Holy waves, fortune-tellers and winged elephants: in Tamil Nadu

Our first experience of the south India state of Tamil Nadu is the busy town of Kanyakumari, sitting on the farthest southern tip of the Indian peninsula at the confluence of three bodies of water: the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. It is the experience of land’s end that attracts a few curious travelers like ourselves. But the main attraction, drawing hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims, are the three converging seas, highly auspicious and worth at least one bath in a lifetime.

When we arrive the seashore is ringing with the voices of excited bathers. For one this means a first hesitant step into ocean waters; for another, a touch of the sea water to their forehead, then a quick splash forward, arms waving, daring the depths. Men pose for that perfect Kanyakumari shot, then another, and another. Children play in tidal pools, groups of women sit in gentle waves rolling over nearby rocks. Four young men stand waist-deep while others climb their knees then shoulders to form a pyramid, then tumble into the brink, then clamber up again, whooping, laughing.   

Up on the sandy shore, men slip in and out of bathing suits and underwear. Women in soaked layers of fabric lay out their long saris to dry, some red, some ivory, a colourful patchwork.

The pyramid men, like many other young men here, wear black bathing trunks or black sarong-like panchas with narrow bands of gold or orange trim, snug on the hip, handsome on the trim, all stomach on others. We have met these men before – Ayappa pilgrims – moving by the bus full through Kerala and Tamil Nadu, off to their main forest temple in the Western Ghats, but touching down at other auspicious sites across the south, like here at Kanyakumari. (Ayappa is a deity born of Shiva and Vishnu’s beautiful female form, Mohini. I have read that the Ayappa cult is growing rapidly.)

These Ayappans, often celibate before pilgrimages, are a restless, enthusiastic bunch on the road, singing and chanting ebulliently on the fly, eating quickly by their buses. More than one seems ecstatic at the moment of plunging into the ocean, then rising from it. Our guidebook says what we can easily imagine: that “they are known for their lusty calls-and-responses – Swayiyee Sharanam Ayappan, Give us protection, god Ayappa – reminiscent of English football fans.”

At the seashore temple sits the virgin goddess, Devi Kanyakumari. Although non-Hindus are not permitted in the inner sanctum, we understand the Devi wears a diamond nose stud whose brilliance compares well with the best of Newfoundland lighthouses, and is said to have once functioned in a similar manner.

More shrines and memorials sit a ferryboat ride away. These include a 40-metre tall monstrosity dedicated to the Tamil poet-philosopher Thiruvalluvar, a fellow who is said to have lived sometime between the 2^nd century B.C. and the 5^th or 8^th century A.D., or is a “Homer”-like stand-in for many pre-modern Tamil poet-philosophers. Whatever the case, given the nature of the man’s life-work, the Thirukkural, which is said to carry a message of simplicity and truth, I’m certain I saw statue weep.

A few metres inland, marketers have set up shop along the only paths to and from the blessed waves. Pretty well everything in bad taste and practical need is covered, from garishly painted plastic Ganeshes and other icons to plastic palm trees, shells, bead necklaces, blankets and winter shirts, sparkly girls’ dresses, drinks of coconut milk, batteries and plaster-cast Shivas, as well as travel products, including suitcases to replace the ones that fell apart coming here. Clever palm and card readers are parked at temple gates, along with a man with a parakeet that pulls your fortune card and someone drawing lines in the sand. Business is good. 

Among the many oddities of oddities of this land’s end is how the shoreline is lined with an armada of Christian churches, including a very large Catholic edifice, as if there was once a plan to run raids north into idol-worshipping Hindustan – one man’s idol being another man’s god (and vice versa). The night we arrive a pre-Christmas service is underway, which we wouldn’t have known if the whole several hours (liturgies being read, Indian choral voices singing hymns in various keys and meters) hadn’t been broadcast across town through loudspeakers, then launched once more at sunrise just after (other loudspeakers blazing from a minaret) the Muslim call to prayers. Speaking of the sun, apparently on some days of the year in these parts you can see it setting and the moon rising on the same horizon. A strange, Alice and rabbit hole kind of place.

As we move north and east through Tamil Nadu, visiting Dravidian temple towns, we are in yet another India: a Dravidian-rooted peoples with distinct physical features, another language and, so we read, a sense of otherness from, and often defiance of, the north. It was from these eastern coasts that Indian sailors, fishermen, traders, priests and kings, stone carvers and bronze idol-makers (crafts still so alive in the region) ventured across the seas to ports throughout South-east Asia, prompting the beginnings of new combinations of local and Indianized beliefs, rituals, crafts, architecture and social forms. Wander Angkor Wat, Borobudur, Prambanan, the Batu Caves, Champa, Ayutthaya and you are walking through an Indian Hinduism and Buddhism deeply internalized in distant lands. 

Here, today, in the crowded Hindu-Dravidian temples of Tamil Nadu, we watch with little comprehension the personal rituals and collective ceremonies whirling noisily around us.

A god is carried on a palanquin, hurriedly but ceremoniously, to his consort where they are bedded down together each night. The devout fall belly on stone floor in front of garlanded black-bodied images draped in green, gold, red and orange fabrics. We stare wide-eyed at the profusion of sculpted, vividly-painted gods, goddesses, serpents, winged horses (ashvas), eyes bulging, ecstatic or distressed we can’t tell. We get lost in mazes of pillars and walls and sanctums within sanctums, votive candlelight populating the half-light with pilgrims become black apparitions, shadowy ghosts stretching up stone walls, across smoke-stained ceilings. Our bare feet follow the steps of millions over millennia, sometimes slipping along butter-smooth stone, often stepping through votive oils, wax, rice, crumbled sweets, nasturtium petals.

For us, such outsiders, these are both wondrous and punishing places – teeming, frantic. We end each day exhausted.

Theyyem: turning the world upsidedown

4: 30 a.m. The full moon hangs in an Indian ink sky, looking over Edakkad village in northern Kerala. We pile out of our auto rickshaw and walk along the edge of an earthen square, the village’s Pathan Pura Temple, 15 or so metres along each side, lit with fluorescent bulbs high overhead. Shrines of different sizes and types sit on each side, each glowing in candlelight: a small building painted in red and white and glowing from a door at the top of several steps, an open shelter within which sit branches and fruit, a table with more offerings. 

Near the latter, a human-shaped figure sits straight-backed in a chair, a green sisal skirt hanging around his knees, dark lines across his white painted face, chest and arms, his eyes inhumanly large and black. A small crown is being adjusted on his head by several make-up assistants. Later he will dance into the embodiment of the god Gulikan, walk on glowing ashes, don an eight or so metre high headpiece resembling a towering narrow palm leaf, leap over a table and wheel around this earthen temple until coming to rest again in the chair where we see him now.

By full sunrise, three hours later, he and three other men, each from the lowest castes, will dance themselves from mortals into gods: first Gulijkan, then Muthapan, Thiruvappan and Karnavar, names familiar to everyone in the area. Taken over by a god, becoming god during the dance, these men-gods will listen to the wishful and the needy, and bestow assurances of good fortune on all who approach them – including men with great wealth and political power, Brahmins, men from the city who will prostrate themselves in the dust at the feet of these lowest-humans-become-god. Here – in what is called theyyem, the ceremony of theyyem – tradition, faith, ego and need turn the day-to-day ordinary world upsidedown.

Theyyem, according to the reading I have done, is a spirit-possession ceremony held during the winter months at village shrines throughout the northern Malabar region. More than 400 versions of ritual are said to exist, each with distinctive costumes, jewellery, body painting, face make-up and gigantic headdresses or mudi.

Unlike kathakali (which we experienced a few days later), where actors impersonate gods, in theyyem the shamans, always male, actually become the deity they evoke. They acquire his magical powers and, as if to demonstrate the point, perform superhuman feats such as walking on hot coals and dancing with fantastically elaborate and towering head pieces.

By experiencing the theyyem, devotees believe they can partake of the powers of the god, appealing to him, say, for a child or the healing of some ailment or good luck in business.

Theyyem is especially fascinating for this aspect: the shaman-dancer-god is always (and apparently must be) a member of the lowest caste, for instance a cleaner or part-time prison keeper, who during the theyyem season becomes all-powerful in the experience of believers. Many people approach the god for blessings, but most remarkable is the approach of the very powerful who, in all other circumstances, would very likely not even acknowledge the man-god in his ordinary life. During theyyem, however, dealers in millions and powerful officials prostrate themselves in the temple dust, touching the shaman-god’s feet, appealing for help. Interestingly, interviews with theyyem shamans (in William Dalrymple’s chapter on theyyem in his “Nine Lives”) suggest they, as regular human beings, are fully aware of this temporary  inversion of power and even delight in it.

(This kind of reversal of status and influence is, according to my copy of the “Handbook of Living Religions,” widespread across India: traditional priests, diviners and shamans, working at the outside edges of established Hinduism, “nearly always” come from the lower castes and exert considerable influence over communities and the powerful in their priestly role.)

As with other dance rituals and story-telling forms in this region, masks (face painting and worn masks), costumes (including detailed body paint as well as elaborate skirts, headdresses, bells and jewellery) and gestural movements each have great importance and are give considerable attention. Dressing and make-up can involve hours of intimate, precise and delicate activity between the shaman-dancers and make-up artists – all men – in ways that give the proceedings a distinctly homoerotic atmosphere. 

In the theyyem rituals we saw, the dancing shamans also had, or took on, what seemed to my eye a bisexual identity: in their face and upper body make-up (accentuated lips and breasts), in their  body and facial gestures, and in their hip and leg movements. Whether this is intentional and an element of the tradition, I don’t yet know, but it certainly felt as if it is.

Although we arrived in the dark at 4:30 a.m., the ritual had begun the evening before and continued late in the night. When we arrived, the musicians – drummers and horn players – were fast asleep. The first theyyem figure of the pre-dawn ritual was just being made up, the only one, incidentally, made up in the full sight of everyone present; all others were hidden from general view as their body paint and costumes were being applied, then appeared suddenly as the fully visual embodiment of a god.

Meanwhile, at this still quiet hour, the dance or temple square is being swept and reconstituted from the night before, oil candles lit, garlands of flowers set in place, masks and other props also placed just so, ready for later use. A place, a home is being prepared for the gods, just as the masking and costuming – then the dance – are like invitations to the gods to enter the body. Men pass around cups of chai to some 60 or so Indian devotees, local villagers and a few tourists. Off in the dark, fires are being built under great cast cauldrons in readiness for the hungry multitudes to arrive over the day.

During the next three hours, four shamans dance into gods, sometimes alone, sometimes together. Each dances into faster and more daring movements accompanied by louder and more intense music. The music especially – sharp staccato drum beats, blaring horns – builds an atmosphere of intensity, excitement, anticipation.

At various stages of the dance and at its finale, ten or twelve men – in simple white dhotis but with the movements of the wealthy, the powerful, like they just stepped out of fine clothes and chauffeured cars – bow in turn before the god or prostrate themselves in the dust at their feet, offering supplicating prayers along with material gifts and cash. In response, each receives the god’s hand on their head or shoulders and, we are told, assurances that all will turn out as wished.

By the end of the final dance, all the visiting Indians – a growing crowd of men, women and children – queue before the seated gods (the most orderly queue we have seen in India), each supplicant speaking to some need, each offering gifts (taken away by the god’s assistants) and each in turn receiving godly assurances.  The shamans will dance again later in the morning. The crowd, we are told, will continue to build. Something of a feast will be served.

I won’t forget this morning.

Now … thinking of this days later, it feels as if there was something toned down and modernized about what we experienced. It used to be, I have read, that the shamans rolled through fiery ashes and danced into body spasms through to god-being. Perhaps this is still the case in some temples on some nights. Our shamans, on the other hand, seemed to take a few symbolic steps in scattered ashes and their trances seemed acted, and not convincingly, at least to me. I read that there is another modernized dimension to theyyem. It has become highly fashionable among wealthy and politically powerful south Indian urbanites to bring their wishes and money to the gods, hoping for an edge, but perhaps also wanting a foot in the powers of both worlds: New India and the felt-mysteries of ancient folk-spiritual India. From what we saw, the man-shamans are pleased to oblige.

                                                

What was far more engaging for me were the theyyem preparations – lighting the oil lamps, painting the body and face of these men-gods, the powerful sense of other than ordinary energy in those masks, the meticulous, gentle transformative process of making man into shaman, the concentration approaching the ceremony. Fascinating, too, was watching the devotees’ personal appeals to the gods, the Malayalam spirit voice seeming to run pell-mell out along the god’s long black flickering tongue, the god’s cavernous speaking mouths, the supplicants’ bent heads, listening, so attentive, waiting for the needed assurance. And then there is that phenomenon of turning things upsidedown, and especially the man-shaman-god’s delight in this.