In this seminar presentation, I examine the various interpretations of teyyam in order to understand its contemporary location both in the context of North Malabar and in the larger world. I look at it through three main modes of understanding: origin stories, the politics of textualization and of performance, and contemporary forms of circulation. From this I infer that teyyam appears to function as a floating signifier gathering possibilities as well as constraints. Although caste is recognized as integral to the performance and practice of teyyam, the ritual itself creates liminal spaces that allow for contest and resistance while simultaneously upholding older structures of ritual and social hierarchies. I argue for a broader notion of such hierarchies, that includes but is not limited to caste. I maintain that caste works in tandem with several other factors including the economic and political, vis-a-vis teyyam. As a result, despite teyyam’s close relationship with tradition, the former is constantly being reinvented due to the inherent adaptability of the latter proving that the ritual, as Turner describes it, continues to be essentially processual, flowing, and subversive.

My larger research is broadly located within the anthropology of body and possession, wherein I ask in specific relation to the practice and performance of the form Teyyam in North Kerala as to the kind of bodies involved in the ritual, and the nature of possession. I explore the dialectic between the human and the divine in this point of crossover and engagement through ethnographic research to understand the socio-cultural location of otherwise lowered-caste male bodies that perform their way into ritual divinity. My intent through this is to broadly explore categories of inclusion, exclusion, community, separation, that are reiterated, restated, or reshaped by Teyyam.

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