Kerala was probably the biblical Ophir from where King Solomon received apes, ivory and peacocks. It was at this period that pioneering Jewish traders seem to have first crossed the Red and Arabian seas to bring the pungent flavours of India to the Middle East and the Mediterranean world. The now-vanished Keralan port of Muziris, described by Pliny the Elder as
primum
emporium Indiae
,
was the spice entrepôt to which the Roman Red Sea merchant fleet headed each year to buy pepper, pearls, spices and Indian slave girls for the Mediterranean market.
The Arabs followed the Jews and the Romans. Then on 18 May 1498, the Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama reached the Malabar coast from Europe, intent on wresting the spice trade from the Moors. The beach where Da Gama landed, a little to the north of Calicut, is today marked by an obelisk. Two hours’ drive further north is the coastal town of Tellicherry, site not only of Hari Das’s notorious jail, but also of one of the earliest East India Company trading posts.
Behind the grim black stone walls with pepper-pot sentry posts, and beyond the gatehouse with its Elizabethan belfry decorated with unexpected statutes of two Jacobean gentlemen in cavalier breaches and wide-brimmed hats, lie a succession of spice warehouses, arsenals and dungeons. Here the very first Britons in India stocked their merchandise and made plans to expand out from their warehouses to seize control of the wider hinterland. Some of them lie here still, resting in their domed classical tombs on the headland above the breakers where once were loaded the cargoes that went to spice the stews of Shakespeare’s London.
The almost unearthly fertility of the soil, which attracted centuries of merchants, still defines this land. Everything, it seems, is teeming with life here, and the life spills out from the backyards on to the backwaters and waterways, the wide lagoons and overgrown canals. From the steps of the canals comes the slap of wet cloth on stone where the women in smocks stand ankle deep in water, busy with their washing, or peeling their vegetables, or cleaning the day’s rice amid a scattering of blue water hyacinths. Nearby, their menfolk are repairing their boats or weaving coir ropes under the Chinese fishing nets, while naked little boys stand soaping themselves, up to their ankles in river mud. The houses are covered with trellises for the climbing roses, and washing is hung up to dry between palms. Flotillas of ducks quack and stretch their wings. An egret suddenly swoops low over the water, a flash of white against the green.
All this seems the most gentle, benign and benevolent landscape imaginable; yet in reality Kerala has always been one of the most conservative, socially oppressive and rigidly hierarchical societies in India. When the British traveller and doctor Francis Buchanan passed through the area at the beginning of the nineteenth century he found caste inequalities and restrictions so severe that a warrior- caste Nair was considered within his rights instantly to behead and kill a lower-caste man if the latter dared to appear on the same road at the same time. The exact distances that the different castes had to keep from each other were laid down in arcane legal codes, as was the specific way that different castes should tie their lungis or even dress their hair.
As late as the early years of the twentieth century, lower-caste tenants were still regularly being murdered by their Nair landlords for failing to presents sweets as tokens of their submission. Today people are rarely murdered for violations of caste restrictions – except sometimes in the case of unauthorised cross-caste love affairs – but in the presence of persons of the upper castes, Dalits are still expected to bow their heads and stand at a respectful distance.
These inequalities are the fertile soil from which
theyyam
grew, and the dance form has always been a conscious and ritualised inversion of the usual structures of Keralan life: for it is not the pure and sanctified Brahmins into whom the gods choose to incarnate, but the shunned and insulted Dalits. The entire system is free from Brahmin control. The
theyyams
take place not in Brahminical temples but small shrines in the holy places and sacred groves of the countryside, and the priests are not Brahmin but Dalit. The only role for the upper caste is when, as land owners, they sometimes have the right to appoint a particular family as hereditary
theyyam
dancers for a
particular shrine, rather like a village squire in England having the right to choose the parish priest.
The word
theyyam
derives from
daivam
, the Sanskrit
word for ‘god’. Some scholars maintain that the
theyyams
of northern Malabar are a rare survival of some pre-Aryan, non-Brahminical Dravidian religious system that was later absorbed into Hinduism’s capacious embrace. Others argue that the
theyyams
were tolerated as an acceptable safety valve to allow complaints against the misdeeds of the upper castes to be expressed in a ritualised and non-violent manner. Either way, there is no doubt that today they are a stage on which the social norms of everyday life are inverted, and where for a short period of the year, position and power are almost miraculously transferred to the insignificant and powerless.
The stories around which the
theyyam
performances are built range from tales of vampire-like blood-drinking
yakshis
, devis and witches, and the
myths of serpent and animal deities, to the deeds of local heroes and ancestors. Many, however, concentrate on issues of caste, and of the social and moral injustices that caste tensions have provoked. Frequently they question the limits of acceptable behaviour, especially the abuse of power, as the upper castes struggle to keep their place at the top of the caste pyramid and oppress the lower castes in order to do so. In many of the
theyyam
stories, a member of the lower castes infringes or transgresses accepted caste restrictions and is unjustly punished with rape (in the case of women) or death (in the case of men, and sometimes women too), and then is deified by the gods aghast at the injustices perpetrated by the Brahmins and the other ruling castes.
In one
theyyam
story, for example, a Dalit boy of the Tiyya caste is driven by hunger to steal a mango while grazing the cattle of a high-caste farmer. As he is up the tree and in the act of gorging himself on the farmer’s fruit, the farmer’s niece happens to pass by and sits beneath the tree. While she is there a mango that the boy has been holding falls on her, so polluting her and revealing his theft. The boy runs away but, returning many years later, is caught bathing in the village pond by the farmer, and is immediately beheaded. In atonement, the dead Dalit is deified and becomes immortal in a local form of one of the great Hindu gods; and it is in this form that he is still reincarnated in the body of
theyyam
dancers today. With the establishment of a cult, a shrine and a
theyyam
, the angry spirit is propitiated and calmed, the dead are redeemed and morality is seen to triumph over immorality, justice over injustice.
This obsession with caste infringements and the abuse of upper-caste or courtly authority, with divinity, protest and the reordering of relations of power, is something that Hari Das believes lies at the heart of this ritual art form, and he sees
theyyam
as much as a tool and a weapon to resist and fight back against an unjust social system as a religious revelation. Two months after seeing him in performance, when I next met Hari Das again to ask him about all this, he was not wearing a
theyyam
costume; indeed he was wearing nothing but a grimy loincloth, and his torso was smeared with wet mud.
‘I didn’t think you’d recognise me,’ he said, wiping sweat and mud from his forehead. He pointed to the well from which he had just emerged, pickaxe in hand.
‘There was one Brahmin last month who worshipped me during a
theyyam
, reverently touching my feet, with tears in his eyes, kneeling before me for a blessing. Then the following week I went to his house to dig a well as an ordinary labourer. He certainly didn’t recognise me.’
‘How do you know?’
‘There were five of us in the team, and he gave us lunch. But we had to take it outside on the veranda and there was no question of being allowed into his house. He used an extra-long ladle so that he could serve us from a safe distance. And he used plantain leaves so that he could throw them away when we had finished: he didn’t want to eat from anything we had touched, and he told us he didn’t want us to come inside the house and wash the dishes ourselves. Even the water was left for us in a separate bucket, and he did not even allow us to draw water from the well we had dug for him. This happens even now, in this age! I can dig a well in a Namboodiri [Brahmin] house and still be banned from drawing water from it.’
Hari Das shrugged his shoulders. ‘Many of the upper castes have changed the way they behave to us Dalits, but others are still resolute in their caste bigotry, and refuse to mix with us or eat with us. They may pay respect to a
theyyam
artist like me during the
theyyam
itself, but outside it they are still as casteist as ever.’
We sat down by the edge of the well, and Hari Das cleaned his hands in a bucket of water that one of his team brought over. ‘
Theyyam
turns the world upside down,’ he explained. ‘If the Brahmins advise you to be pure and teetotal and vegetarian, a
theyyam
god like Mutappan will tell you to eat meat, to drink and be jolly.’
‘You think the
theyyam
can help the lower castes fight back against the Brahmins?’
‘There is no question – that is the case,’ said Hari Das. ‘Over the past twenty or thirty years it has completely altered the power structure in these parts. The brighter of the
theyyam
artists have used
theyyam
to inspire self-confidence in the rest of our community. Our people see the upper castes and the Namboodiris bowing down to the deities that have entered us. That self-confidence has encouraged the next generation, so that even those who are not
theyyam
players have now educated themselves, gone to school and sometimes college. They may still be poor, but their education and self-esteem have improved – and it’s
theyyam
that has helped them.’
I asked: ‘Is it that the
theyyam
stories provide inspiration?’
‘Certainly,’ replied Hari Das. ‘Many of the
theyyam
stories mock the Brahmins and the Nairs. They criticise them for the way they treat their fellow human beings, especially us Dalits. Let me tell you one story of the deity known as Pottan Devam. Our ancestors turned it into one of the most popular of all
theyyams
, the
Pottan Theyyam
, and used it to show the Brahmins that they couldn’t just treat us like dirt.’
By this stage, the entire well-building team had emerged from the hole in the ground, many carrying baskets of stone and mud, and were sitting around on the ground, axes and buckets to one side, listening to what Hari Das had to say.
‘One day,’ he continued, ‘according to the story of the
Pottan Theyyam
, the great god Shiva wanted to teach the Brahmins a lesson. He wanted them to stop being so proud and chose a very clever way to achieve this. He decided to humiliate the highest and cleverest of all the Brahmins of Kerala, the great saint and teacher Adi Shankacharya. This was a man who was very near to Enlightenment, a great saint, but who was held back from achieving Nirvana by his own arrogant pride, and his refusal to see the common humanity he shared with all men, whether high or low in rank.
‘So one day, to teach him a lesson, to clear his mind of these notions, and unseat him from his pedestal of pride, Lord Shiva and his wife Parvati played a joke on him and took the form of a poor landless Pullaya [Dalit] couple, and their son Nandikesan accompanied them.
They were dressed like day labourers – rather like I am now – covered in dirt and mud from the fields. Worse still, Lord Shiva made himself smell of meat and drink, and swayed around as if he had spent the whole night drinking toddy. To complete the effect, he placed a great pitcher of toddy under his arm, and in his right hand he held a half coconut shell which he used to drink the spirit.
‘In this state, they came across Adi Shankacharya just as the saint was crossing the narrow causeway that led across a paddy field. In Keralan society, it was always the rule that Pullaya and other low-caste persons should jump in the mud of the paddy rather than obstruct the path of a Brahmin, but in this case Lord Shiva and his family kept heading straight for Shankacharya, lurching drunkenly from side to side as he did so, and asking the old man who was coming towards them to move aside.
‘Shankacharya of course was furious, and berated the three of them. How dare a family of polluted, stinking, drunken, meat-eating untouchables cross the path of a pure and unpolluted Brahmin? “You smell as if you have never taken a bath in your entire life,” he shouted. Such a thing had never happened before. If they didn’t all step down off the causeway, immediately, Shankacharya said he would make sure that all three Pullayas were beheaded – this crime, he said, not even a god could forgive.