Free Nine Lives by William Dalrymple

ropes under the Chinese fishing nets, while naked little boys stand soaping themselves, up to their ankles in river mud. The houses are covered with trellises for the climbing roses, and washing is hung up to dry between palms.  Flotillas of ducks quack and stretch their wings. An egret suddenly swoops low over the water, a flash of white against the green.
    All this seems the most gentle, benign and benevolent landscape imaginable; yet in reality Kerala has always been one of the most conservative, socially oppressive and rigidly hierarchical societies in India. When the British traveller and doctor Francis Buchanan passed through the area at the beginning of the nineteenth century he found caste inequalities and restrictions so severe that a warrior- caste Nair was considered within his rights instantly to behead and kill a lower-caste man if the latter dared to appear on the same road at the same time. The exact distances that the different castes had to keep from each other were laid down in arcane legal codes, as was the specific way that different castes should tie their lungis or even dress their hair.
    As late as the early years of the twentieth century, lower-caste tenants were still regularly being murdered by their Nair landlords for failing to presents sweets as tokens of their submission. Today people are rarely murdered for violations of caste restrictions – except sometimes in the case of unauthorised cross-caste love affairs – but in the presence of persons of the upper castes, Dalits are still expected to bow their heads and stand at a respectful distance.
    These inequalities are the fertile soil from which theyyam grew, and the dance form has always been a conscious and ritualised inversion of the usual structures of Keralan life: for it is not the pure and sanctified Brahmins into whom the gods choose to incarnate, but the shunned and insulted Dalits. The entire system is free from Brahmin control. The theyyams take place not in Brahminical temples but small shrines in the holy places and sacred groves of the countryside, and the priests are not Brahmin but Dalit. The only role for the upper caste is when, as land owners, they sometimes have the right to appoint a particular family as hereditary theyyam dancers for a particular shrine, rather like a village squire in England having the right to choose the parish priest.
    The word theyyam derives from daivam , the Sanskrit word for ‘god’. Some scholars maintain that the theyyams of northern Malabar are a rare survival of some pre-Aryan, non-Brahminical Dravidian religious system that was later absorbed into Hinduism’s capacious embrace. Others argue that the theyyams were tolerated as an acceptable safety valve to allow complaints against the misdeeds of the upper castes to be expressed in a ritualised and non-violent manner. Either way, there is no doubt that today they are a stage on which the social norms of everyday life are inverted, and where for a short period of the year, position and power are almost miraculously transferred to the insignificant and powerless.
    The stories around which the theyyam performances are built range from tales of vampire-like blood-drinking yakshis , devis and witches, and the myths of serpent and animal deities, to the deeds of local heroes and ancestors. Many, however, concentrate on issues of caste, and of the social and moral injustices that caste tensions have provoked. Frequently they question the limits of acceptable behaviour, especially the abuse of power, as the upper castes struggle to keep their place at the top of the caste pyramid and oppress the lower castes in order to do so. In many of the theyyam stories, a member of the lower castes infringes or transgresses accepted caste restrictions and is unjustly punished with rape (in the case of women) or death (in the case of men, and sometimes women too), and then is deified by the gods aghast at the injustices perpetrated by the Brahmins and the other