CHAPTER 14
The Teyyam Tradition of Kerala
Rich Freeman
The tradition of worshipping teyyams, the local deities of northern Kerala,
through costumed spirit possession and dance, is surely one of the most perform-
atively engaging and sociohistorically profound of those Hinduisms we call
“folk” found anywhere in India. Performatively, these hundreds of gods each
have their unique costuming, make-up, and insignia, and they are danced as
part of annual festivals in public rituals of worship by spirit-possessed profes-
sionals who incarnate them in thousands of family, caste, and community
shrines across this region. Historically, teyyams literally enshrine the legacy of
the way local deities, often themselves the apotheoses of human ancestors, have
alternately contested or come to terms with caste-Hinduism, as their lives are
liturgically recounted and ritually enacted from a largely subaltern religious
perspective.
Theteyyamtradition illumines a number of interesting issues for the student
of Hinduism, whether from the perspective of the history of religions or from
that of the social sciences. Regionally speaking, teyyamworship is demonstra-
bly part of those ancient and cognate patterns of institutionalized spirit posses-
sion that were shared as a religious paradigm across the cultural zone of south
India that we identify in kinship and linguistic terms as “Dravidian” (Trautmann
1981). In its ritual and institutional stability, teyyamexemplifies how south
Indian cults of possession and ancestor worship may have articulated with, and
synthetically given rise to, the local cultural form of temples and enshrined
images associated with high Hinduism. It further suggests how those beliefs
and practices labeled “tantric,” which are generally recognized to underlie the
A ̄gamic ideology of temple-installation and worship, served historically and in
the present to mediate between high Hindu practice and possession-worship
(Freeman 1998).
From the vantage point of social science, teyyamaffords an equally fascinat-
ing perspective on the caste-dynamics of this process, both ethnohistorically,