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 farther 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 statues 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 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 onto 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 present 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 in 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 that, 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.