Nine Lives

by William Dalrymple

  “For my first performance I was to be Guligan the Destroyer, and wear an eighteen-foot-high headdress. I don’t think I have ever been so frightened in my life. I was worried about silly little things: what happened if I needed to pee in the middle of a performance? What would happen if I fouled myself? But in the event, my first performance went very well.

  “All I can remember is going to the green room, getting made up and putting on the costume. Then I went to the Guligan shrine, and bowed my head before the deity, praying with folded hands. Usually the deity comes when you look in the mirror and see your face as the face of the god; but on that first occasion it happened even before I had looked, when I made the gesture of lifting my hands above my head. This is a formal invitation for the god to enter you. This act of worship, this call, directed at the heavens, brings the god down. If you pray to God with a sincere heart and focus on one deity with all your mind—like Arjun focussing the aim of his arrow on the eye of the fish in the Mahabharata, so that you can see nothing but that which you are aiming at, and the rest of the world does not exist—then that is the moment when you cease to be the dancer and become instead that deity. From that moment it is not the dancer who dances, but the god.

  “Things are unclear after that. I remember ceasing to feel like a man. Everything, body and soul, is completely subsumed by the divine. An unknown shakti [sacred energy] overpowers all normal life. You have no recollection of your family, your parents, your brothers and sisters—nothing.

  “My first sensation on coming back that first time was nervousness: about whether my god and the audience and especially my father had liked the performance. I felt a contrast between my body, which was tired from the exertions and having to carry this weight for several hours, and my heart, which felt very light, despite all my worries and concerns. There was a sensation of relief, a bit like the end of a headache. Then my father came to the changing room and congratulated me, telling me it was well done, and I remember feeling as if some great thirst had been quenched.

  “After that I lost all my fear of performance, and I knew for sure that this was the sacred path I was meant to follow.”

  The following evening, after he had finished work, Hari Das joined me again. We went to a street restaurant in the main bazaar of Kannur, and ordered appam and stew. He looked exhausted, and I asked which was more tiring: building wells, policing Tellicherry jail or performing theyyam all night?

  “Theyyam is the most exhausting,” he replied. “No question. During the season a dancer cannot eat properly or sleep after dark—you are dancing all night, almost every night. The god blesses you and you find the strength somehow. All you can do is rest between performances, and sleep all day to recoup your strength. If you do not do this, your body will give way. Theyyam dancers have a very low life expectancy; most die before they hit fifty. It’s very demanding: the costumes are very heavy and we use strings to tie the costumes on and these rub and inhibit the blood circulation. Many of my colleagues turn to drink, because toddy gives you strength and helps you to make the facial expressions.

  “That said, all these different jobs are tough. The jail work is the most frightening, but the least demanding physically. All you have to do is wander around all day with a lathi [cane] and avoid getting knifed. There is no satisfaction at all in that job—the only point of doing it is the cheque for Rs 6,000 that arrives on the first day of every month. Nothing else.

  “My second job, as a well builder, is different again. As a labourer you live by the sweat of your brow.” Hari Das opened the palms of his hands to show the calluses and blisters. “There is some little satisfaction in that job, getting a well built properly, with all the stonework nicely done. You’ve met my team. Every day we shovel and dig and line the walls of wells for the houses of farmers, usually Namboodiris or Nairs. When the well gets deep—fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty feet—we have to suspend ourselves on coir ropes and pulleys and dangle ourselves down the well shaft, sometimes resting on wooden slats or discarded car tyres. It’s difficult and can be very arduous. We keep going down, lowering the platform as we go, and when we hit water we have to remove the slush in baskets. Sometimes we slip, and some of my friends have had quite serious injuries that way. Very occasionally the well collapses and when that happens we can get really badly hurt. This is always a fear, but we still have no option but to carry on and to finish the job. It’s dirty work, in every sense. My wife won’t let me near the house until I’ve had a proper bath.

  “As a labourer you sweat blood on the roads or inside the well shaft. But in theyyam you have to invest body, heart, mind and soul. If you do not feel for the story your eyes will be soulless and without expression. The blood has to come to your face from your heart. The hardest technically is the Vishnumurti theyyam, especially the opening scene where the demon king Hiranyakashipu doubts the existence of the god Narasimha, and to punish him, Narasimha, who is half-man and half-lion, breaks out of one of the pillars in his palace, smashes open the wall with his mace and devours him, tearing out his heart and drinking his blood.

  “It is demanding mentally too. When the theyyam artist is setting out for a performance, however sad and despondent he is inside, he cannot show it on his face. He has to appear happy, and he should spread goodness and good cheer when he arrives in a village. But being a theyyam artist is also the most satisfying, and the only job of the three that really brings in both money and satisfaction.

  “My wife certainly prefers it, as theyyam makes me famous in the villages. Before I was married, all the girls were interested in me for this reason, too. To be honest, there is a lot of unrequited love in a performer’s life. They are meant to respect us as vehicles of the gods, but actually many of the girls who are watching the performance are thinking of quite different things. It’s natural, I suppose. Many of my friends say I shouldn’t complain, but I don’t like it. Things can get very complicated. It is difficult to lead a happy domestic life and have admirers. In this job it is important to have a good reputation—one scandal could destroy you. So I keep these women at arm’s length.

  “Brahmins are another problem. Twenty or thirty years ago they were very uppity. Now they are better, but they still have all the power. When they watch theyyam they have this sense of discomfort, as they know that the stories often criticise their caste, and seek to reform their behaviour. There are many thottam songs, for example, that tell stories showing the importance of doing good acts to your fellow men, reminding the Brahmins that their bad acts to those of lesser birth than themselves cannot escape the scrutiny of the sun and the moon which watch over everything. Their bad acts will not go unnoticed, and the songs advise them instead to adopt good and kind ways. Sometimes they tell this in a very angry manner. At other times these lessons are told very gently and poetically.

  “One of my favourites tells the story of two disciples of a guru, called Chaitra and Maitra. One day the guru gave them one rupee each and took them to two empty rooms. He asked them to use that one rupee to fill the room. Maitra rushed out to the bazaar and tried to find something for one rupee with which he could fill his room. Of course there was nothing for that price. And then he thought: ‘I will go to the garbage seller,’ and from him he bought a mountain of stinking rubbish and proudly piled it high in his room. But Chaitra meditated in his room and then calmly went out and bought a matchbox, an incense stick and an oil lamp. He lit the flame, filling the room not just with light but also a beautiful fragrance.

  “When the guru came to inspect the two rooms, he turned away in disgust from the room with the garbage, but happily walked into the illuminated room which smelt of jasmine and sandalwood. The song tells the listeners to ponder the beauty of the story, and the lesson it contains: that good acts and good karma will bring people to you and cause them to love you, but bad acts will disgust them and send them away.

  “Despite the criticisms they contain, many Brahmins still believe and have reverence for the theyyams, and whe
n their priests and temples and astrologers are unable to solve their problems, they come to us and ask the deities for advice. In fact people everywhere in this part of Kerala are still very devoted to theyyam; all the different Hindu castes, and even some of the Muslims and Christians too, though they can be more secretive in their devotions. I think people like it because in a temple or a church you see only an inanimate image. Here you see the god in the flesh and you can speak to him and ask him about your worries. People believe very strongly that in a theyyam the god speaks to them directly. That is why people will travel a long way to see a performance, and once there will patiently queue to have a word with the god.

  “As for the future, it’s true that many of the small shrines to village deities have gone, and many of the small local gods and their stories have been lost and forgotten. But of late I sense that there has been a revival. Some villages who neglected their theyyams found that their crops failed and they experienced dosham—misfortunes of some kind or another. So they consulted astrologers, who advised calling us back to begin celebrating the different village theyyams again.

  “In other places, some of the more famous village shrines are now transforming themselves into big temples and people are coming all the way from Cochin and even Trivandrum to see the performances. People have even begun to sell posters and DVDs of the more celebrated theyyams. And the different political parties have all started supporting different deities—the RSS has adopted one theyyam deity, even though they are really a party of the upper castes, and the CPM support another, even though they are supposed to be atheists. So there is new patronage coming in, and it is possible to make a much better living than my father could ever have imagined.

  “Certainly this generation seem much more interested than in my father’s time. Back then, many of the people in the towns dismissed what we did as superstition, saying that there is nothing in the Vedas about theyyam and that it is all a load of Dalit nonsense. For all the development and technology we now have, people still have not forgotten the power of the theyyam. They still know, for example, that a Pottan Theyyam can stop even the worst epidemics, and that other theyyams have the power to give jobs or help women conceive healthy children. One Brahmin came to my house last week saying he had been out of work for six months, despite going to the temple and praying every day. Yet after attending one of my theyyams he found a job in the Collectors’ Office the following day. He said the theyyam did what his own family temple had failed to do.

  “I hope my two boys will take on my mantle when they are older. Already they are showing some skills. One is three, and the other is five. I feel good when I see them playing at theyyam and when they ask me to beat a drum for them. The only worry is money. Both my boys are at school, and if in future they can earn more money by learning some other skill, who knows whether they will carry on the family tradition? Some of my friends who are theyyam artists have educated their children and they have risen to be police officers and even military personnel. Sometimes these children take a leave of absence and come home in the winter to perform the theyyams, but with many professions that is impossible. As our people rise up and become more educated, I fear for the future. Who in the villages will still be able to take off three months to do this work? We will see.”

  Nine months later, I was back in Kerala for Christmas, and went up to Kannur to see Hari Das. It was again the theyyam season, and I timed my visit to coincide with the day on which Hari Das was performing in the same forest kavu shrine where I had met him the previous year.

  I arrived early one morning, between the end of a night theyyam and the beginning of the day performance. People were milling about the clearing in the teak forest, plumping themselves down where they thought they could have the best view or, in the case of some of the ladies, moving white plastic chairs under a tarpaulin which had been erected to one side. The performers were sitting on a bench outside their makeup hut, yawning; one of the dancers was curled up on a palm mat snoozing in the shade nearby. Hari Das was again being made up to play the Vishnumurti theyyam, and while I waited for him to appear, I chatted to some of the devotees who had come for the performance.

  Prashant, a large, dark-skinned man of around thirty, newly returned from the Gulf, had sponsored the performance, and was directing matters from his seat on a log at the side of the clearing. He had been away for two years in Saudi Arabia doing construction work and had liked it: “I made lots of money,” he said. “Those Saudis are tough fellows, but they know how to reward their workers.” He was sponsoring this performance to say thank you to his village theyyams for his safe return with all his savings intact. There was a nice irony, I thought, in the money of the most puritanical and intolerant of Wahhabis being used to fund such a fabulously and unrepentantly pagan ceremony.

  Beside Prashant was his childhood friend Shiju, who had come all the way from his job working in the railways in Chennai for the performance. “In 1995, when I was thirteen years old, I was diagnosed with cancer,” he told me. “It was non-Hodgkins lymphoma and I underwent chemotherapy in Chennai. After a while the doctors said there is only so much we can do for you—now you just have to turn to God. My grandparents, who live in a village not far from here, came and told the goddess Bhagavati about me. She told them that within a month I would be completely well. Her power strengthened the hands of the doctor who took care of me, and I made an immediate, miraculous recovery. As no one—least of all the doctors—could explain it, we all believe that it was the goddess who cured me. Since then my family have never missed a single theyyam at this shrine. Each year we come all the way from Chennai to seek blessings and give thanks.”

  We were still talking when the drumming began. Within a few minutes it was loud enough to hurt the ears, thumping into the body with an almost physical impact. I withdrew some distance from the shrine and the makeup hut, and took my seat in the front row of the crowd, as the thottam song of invocation was sung.

  This time, Chamundi was the first deity out, a much more sinister theyyam than any I had witnessed the previous year. Red-faced, black-eyed and white-armed, with rouged lips, large red metal breasts and a halo of palm spines that looked like the blade of a giant circular saw, the deity emerged into the clearing rattling her bracelets and hissing like a snake. She circled the shrine, her face distorted and twitching from side to side, like a huge lizard. Her mouth opened and closed silently, her ruff of palm spikes swivelled and every so often she let out a loud cockatoo-like shriek. There was something agitated, disturbed and unpredictable about this eerie figure strutting malevolently around the edge of the crowd, glaring every so often at some individual who met her gaze; yet there was also something unmistakably regal about her, demanding attention and deference. Two priests, stripped to the waist, approached her, heads bowed, with a bowl of toddy, which she drank in a single gulp.

  As she was drinking, the drums reached a new climax and suddenly a second deity appeared, leaping into the clearing with a crown of seven red cobra heads, to which were attached two huge round earrings. A silver-appliqué chakra disc was stuck in the middle of his forehead, and round his waist was a wide grass farthingale, as if an Elizabethan couturier had somehow been marooned on a forgotten jungle island and been forced to reproduce the fashions of the Virgin Queen’s court from local materials. His wrists were encircled with bracelets of palm spines and exora flowers. It was only after a minute that I realised it was Hari Das. He was unrecognisable. His eyes were wide, charged and staring, and his whole personality seemed to have been transformed. The calm, slightly earnest and thoughtful man I knew from my previous meetings was now changed into a frenzied divine athlete. He made a series of spectacular leaps in the air as he circled the kavu, twirling and dancing, spraying the crowd with showers of rice offerings.

  After several rounds in this manner, the tempo of the drums slowly lowered. As Chamundi took her seat on a throne at one side of the main entrance to the shrine, still twitching uneasily, the Vis
hnumurti theyyam approached the ranks of devotees, in a choreographed walk, part strut, part dance. All of the devotees and pilgrims had now respectfully risen from their seats or from the ground, and stood with heads bowed before the deity.

  In one hand the Vishnumurti held a bow and a quiver of arrows; in the other a sword. These he used to bless the devotees, who bowed their heads as he approached. With the blade of the sword he touched the outstretched hands of some of the crowd. “All will be well!” he intoned in a deep voice in Malayalam. “All the darkness will go! The gods will look after you. They will protect you and be your friend! Do not worry! God is everywhere!” Between these encouraging phrases in the local dialect he muttered a series of Sanskrit mantras and incantations. The personality of the deity was quite distinct from that of Chamundi—as benign and reassuring as the latter was disturbing and potentially dangerous, even psychotic.

  The deity now returned to the shrine, and taking a throne, looked on as the various priests and attendants prostrated themselves before him, each offering a drink of toddy. Like Chamundi, Vishnumurti drank the offering in a single gulp. This was the signal for the spiritual surgery to begin and the devotees to queue up and approach the deities for individual advice and blessing. Vishnumurti’s queue was noticeably longer than that of the goddess; only the brave—mostly elderly women—approached Chamundi.

  One by one the petitions were presented. Old women asked for grandchildren, unemployed men for jobs, young women for husbands and farmers for good harvests. To each, Vishnumurti offered reassuring advice: “Your family will be showered with blessings,” he said to one woman. “The evil times are over. Peace and calm will return to your family home. You will be like Saraswati, illuminating the darkness.” “I will look after you,” he said to an old man, “and I will take care of your sons. Both your kids are going to be fine. Don’t take the path towards evil and you will always be able to lift your head in public! Never worry.” To a little boy: “Listen to your parents and you will do well in your exams and have a bright future.”