“Theyyam as a folk genre and performance is a creative and ritual invocation of the people who had been killed and silenced by the hegemonic structures of social power,” according to Dr. Rajesh Komath, a faculty in Social Sciences and coordinator of KR Narayanan Chair for Human Rights and Social Justice, Mahatma Gandhi University. Dr. Rajesh who is also a Theyyam artist was speaking on “Writing Self and Narrativizing Performance” at the Human Geography Web-Lecture organized by the Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension (IUCSSRE), MGU.
Dr. Rajesh said that “the life of the Theyyam performer—being a vulnerable social entity living on the margins of society as an untouchable body—expresses his own vulnerable life putting the life of the persons, male and female, who had been killed and subjected to social atrocity, humiliation and exploitation.” He characterized Theyyam as “a creative and ritual expression of dissent and resistance of the oppressed.”
Dr. Rajesh pointed out that “the energy of the performer to articulate these lives in the form of dance, songs and possessed state of mind comes from this social isolation of the dramatis personae memorialized as Theyyam. The dancer impersonates his past as the text while society looks on the performance of the performer.” Dr. Rajesh further extrapolated that “even before social reformers critiqued unequal caste order and the injustices inflicted upon lower castes and classes, a Theyyam like ‘Pottan’ had questioned the irrelevance of caste hierarchy. It had also negated the hegemony of the Vedic tradition in the expressive mode of Theyyam,” he added.
Dr. Rajesh said that “Theyyam or the self of the dancer is a story of the failed people who stood against social inequalities and injustices.” Therefore, this mode of ‘writing self’ is, in a way, writing culture and society. “The mythical narrations of the Theyyam and its subaltern critical standpoint as the politics of the performance have never been separated in the cultural geography of north Malabar.”
Dr. Rajesh also highlighted the importance of auto-ethnographic mode of writing culture putting self in context. As a traditional performer of the Theyyam, he has elucidated his life-story of becoming the god and goddesses of the villages of North Malabar. Dr. Rajesh said that “this narrative itself is about the secret art of performance and its sociopoetics.” “The self is an epistemological standpoint that has been systematically introspective and written about.” This written text, in turn, becomes a narrative text of the performance which has great academic value in the new frontiers of Social Science research, he pointed out.
