times. When it comes to the enduring ritual offices themselves, the shrine
priests, officiants, and of course, the teyyamperformers are all filling their titled
roles according to a highly regulated hereditary, caste protocol. Different caste
names and conventions of address according to caste status from the medieval
order all apply in the rites themselves, in and through the very voice of the god’s
possessed vehicle. Even the demarcations of ritual space still create zones of caste
inclusion and exclusion, keyed to accord with the traditional purity norms of the
controlling shrine members. Discriminations, supposedly extinct, that would
create revolt in other, more secular public forums, reappear and are embraced as
ancestrally charged and potent mandates for accessing divine powers in this reli-
gious context.
In a wider extension of these same kinds of relations, we find former political
organizing principles and institutions resurfacing as well. While the largely
Marxist movements have gone far in refiguring patterns of land control and
associated social inequalities at many levels we would consider “political,” the
earlier order in which religion and polity were intertwined in a more pervasively
felt set of institutional ritual “norms” (a ̄ca ̄ram), is preserved in relations between
and across the network ofteyyamshrines. Thus, hierarchical relations between
Brahmanical temples and lower-caste teyyamshrines still find overt ritual
expression, as with the earlier mentioned rite of transferring flames from
temples’ lamps to their subordinate shrines. Processional prestations (ka ̄l
̄
ca) of
produce and goods are routinely made from former subjects and their shrine rep-
resentatives to their former overlords as part of the celebrations. Former tenants
seek ritual “permission” from their historical landlords and chiefs to conduct
their festivals and accord them special honors and dignities in the shrines. Re-
ciprocating ritual visits persist between former martial allies and dependants
during each others’ teyyamfestivals. These and many other complex relations of
“traditions and rites” (a ̄ca ̄ra ̄nus.t.ha ̄nan.n.al.) reenact, without apparent protest or
embarrassment, many of the so-called “feudal” sociopolitical hierarchies that
Kerala so prides itself on having eradicated in secular forums. Many of the shrine
ritual offices and the various dignities of the teyyamdancers themselves are still
ritually ratified and their “ritual names” (a ̄ca ̄rappe ̄r) conferred by the des-
cendants of kings, who become once again “ra ̄jas” for the occasion, at their
“palaces” (ko ̄t.t.a ̄rams). This culminates in the fact that the territorial norms that
regulate and define different sub-traditions within the practice ofteyyam, still
largely conform to the territorial boundaries of the otherwise defunct medieval
kingdoms.
For the historian, humanist, and social scientist alike, the persistence of
this whole complex obviously raises perplexing problems for the construct of
“modernity” itself, and the place of religion and tradition within it. The peren-
nial vigor of traditions like teyyamsuggest ways that secular modernity itself
may sometimes be relativized by a fundamentally religious reframing. It is clear,
in any case, that the Hindus of northern Kerala maintain the prominence of
teyyamin their social lives not as a mere curiosity or relic of tradition. In addi-
tion to the motives we may problematically recognize as religious, my sense is
324 rich freeman