Content area
Full text
Abstract: This article focuses on Muttappan and the practice of teyyam in Kerala, South India. The growing power and increasing presence of this ritual practice and its transition from traditional sacred spaces into modern public spheres, including cyberspace, are analyzed in order to understand its inner dynamics and potentialities. Engaged with the quotidian aspects of human existence, the male divinity Muttappan-teyyam is a being of the moment who overcomes any bounding or hierarchizing force in his path. I argue that Muttappan's modernity has a decentering and destabilizing fluidity that appeals to all social classes. The ritual practice has put the arts and the state at odds, with the latter co-opting it to serve the state's purposes through tourism and spectacles that encourage national solidarity.
Keywords: assemblage, deity, modernity, Muttappan, potency, ritual, state, teyyam
In the context of religious and communal practice in the Indian state of Kerala, teyyam rituals are manifested by and identified with particular deities. One such, in the ritual complex of North Malabar, is the teyyam or deity of Muttappan. In contrast to the Brahmanic and hegemonic discourse of state ideology, Muttappan highlights the importance of teyyam as both deity and ritual in symbolic representations of community. Muttappan is in itself an image of power that unsettles all other images of state power and caste hierarchy.
My purpose here is to analyze the deity Muttappan in relation to the changing structures of the Indian state. This particular teyyam has the potency to deterritorialize and reterritorialize, continually reinforcing itself, asserting its autonomy and transgressing boundaries. Its potential to do this- and the way that it does so-will be examined in this article. My analysis of Muttappan will proceed by discussing the relationship between power and ritual worship, the politics of the devaluation of the latter as 'art', and the assertion of autonomy within caste structures.
I begin by presenting an instance of how teyyam emerged in the situation of a nascent colonial state coming up against an existing kingdom, with the latter trying to reassert its power while being eroded in the presence of the former. I will explore some of the ways in which colonial and post-colonial Kerala discursively constructed teyyam as 'devil worship', a process wrought within the rationality of...