Theyyam

Theyyam belongs to the shrines and sacred groves of northern Kerala, the region historically called Malabar, and to a religious world that runs alongside the brahminical temple rather than inside it. Its deities are not, for the most part, the great gods of the Sanskrit tradition. They are goddesses of place, serpent deities, ancestors, and above all heroes and heroines who died badly: a woman killed unjustly, a warrior betrayed, a low caste man struck down by a landlord. Their stories are sung in the thottam, the invocation chanted before the transformation, and many of them are stories of injustice that the shrine exists to keep in memory.

The right to perform a given theyyam is hereditary and belongs to particular communities, among them the Vannan, Malayan, Pulayan and Velan, most of whom occupied the lowest positions in the caste order of Malabar and were historically denied entry to the temples of the same villages. That is the fact that gives theyyam its social edge, and it is not a modern reading imposed on the practice: for the hours in which the deity is present, landowners and brahmins of the village stand before a man from a community they would not otherwise touch, and receive his blessing and sometimes his rebuke. The shrine, the season and the hereditary right are all fixed; what the deity says when he arrives is not.

A theyyam is assembled slowly and in public. The performer fasts and observes restrictions for days beforehand, and on the night itself the face is painted over several hours in patterns fixed for each deity, worked in rice paste, turmeric, lime and red pigment by assistants who know the design by memory. The costume is built up in layers of split palm leaf, cloth, brass and silver ornament, sometimes rising into a headdress several metres tall that has to be braced against the body. The whole assembly is heavy and hot and is put on in front of the people who have come to see it.

The turn from performer to deity is marked. The dancer is handed a mirror and looks into it, and the moment of recognition, when the man sees the deity rather than himself, is the point at which the transformation is understood to be complete. From then the figure speaks in the first person as the deity, moves to a hard drum rhythm, gives oracular answers to those who approach, and blesses. Some theyyams involve fire directly: in the ottakkolam and related forms the dancer enters or falls repeatedly into a bed of embers, protected, the tradition holds, by the deity now present in him. At the end the headdress is removed and the man is a man again, and the village returns to its ordinary arrangement until the next season.