down to the apotheoses of local chiefs, warriors, and military henchmen. Other
teyyams have a more caste-specific focus, representing milieus special to a par-
ticular lifestyle, and sometimes in conflict with other castes in terms of social
authority or status relations around ritual purity and pollution. Familial levels
of concern generate teyyamdeities as well, around authority and social controls
within the family, around peculiarly marked ancestral figures, and, significantly,
in terms of the oppression and wrongful deaths of various women who become
goddesses subsequent to their deaths. Finally, there are various individuals who
set themselves apart in special achievements that entail the quest for and control
of divine powers: healers, scholars, sorcerers (mantrava ̄dis), martial arts experts,
hunters, and even traders who operate in dangerous territories, may all be
singled out as individuals whose surfeit of power marked them as divine.
This spectrum of human–divine powers, being arrayed in an inherently hier-
archical system of social dominance, frequently takes on an agonistic and con-
testatory character, lending teyyamits characteristic narrative and performative
violence. Among those teyyams of human derivation, as earlier noted, some
clearly have their origins in the vengeful ghosts of lower-caste victims of social
or political oppression, or of women, often murdered by their own male kinsmen
in the enforcement of gender hierarchy. Others arise from great hunters or
martial champions, whose low-caste origins and rise to power clearly harbored
elements of challenge to the sociopolitical status quo. Still others are powerful
warriors to begin with, who murder and conquer other peoples, establishing
their own new order of power relations at the cost of pre-existing polities (figure
14.2).
Similarly for those of even initial godly status, there are usually relations of
social hierarchy or conflict that lead to violence against their often demonized
Others, in which social elements of relative status, power, and imputations of
impurity drive supernatural struggles that inevitably draw human characters
into the fray, establishing charters for lasting institutions and relationships. A
typical example might be the case of Kun.d.o ̄r
̄
a Ca ̄mun.d.i (figure 14.3). She is ini-
tially created by S ́iva to kill the demon Da ̄rikan in the Kerala-specific recasting
of a standard Puranic theme. Since this Ca ̄mun.d.i, however, is polluted from
the carnage of her successful battle, she is banished from S ́iva’s presence and
ordered to travel to local holy bathing spots (tı ̄rtha), where she must seek purifi-
cation. Instead of finding the enjoined purity, however, in visiting such places
she forms agonistic relations with Brahmans, whose rites she disrupts, and who
accordingly struggle, unsuccessfully, to banish and exorcise her. She similarly
afflicts a local king and his kingdom, committing cow-slaughter in his barns to
feed her appetite for blood, attacking the local temples in her demands for a place
as a deity, and finally killing the Brahman priests when this is refused. Through
such acts she eventually extorts acts of placation from the populace, is promoted
to the status of a goddess, and is enshrined by a Brahman chief of Kun.d.o ̄r
̄
a
(whence her name), under the patronage of the king. As I have demonstrated at
length in my larger work (Freeman 1991), such narratives frequently recall real
political and social struggles, in our historical sense, as well as forming divine
the teyyam tradition of kerala 319