Purity and violence: Sacred power in the Teyyam worship of Malabar

Abstract

This thesis entails a cultural anthropological analysis of the worship of local deities known as teyyams, found in the Malabar region of the Indian state of Kerala. The problem around which this study is organized is an understanding of sacred power (sakti), as represented in the current worship of teyyams and in the traditional narratives on which that worship is based. The methods used in this research include semantic analyses of interview materials, combined with a close reading of the texts of worship, as well as more standard social organizational field-work. The subject matter brought together includes observed teyyam-performances and festivals, the teyyam ritual texts, various historical works, shrine-charters and myths, and several case-studies of shrines in an ethnohistorical perspective. Theoretically, I am concerned with tracing continuities through time, and with relating teyyam-worship to the larger cultural region of South India and its many cognate ritual traditions. I posit that there is a coherent complex of values distinctive to this region which has been in dynamic inter-action with a normative "Sanskritic" Brahmanism, and that the discrepanies between these ideologies have been mapped into the caste system in relationships of dynamic tension. These tensions cluster around the different valuations accorded to sacred power (sakti) and its uncomfortable accommodation to schemes of Brahmanical purity as encoded into high-temple culture. The result of this mutual definition in the ideologies of power enables me to identify three grossly discrepant ideological systems which I label the 'brahmanical-', the 'warrior-', and the 'sorcerer-complexes', corresponding to the three broad caste-divisions of traditional Kerala society. The conflict between these complexes is traced through traditional sources down to present practice and belief. I argue both that a clear separation between divine power and political power does not apply in this culture, and that there are marked continuities with the past in the way social relationships are construed today through the perpetuation of myth and ritual and through the use of the metaphor of battle as reflecting the inherently contestatory nature of social life.

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