In theyyam the performer stops representing the deity and becomes it

A season rather than a single festival

Theyyam is performed in the shrines and sacred groves of north Malabar through the cooler, drier part of the year, with performances at hundreds of small kavus rather than at a handful of famous venues. Each shrine has its own dates, fixed by tradition and by its own community.

That decentralisation is the first thing to understand. There is no single theyyam festival to attend; there is a season during which, on any given night somewhere in the region, one is happening.

The performances usually run through the night and into the morning, with the most striking sequences often in the dark hours before dawn. This is not a scheduled evening entertainment, and treating it as one is the surest way to miss the thing itself.

The transformation is the substance of it

The preparation takes hours. Facial designs are applied in layers of natural pigment in complex patterns specific to the particular deity, elaborate costume is built up around the performer’s body, and enormous headdresses of wood, cloth and palm are assembled.

At a defined point the performer is handed a mirror and looks at himself in the completed form, and it is at that moment that the deity is understood to enter him. Everything before it is preparation and everything after it is the god. Onlookers behave differently from that point onward, and so does the performer.

What follows includes dance, drumming, and in some forms interaction with fire that is physically extraordinary — leaping into embers, wearing burning material — as well as speech. The theyyam addresses the assembled people directly, hears their difficulties and gives blessings, and this is the part that most visitors do not anticipate.

A social order briefly turned upside down

The performers come overwhelmingly from communities that were, historically, excluded from the temples of the very people who now stand before them seeking a blessing. For the duration of the performance the usual hierarchy is inverted, and the person at the bottom of it speaks with divine authority.

How much this inversion means outside the ritual has been debated for a long time by people who know the region far better than any visitor. One reading is that it provided a channel for grievance and dignity; another is that a licensed reversal for one night can help a hierarchy persist rather than weaken it.

What is not in doubt is that the tradition is sustained by hereditary performing families, and that the work is arduous, seasonal and not well rewarded in proportion to what it demands. Anyone attending should be conscious of what they are looking at, and of who is bearing the cost of it.

The forms are many and they are not interchangeable

There are a great many distinct theyyams, each a particular deity, ancestor or hero with its own colours, headdress, songs and story, and a shrine will perform the ones that belong to it. A visitor seeing two performances in different villages may be seeing entirely different beings.

Several of the forms commemorate people who died violently or unjustly and were afterwards deified, which gives some of the performances an edge quite unlike the celebratory register of a temple festival elsewhere in the state.

The music is percussion-led, with the chenda and other drums driving the dance, and there is sung narrative that establishes who the deity is and how it came to be worshipped there. Without any of that context the visual spectacle is still remarkable, and it is a fraction of what is happening.

Going to one, rather than to a show of one

Hotel and resort performances exist, are labelled as demonstrations, and are not the ritual. They can be a reasonable introduction to the appearance of the form. They are not an occasion on which anybody believes a deity is present, and the difference is the whole subject of this article.

Finding a real performance means asking locally in the Kannur and Kasaragod districts, where people know which shrines have dates coming up. A local contact is close to essential, both for information and because arriving at a village shrine at two in the morning with no idea of the etiquette is not a good plan.

Dress modestly, ask about footwear, sit where the community sits, and do not walk into the space the theyyam is using. Photography is frequently tolerated and occasionally not, and the sensible course is to ask the organisers rather than to assume; a camera pushed into the middle of a blessing is an intrusion in any tradition.