sis between the various castes, in which similar conceptions of divine and
demonic powers, and similar technologies of control through animate and
inanimate mediums of “possession,” get differently realized according to con-
trastively more Sanskritic, versus more indigenous, linguistic and ritual idioms.
Here teyya ̄t.t.am grades into lower-caste mantrava ̄dam, just as surely as
Brahmanical tantric practice informs the mantrava ̄damof higher castes.
Thus the larger point to grasp in the relation ofteyya ̄t.t.amto both tantric doc-
trines and to mantrava ̄damis that popular religion and magic in south India
are both predicated on immanent local powers whose worship entails ritually
intensifying that immanence through divine “possession,” whether of normally
animate humans or through their inanimate surrogates. The natural imma-
nence of these powers is revealed in the fluidity of boundaries between the divine
and human, the living and the dead. Since these powers are immanently human,
they are also social, and thus we can see how teyya ̄t.t.am, putatively “low-caste”
religion, is actually and pervasively “popular” Hinduism. It was of course inti-
mately and integrally part of the life-world of all the laboring castes, but it was
simultaneously a powerful index of martial prowess and authority for all those
involved in traditional polity, and it also epitomized the dreaded Other of low-
caste religious power against which Brahmanism defined itself, and which it
therefore came to assimilate in veiled, but unmistakable ways.
Premodern Gods in Postmodern Kerala
One of the most remarkable aspects ofteyyamfor the historian of religion is
the extent to which belief-structures, ritual practices, and social forms from pre-
modern south Indian life-worlds seem to be stubbornly maintained, and even
celebrated, in the midst of modern, globalizing Kerala. Officially secular educa-
tional systems, where science and technology are at a premium, socially egali-
tarian institutions which deny, in principle, the relevance of caste, and a political
scene largely shaped, and frequently dominated, by a putatively Marxist party,
all sit cheek-by-jowl with teyya ̄t.t.am. We have reviewed the extent to which
divine and magical powers, their ritual harnessing and manipulation, the
continued life and presence of the ancestral dead, and their channeling through
incarnate possession vehicles all point to sustaining a worldview very different
from the empirical scientism of high modernity.
While there have been some avowedly “progressive” attempts to administra-
tively integrate and re-organize some teyyamshrines at a wider “community”
level, in my experience, these are for the most part rhetorical and symbolic; the
majority of these institutions remain clearly associated with hereditary lineage
control within particular castes, with offices, titles, insignia, and powers that
devolve in ancestral lines and that link them to the very historical identity of the
gods enshrined there. And in any case, these managerial concerns are largely a
matter of administering the economic resource-base of the shrine during festival
the teyyam tradition of kerala 323