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.”