Nine Lives

by William Dalrymple

  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 a tool and a weapon to resist and fight back against an unjust social system as much 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, Shankacha
rya said he would make sure that all three Pullayas were beheaded—this crime, he said, not even a god could forgive.

  “Lord Shiva swayed around, and said, ‘All right, I admit I have had a drink or two. And it’s certainly been a while since I last had a bath. But your Honour, please: if I am to get down from this causeway maybe you could first explain to me what is the real difference between you—a fine, high Brahmin, as you say—and my family here, who you tell me are so unclean and filthy? You have asked me a question, now answer some questions of mine. Answer these questions satisfactorily and I promise you I will happily get down into the mud, and tell my wife and son to do likewise.

  “‘This is my first question: if I cut my hand and you cut yours, we both have red blood. Maybe you would like to tell me what the difference is, if any? Secondly, we eat the same rice, do we not, and from the same fields? Thirdly, do you not use the bananas my caste grows to offer to your gods? Fourthly, do you not use the flower garlands our women make to dress your deities? And fifthly, does not the water you drink and use in your temple rituals come from the wells that we Pullayas toil to build?’

  “Shankacharya could not reply to these questions, and seeing his stupefied silence, Lord Shiva asked him more questions, and continued to berate him. ‘Just because you use beautiful metal dishes to eat your food upon, and we use plantain leaves and cups of betel leaf, does this mean we are not the same species? You Namboodiris may ride on elephants while we ride on the backs of bullocks, but does that make us bullocks too?’

  “This relentless questioning not only confounded Shankacharya, it also made him wonder how it could be that an illiterate, ill-educated Dalit could ask such sophisticated and penetrating philosophical questions. So Shankacharya began to meditate, even as he stood there on the causeway of the rice field. Then his sixth sense opened and instead of the Pullaya and his family, he dimly began to perceive Lord Shiva, the Devi Parvati and their son Nandikesan. Shankacharya was horrified at what he had done, and there and then he jumped into the mud of the rice paddy and prostrated himself before his lord, reciting a series of slokas in his praise:

  Salutations, O Lord of the mountains!

  Salutations, O Crescent-crested Lord!

  Salutations, O Ash-smeared Divine!

  Salutations, O Rider on the eternal bull!

  Salutations, O Lord of Lords!

  “After Lord Shiva had forgiven him, Shankacharya asked a question in turn: ‘Tell me, O Lord, why did you take this strange form to present yourself to me, your most devoted devotee?’ To this Lord Shiva answered: ‘Truly, you are a wise man and well on the path to salvation! But you will never get there unless you understand that all men are deserving of respect and compassion. It was to teach you this that I took this form, for I realised that only then would you understand. You have to fight against prejudice and ignorance, and use your great knowledge to help people of every caste, not just your Brahmins. Only then will you attain true Enlightenment.’

  “Shankacharya bowed his head and replied: ‘Thank you, my Lord. Now I understand. But in order to make the generations to come also understand, I am going to initiate a theyyam which will celebrate you in your current form. Before I do that, however, I will consecrate some temples where I will install your idol in this form of the Pottan Devam so that we humans may worship you.’ So Shankacharya made the shrine, and it is this form of Shiva as a Pullaya that is today one of the chief deities of this part of Malabar, and this theyyam which is now among the most popular of all theyyams. It is also one of the longest,” added Hari Das. “I have seen Pottan Theyyam rituals which have gone on for twenty-four hours.

  “This happened thousands of years ago,” added Hari Das. “It was a form of true Enlightenment. The great modern reformers such as Karl Marx or [the Dalit political leader] Ambedkar are really only reinforcing the lessons taught to us by the great god Shiva.”

  A couple of hours later, after he had washed and changed, Hari Das came to the house I was staying in outside Kannur, on a bluff above the sea. We sat drinking chai on the veranda as the sun set, and he began to tell his story.

  “I grew up in extreme poverty,” said Hari Das. “Like me, my father was a day labourer, who also did theyyam during the season. Today theyyam can bring in much more than labouring—in a good season, after expenses, maybe Rs 10,000 a month—but in those days earnings were very meagre; maybe only Rs 10 and bag of rice for a single night.

  “I lost my mother when I was three years old. She had some small injury—a piece of metal pierced her foot—but it went septic, and because she couldn’t afford a real doctor she saw a man in the village instead. He must have made it worse. Certainly he failed to cure her. She died quite unnecessarily; at least that is what I feel.

  “To be honest, I can hardly remember her. All I remember is her kindness, and her kissing me and encouraging me to be good. But I am no longer sure whether the face I see when I try to think of her is actually her. There is no photograph. In those days no one in our community had access to cameras, or anything like that.

  “Within a year, when I was four, my father married again. I never lived with my stepmother. I am not quite sure what happened—presumably my father thought he could not cope—but I was given to my peri-amma, my mother’s elder sister, to look after. She lived in a different village, six miles away. The house had two rooms. It was unplastered, but it had a pukka tile roof. As my father had no money to give, my peri-amma had to pay for everything. I was lucky: although she was also very poor, she loved me, and was very good to me. So were my three stepsisters and my stepbrother. They were all ten years older than me, and they showered me with love.

  “My father would visit every so often, and I was fond of him, though in those days fathers were fathers and sons were sons. We would never play together—he was very formal with me, more like my guru—and sometimes when he came to visit I would run away rather than face the very strict interrogation he would give me about school. He had never been himself, and was completely illiterate, so he regarded education as very serious, almost a religious affair. My real affection was soon for my peri-amma, who was always there for me. I’m not sure about my stepmother. She’s all right, I suppose.

  “Maybe theyyam is in my blood, because although I never lived with my father, I always wanted to be a theyyam artist like him. Even as a child I would play at theyyam, beating a piece of tin to make a noise like the theyyam drums. As I grew older, I became very proud of him, and the sight of him being worshipped by so many people made me swell with happiness—who would not be proud to see their father being worshipped by the whole village? I went regularly to watch him performing the theyyam from the age of five, and by the age of nine I was certain that this was what I too wanted to do.

  “Eventually, soon after my tenth birthday, I went to my father and asked him to begin teaching me. He looked at me and said, ‘Hari Das, theyyam is your birthright, but your body is not yet strong enough. You have to be as strong as a wrestler to be a dancer. Just think of the weight of some of the costumes you will have to carry.’ I knew he had a point: some of the headdresses alone are forty feet high. So he asked me to wait and develop my body, and become stronger. This I did, practising weights with heavy stones, and wrestling and running and training every evening after school.

  “It was four years later, at the age of fourteen, that I finally began formal lessons with my father, and it was not until I was seventeen that I had my first performance. In between lay three years of intensive training. Together we made a temporary shelter, a shack of coconut leaves, which became my training place. First he taught me to drum, not on a real drum, but on a slab of stone which we would beat with sticks. This was to make me sensitive to the different beats and tempos of the theyyam drummers, for each theyyam has a different rhythm and you need to be aware of all the ways the drummers can subtly change the mood of a theyyam by altering the beat.

  “After that he would narrate the thottam story-songs that invoke the
deity of each theyyam, and these I had to learn by heart, so that I would get the words exactly right. Some are short, but a few of the thottams are very long: there is one Vishnu thottam that takes two hours to sing in full. Then, in turn, we learned the mudra [gestures], nadana [steps] and facial expressions for each of the different deities, as well as how to apply the makeup: it is critical that this is exactly correct for each of the different theyyams, for unless the dancer has the skills, and knows all the moves, the gods cannot incarnate fully in the dancer—it is like not having the right equipment to make a machine work. My father was a good teacher, formal and strict, but also very patient. Sometimes that was necessary, for I was a slow learner.

  “Finally, he borrowed money from the village money lender and bought me my first costume. Some of these are very expensive: the headgear—thallapaali—for some of the theyyams can cost as much as Rs 5,000, while one silver anklet can cost Rs 2,500.

  “Before my first peformance I was very nervous. I was ambitious to become a great theyyamkkaran, to have good improvisation and to add lots of colour to the traditional way of doing a theyyam. As a performer you can’t ever be boring, people lose interest, and I was constantly looking for ways to improve my performance; but I also feared failure. Unlike other Keralan dance forms such as Kathakali, theyyam is not a fixed composition—it depends on the artist and his skills and his physical strength. Also in a theyyam there is no screen between the performer and the devotees, so before you go out for your first performance you have to be as near to perfection as you can. You can train for the makeup and the steps and the story and the costume, but you cannot train for a trance—that comes only with a real theyyam performance.