“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.
“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.