By:

Since from my childhood, I used to watch teyyam, the sacred performance in our village. Teyyam, the indigenous way of worship in North Malabar fulfills several social and cultural functions. All the Hindus, irrespective of varna and jati, view it as their god. The whole system of teyyam is working on the nature-man interaction in a given space. Many teyyam deities are the transfigured nature, i.e., serpent, monkey, leopard, etc. Therefore, here I make a humble attempt to discuss about how teyyam, a technology of the society, which was shaped in North Malabar. The teyyam emerged from the nature-man interaction. It has long been established that ecology plays a vital role in conditioning the culture, and that the geographical situation of a locale goes a long way in shaping the needs, customs, behaviour and thoughts of the people. These are space, time, local resources available in the immediate neighborhood, and the cultural elements that evolved due to man’s utilization of them. So also in the case of the teyyam too, ecology plays a vital role in producing a culture. Teyyam also serves as a social mechanism, a technique to tackle the social depressions experienced by the bottom-layers. They are the targets to brutal harassment by the superiors in the social hierarchy. They neither rebelled nor rise voice but, indirectly protested and condemned all grievances by converting the heroes and ancestors, who fought against social evils, to teyyams. Teyyams like Chonnamma, Iyepalliteyyam, Kurikkalteyyam, Muchilottu bagavathi, Pottanteyyam, Pulimaranja thondachan, etc are best examples to this. Hence, the people in North Malabar make use of teyyam as an effective tool or technique to tackle certain day-to-day problems, since it evolved through nature-man interaction in a given space.

Stream: Cultural Sustainability

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

At present I am working as a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, University of Madras, Tamil Nadu, India. I was born and brought up in a village, Payyanur in Kannur district of the Kerala State, India. My father was a folk-performer, teyyam performer, and my mother is a traditional local mid-wife. I did all my school education in government school. I got graduation in BSc. Zoology, and MA in Social Anthropology. Now I am doing PhD. Research on, the Malayans of North Malabar and their Teyyam in Kannur University, Kerala, and preparing to submit my thesis very soon. As I belong to a socially and educationally backward community, I want to be a reputed Teacher as well as a Researcher. So, I always try to update my students and myself. I am interested in taking my students to different places to carry out fieldwork, because they can learn many things from the real life situations rather than secondary sources. I already have done four ethnographic studies in Kerala as well as in Tamil Nadu (including the Kurichchan, the Malayan, the Todas, and the Sholagas). I have great interest in the grass-root level developmental activities. Accordingly, I worked as a Key Resource Person to Payyanur Municipality in Kannur, Kerala, in its De-Centralised People’s Planning Campaign, Janakeeyasuthranam. In addition to that I served the Municipality as the convener to Scheduled Caste’s Development Committee, and later as the Vice-Chairman to the same committee. I actively involved in all steps in local planning and project implementation. I wish to study further on teyyam, and similar folk traditions in Tamil Nadu. I believed that such studies have great significance particularly the documentation of each and every movements of people becomes a demand of Anthropology. I hope that it would be a great contribution to our culture, knowledge, and life.