Theyyam
തെയ്യം
Also Theyyattam, Kaliyattam, Thira.
Ritual art Kerala
What it is
Theyyam is north Malabar’s ritual in which a man becomes a god and is worshipped as one. A performer of a particular community puts on the makeup, the headdress and the costume, and at a point in the preparation the deity is held to enter him; from then until the end he is not a performer. He blesses, hears grievances, gives judgements and is treated as the deity by everybody present, including by people of castes that in ordinary life would be above his own. It is theatre only in the sense that it is watched.
How it is built
Over four hundred theyyams are known, each with its own face design, costume, story and song. The thottam is the song that calls the deity, sung by the performer himself in the lesser costume before the full one is put on. The mukhathezhuthu, the face writing, is done with rice paste and natural pigments over hours, in a design fixed for that deity. The headdress, the mudi, can be thirty feet tall. Many theyyams involve fire: the Theechamundi runs through a bed of embers repeatedly through the night. The performance ends when the deity leaves and the mirror is looked into.
How it is learnt
The question a family actually has
Hereditary, in communities including the Vannan, Malayan, Velan and Pulayan, learnt from the father from childhood by watching and assisting. A young performer begins by helping with the costume and the drum and may be fifteen or twenty before taking a theyyam, and the harder ones with fire are given later. The body training is for endurance rather than grace: a performance can run through a night with the costume weighing a great deal. The songs are learnt by ear and run to hundreds of lines.
Whose lineage is whose
Where a claim is contested, by whom
The communities that perform are among those the old Kerala caste order placed lowest, and the deities they embody are worshipped by all, including by the Nair and Nambudiri families whose kavus they perform at. That inversion, for the hours of the performance, is the fact everybody writing about the form returns to, and interpretations of it differ sharply: some read it as a genuine suspension of hierarchy, others as a licensed release that left the hierarchy intact the rest of the year. Both readings are argued in Kerala, and the performers’ own accounts are not uniform either.
Worth knowing
The mirror at the end
During the preparation, before the deity is held to have entered, the performer looks into a small mirror while the last of the face is finished. He is looking at the deity arriving in his own face. At the end of the performance he looks again, and what he sees is himself, and the deity has gone. The mirror is the hinge of the whole thing and the moment the performers speak about most carefully. Some describe it as a possession they do not remember; others as a complete and continuous awareness of being two things at once.
Speaking to the landlord
A theyyam hears grievances. A tenant who could not have addressed the landowner directly could, as a devotee before the deity, say what had been done to him, with the landowner present and obliged to listen and to answer to the god. Deities like Pottan Theyyam have songs that argue caste directly, asking what difference there is between the blood of a Brahmin and of an untouchable if both are cut. That these songs were sung to the faces of the people they indicted, by the people they were about, in the one setting where it was permitted, is the heart of what the form is.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Kerala
- Kannur and Kasaragod are the home, with the season from Vrischikam to Edavam and the daily Muthappan theyyam at Parassinikkadavu the one exception to the season.
- Tulu Nadu
- The bhuta kola of Tulu Nadu is the neighbouring form with the same structure, and at the Kasaragod border the two are performed by overlapping communities.
- Karnataka
- The coastal districts keep the kola, and the Dharmasthala daivas are worshipped in the same way.
Connected to
Deities
Temples
Related arts