This dissertation surveys the disappearance of the Indian circus as it unfolds in the Southern state of Kerala, particularly around a town in the region of Malabar, Thalassery, known locally as “the cradle of the Indian circus”. I examine the ways people in this region remember the circus as a cultural form, and how, through their continuous recollection of it, they collectively produce this cultural form as one which is disappearing. I evidence that despite the prevalent impression that this decline is accelerating, the circus’ disappearance is neither a new, nor a quick phenomenon. In fact, archival sources suggest that the circus has been disappearing in Malabar for almost as long as circus shows started being produced in their current, post-Independence form. I analyze the reasons why, and the aesthetic choices by which, circus companies exist in a gerundial temporality of perennial disappearing.Disappearance, I argue, is a perspectival phenomenon: it is only visible from sites where this process is collectively meaningful, and at specific times, defined simultaneously by the historical conjuncture and in relation to one’s life course. In other words, it is a phenomenon most likely to unfold when collective frameworks of sociality encourage such conceptualizations of a cultural form, and at a point in someone’s life when looking back is subjectively meaningful. For these reasons, the circus’ disappearance stands out the most in Malabar because of the way it nestles into the lives of the region’s retired circus professionals, and in the biographical trajectories of their families, which have sought to move on from the past circumstances that brought the circus into their lives. Disappearance ties the ‘golden age’ of the Indian circus to the lives of ageing, retired or retiring professionals, rather than to people actively involved with the circus today – to whom, tellingly, this anticipated circus disappearance is not always apparent. Senior circus artists, managers and owners once traveled with the circus show on routes much wider than that of current companies. They performed in a dispensation of the circus – involving spectacular wild animals and child trainees – which has been restricted and transformed since the 1990s by of a series of legal battles about animal and children welfare. This arc of the circus’ decline serves as scaffolding for the biographical recollections of former circus professionals. It crystallizes such changes (the ban on animals, the rescue of children trainees) as the frontier to an irretrievable circus past, and condenses this past as an unmatchable standard to which present shows try to conform, eliciting nostalgia and disappointment from spectators. Disappearance, then, places Malabari circus professionals on the more respectable side of that divide and dismisses current shows as a mere afterimage of what circus entertainment used to be. Combining ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2021 in Malabar and in active Kerala-based circus companies, and an analysis of the historical record for circus events since the 1850s in India, I trace the maintenance and transformations of the circus’ disappearance. I provide insight on the ways remembering, understood as a collectively sustained human practice, is both continuously attuned to the present context and (re)produces contemporary forms of sociality.