter another contrived world, of the American adventurer and archaeologist. In the film, Harrison Ford, the American protagonist, outfoxes Oriental bad guys.

We arrive at the ride and its delicate French translation – Indiana Jones et le Temple du Péril. The queue again looks, mirage-like, to be manageable. I hope it will not be Indiana Jones and Parental PTSD.

I remember the film with fondness. Indiana Jones is, after all, the embodiment of scholarly cool: a smart guy with a whip, an archaeologist on the right side of history.

After the film came out on video, I watched it a few times in my friend Paul’s basement in Edmonton. We paused and rewound the VHS for the gory parts. I felt queasy in the scenes, set in India, of villain Mola Ram.

Head of a Thugee cult, Mola Ram sacrifices humans for the goddess Kali. Power-mad, he enslaves children, who toil underground to find a magical stone. As during the Klondike and at Big Canyon Mountain, the object of desire is unseen and subterranean.

In the film’s most terrifying scene, Mola Ram, sweating profusely and wearing animal skins, cuts out the heart of a sacrificial victim. Indiana Jones, saviour that he is, proceeds to restore rational sanity to this deranged world.

For a while, Indiana Jones became the reference point at Pollard Meadows, my elementary school. We raced our Kuwahara bikes – “Kuwis” – through Edmonton’s burgeoning subdivisions and mini-malls. Before going home for dinner, we pooled our allowance money and sipped together from a 7-11 Slurpee.

I remember one such afternoon, my bike bouncing from curb to street, and Paul streaking past, smiling. He shouts “Hey, Indian Jones!”, screwing up his face menacingly like Mola Ram, lifting his gripped hand as if holding that wet, squishy human heart.

The late 19th century, during North America’s resource booms and gold rushes, had a fashion for magic lantern shows. A precursor to cinema, magic lanterns were exotic images, magnified by light, and displayed by travelling entertainers, who stitched visuals to story.

A pioneer was John Stoddard, who in the 1880s and 1890s became the superstar of the magic lantern circuit. Stoddard travelled to India for source material, aligning with the Victorian disgust for Indian itinerants.

At Calcutta’s Kali temple, he recalled “specimens of Indian fakirs, each of whom seemed a combination of beggar, fanatic, or imposter… A sickening feeling came over me at the sight of this human degradation; especially when I remembered that there are in India more than a million of these half-crazed mendicants and frauds.”

Returning from Asia, Stoddard toured extensively through the American west with his images of Indian fakirs. He melded them to fables: of the conjurer and magician, of the ascetic’s austerities, and of the mendicant and wanderer.

The fakir was the object and subject of magic lantern shows. Magic lantern hosts doubled down on the staged exotica, dressing in lurid Oriental getup, even calling themselves fakirs.

The fakir became a cross-Atlantic phenomenon. In England, the turbaned, robed fakir was its own genre of variety shows, featuring illusions and levitating girls. The fakir allowed imaginative evasion, a deliberately unreal way to teleport oneself.

The fantasy of the fakir also underwrote the empire’s alibi for violence. In Waziristan, on colonial India’s western periphery, the Royal Air Force, from its squadrons in Peshawar and the North-West Frontier Province, spent years bombing villages in the early 20th century.

It sought to dislodge an insurgency led by Mizra Ali Khan. In England’s press, he was known as the “Faqir of Ipi”, a nod to his Sufi mysticism.

This religious-political opposition to the Raj fed a wider disdain of Indian autonomy. In London, Piccadilly’s fakir spectacles were replete with fake mediums and trickster jugglery. So too must Indian critiques of empire be a political masquerade.

Winston Churchill fumed of Mohandas Gandhi in 1931, then meeting colonial officials in Delhi: “It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir… striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace.”

I am not sure anymore if Disneyland is deviation from real life or just its crystallisation. When someone calls something “Disneyfied”, they scorn its artifice. The company, I learn in Paris, calls its employees “cast members”. Yet we all act in theatres of glory and abjection.

One difference is that some recognise our roles immediately, and others don’t. As a child, I played prospector in Klondike Days’ Chilkoot mine, eyeing the panning tray for gold flecks. I wanted the real thing but always got the fool’s gold.

Here, at Disneyland Paris, at the fake sign at Big Canyon Mountain, I feel addressed for real: hailed as the fakir, the opposite to the hero.

Am I the prospector who is protagonist or the fakir who is antagonist? The Orientalist who glamorously probes, or the Oriental, with his fanatic blood-lust? Am I Indiana or the Indian?

In notes for an unfinished book, James Baldwin recalls another misidentification. As a black child in Harlem, he is fascinated by John Wayne westerns. Such films stoke his kinship with the cowboy hero who acts with righteous vengeance. But then he notices a mismatch.

Between his skin and that of the dead natives is a continuity. He cannot be the romantic revolutionary; his social casting is as the raving maniac. Baldwin writes: “We’ve made a legend out of a massacre.”

As do our upholstered rides, our recreated funfairs. The Klondike gold rush paved the way for foreign settlement; Klondike Days is its euphoric re-enactment.

Disneyland’s Frontierland, likewise, is a romance of what never was – the West was always inhabited. It was a frontier only for those insisting it was empty. Just like Disneyland’s engineered magic, the gold rush was a modern fable of new El Dorados.

So it seems that, in the long line at Big Canyon Mountain, the address to the fakir is necessary after all. A heroic legend needs a tableau of anarchy, of irrationality, to unfold.

The gold rush’s psychodrama of extremity – its own magic trick – is then displaced onto others. The fakir is only one type of Indian that manifests the fiction.

Ajay Gandhi teaches at Leiden University.