If it can be tamed, it can be staged. The proscenium is where art comes to defang itself in order to extend its life. Koodiyattam’s overnight temple performances made into two-, sometimes, three-hour-long abbreviations on stage, Sadir’s (an early dance form) eros flattened into Bharatanatyam, their primality tethered, the live fire and the acrid smell of burning coconut fronds disallowed, unwieldy faith flattened into temperature-controlled rooms. Art is rendered legible and, by being made legible, is laundered of its rough-edged excess.

In catching the tail end of the Theyyam season (which runs from November until May) in the temples and groves of Malabar, where you shed your body weight in sweat in the moist and dense tropical heat watching performances spread and congeal through the night and into the morning, fractured with long narrations, food breaks, punctured with bursts of intense performance, with the chenda drumming so loudly, so vibrantly, your heartbeat begins to synchronise with it—the question of Theyyam’s form looms large. The performance holds more than the human body should endure—as a performer, as a spectator. But in turning performer into god, deivam or Theyyam, and spectator into believer, the question of legibility is swapped for permeability: can you enter this performance?

As wild as they were—with a chicken pulled from two ends until its body snapped—the Theyyams I saw were a far cry from the scholar Wayne Ashley’s description of the aftermath of one such performance in 1979: “Slaughtered goats are scattered everywhere, lying in pools of blood outside the temple compound. Decapitated chickens have been thrown together in large separate piles. The god Karin Camundi’s mask lies discarded atop one of the mounds of carcasses, soaked with blood and feathers.... Some of the sacrificial goats hanging from trees are being skinned and prepared for selling. The temple grounds are empty after the previous night’s festivities, when hundreds of anxious spectators crowded together, pressing to catch a glimpse of their god gulping down the blood of the sacrificial animals. The flies come with the day.”

If it has lost this wildness, what more will it lose as the decades age? And how will this loss render it more legible?

The divine is no cosy being in Theyyam; it is screaming, jumping through fire, barrelling on the ground, hurling into crowds, chasing kids and women, strutting with feet strapped on 3-foot-high stilts, guzzling alcohol, decapitating chickens, wearing headgear five times the body’s height, and caked in paint that peels off with every wash of sweat. It approaches the sublime by centring the body; the beauty strikes the fear of god in you. Men surround the Theyyakaran, the performer, fanning him, wiping his sweat away with a wet cloth, adjusting his attire, his hair. A masculine air—entirely male, although there are exceptions—is wafting.

Often, the divinity being venerated comes from stories of total violation, violations that were neither avenged in the lifetimes of the people concerned nor in their afterlives. Men who were killed on the battlefield and whose body parts were scattered everywhere, for example. This legend becomes the divine Kathivanoor Veeran, and the question of how someone incapable of protecting himself can be deified is replaced by his fertile, fiery presence in the Theyyam, where as a lover and a warrior he shall fulfil your wishes, even if his own were left curdled. Power is a thing summoned by the body of the Theyyakaran. These tales do not possess easy morals, nor allow for easy morality.

The caste question complicates the performance

Theyyam is performed by members of the SCs or the STs, patronised by dominant-caste communities or tharavadus (homestead). The caste question complicates the performance and, therefore, complicates the possibility of it being appropriated by the proscenium.

Theyyam performers have long argued for fair payment, with their bargaining power dented by their caste status. In the 1980s, for example, the Dutch scholar Erik de Maaker threw light on how low payments were normalised, and even when payment was made in kind—often as paddy—the quality of the grain was inferior to that sold in the market. It is true that for the duration of the performance, the performers are considered divine, but this divinity is inscribed by the demands and allowances of the dominant-caste patron. What is this divinity you insist on praying to but cannot see as essentially human? Perhaps it is easier to imagine someone as god, who can be warded off with a performance of piety, a touching of feet, by demanding blessings, than to see them as totally, equally human, which would require not the performance but the embodiment of rights.

While the performance itself horrified colonial officers, and the flowing alcohol and animal sacrifices also caused the ire of social reformers, including Sree Narayana Guru, the communists were in a quandary about their posture towards Theyyam. Gilles Tarabout writes in the essay “Malabar Gods, Nation-Building and World Culture”: “On the one hand, entrenched as it was in the rural structures of power, Theyyam was condemned for legitimizing the existing land tenancy relationships, and therefore for perpetuating a local ‘feudal’ order. On the other hand, it was possible to see the stories of past heroes, who were at the centre of many Theyyams, as epics of resistance against such an exploitative order.” Pottan Theyyam, for example, stages an encounter between a Dalit and Adi Sankara, with the former vanquishing the latter in debate.

Besides, to get rid of Theyyam would leave a lot of people unemployed. It was, Tarabout argues, the Marxists who, through their scholarship and interest in the political possibilities of Theyyam, encouraged the form, even as they were averse to the status quo it sustained. There was a deep ambivalence at the heart of their involvement, one that sustained and grew Theyyam.

The proscenium offers a salve, bringing in more women, higher pay, increased visibility, spaces for confluence, and a dignity of labour to the oppressed-caste performing bodies. There have been earlier strained attempts in this direction. In 1982, when Theyyam was performed at the Asian Games opening, for example, there was some anxiety. Kotakattu Kannan Peruvannan remembers performing a non-ritualistic version of it, skinned of its religious fervour, tied merely to its rhythmic and visual excess. It was later reported by Wayne Ashley that one of the performers was even banned from performing in temples after this export, due to accusations of “selling out”.

How would the stage handle the notoriety of Guliga, who jousts playfully, teasing kids, running after them, stealing jackfruits, and leaving a trail of the leaking sap? He runs into the grove, children running after him. He runs back from the grove, running after the children. He collects them in a corner, makes them dance, and scatters them just as quickly, switching between being feared and being a friend. The power is not merely about the body but the encounter between the performer and spectator. Can the proscenium allow for that encounter: of fleeing and returning, of the sublime and the surreal?

I am not arguing for a provincial stagnation of Theyyam as it is, where money remains scarce for performers, who are locked into their caste status, often hazarding their health by jumping through fire and swirling swords, with little to no government support or pension, and with that unchanged masculine waft continuing in the guise of tradition.

I am wondering if a middle path exists between its desacralisation and its stagnation.

At a Karichamundi Theyyam, seated in the front row, I was immediately warned that the Theyyakaran would roll into the audience and that he is especially known to jump at women; the legend involves a pregnant woman snapped in half. The warnings bore fruit. Karichamundi lunged into the audience, who immediately scattered, the women fleeing in droves, only to later come back and settle into prayer. Karichamundi rolled on the ground, dragged her body—his body, really, but playing her body—and rushed and grumbled. There can be no meaning made here. For it offers an altogether new language of performance, one that can be translated to a stage, but every act of translation would feel like a necessary violence, one we are unable to enact on Theyyam just yet.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.

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