On a guided tour of the 1812 Wickham House in Richmond, Virginia, recently, a framed portrait catches my attention, its subject so at odds with those represented in the other paintings displayed alongside it. Completed in 1812, the beautifully restored building was once the home of John and Elizabeth Wickham, prominent Virginians involved in business. However, it is as a lawyer that U.S. history remembers John Wickham, whose fame came from his 1807 defence of Aaron Burr. The then Vice President had killed his opponent Alexander Hamilton in a duel, leading to Burr’s famous trial. In 1898, the Wickham home was purchased by Mann Satterwhite Valentine, Jr., making it part of The Valentine Museum. At this repository, visitors can see artefacts of Richmond history and a glimpse of nineteenth century, upper crust Southern American life as it is epitomised by the preserved Wickham residence. While there are no images of the enslaved black servants owned by the Wickhams, there are paintings of members of the erstwhile owners as also the Valentines. Standing in sharp relief against the portraits of these white faces, the image that commands my attention is that of a sword-holding, turbaned South Asian man, hung high up above a doorway.
The placard accompanying the picture explains that it was painted by James Warrell around 1817 and that it depicts “Sena Sama (also spelled Senaa Samma) from Tamil Nadu, India, [who] was said to be the first known sword swallower in America.” This first public demonstration of sword-swallowing occurred in New York City on 25 November, 1817, the sign goes on to state by quoting a newspaper article, and that the performer “worked a short time with Pepin’s Circus in 1818 and continued to perform until 1843.” But what happened to him after 1843? And how old was the man? Till what age did he swallow swords, and what made him stop, if the choice was indeed his? My interest piqued, I began to look for more information about the traveling artiste. While traces of him appear in a couple of different sources about the American circus, his presence is also obscured because there is some confusion about whether he might have gone by another name.
As South Asian American professor and blogger Amardeep Singh notes in a 26 May, 2006 post, William Makepeace Thackeray’s (1848) makes mention of an Indian juggler named Ramo Samee. Singh states that this performer lived in England with his wife between approximately 1819 and 1851, when he died. But speculation exists that his prior travels may have taken him to America where he could have performed as a sword-swallower in 1817 before changing his act and his country of residence. Nonetheless, this begs the question of how the same person could have been in two places at the same time as both a sword-swallower in Pepin’s Circus and a juggler on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
This historical conjuration aside, the conflation and confusion between these two South Asian artistes speaks to a larger invisibility of diasporic lives that may not be upwardly mobile or respectfully professional. No doubt, while made hypervisible due to his ability to swallow swords, it is also the colour of his skin that made Sena Sama exotic enough to have his likeness recorded by a painter in America. Even so, history loses sight of him and imagines him as possibly having existed elsewhere, even taking on the guise of a juggler in England. Rather cosmopolitan, but at the same time a dispensable oriental. At the risk of sounding anachronistic, there appears to be a continued blindspot today, just as in the nineteenth century, when it comes to the labour and lives of such non-elite cosmopolitans as the , domestic workers, and some classes of performers, among others.
The doorway over which the sword-swallower’s pictures hangs leads to another room in the Wickham House, where various curios collected by the Valentines are on display. These include images of Native Americans and such objects as arrowheads. Though clearly demonstrative of the power and cultural hierarchies that would allow such items to be exhibited with no question about their provenance, these representations and belongings of America’s First Peoples bear witness to a history that is not completely effaced. So also, even as Sena Sama appears to vanish from the historical record, the continued existence of his portrait at The Valentine causes one to reckon with the fact that he did exist.
