Devotees, performers, academics and researchers of teyyam all agree that a predominant number of deities in teyyam are female although they are ritually danced by men. Collectively referred to as amma deivangal (Mother Goddesses) thereby invoking concepts of ‘maternal’ and ‘motherhood’, the myths of many of these goddesses veer towards meanings other than the maternal in the term’s normative understanding as life-giving or nurturing.



In this seminar, I explore three broad understandings of teyyam goddesses; as women who lived lives of precarity, as women who perform gender incorrectly, and as ‘non-native’ women settlers whose foreign-ness allowed them to live unconventional lives. The first two categories reveal a precariousness in the lives of women irrespective of caste and class location. One asks as to where agency was located in their figures as women and/or goddesses? Conversely, in the last category, did being foreign allow them certain liberatory potential as women who were exempt from conforming to cultural expectations? How did agency work in their case? As several works in women’s studies and feminist research have demonstrated and representations of women in popular culture have revealed, a woman’s place in Kerala society is unique due to the ambiguities and anomalies inherent in their interpellated subjectivity.



Postcolonial female subjectivity in India began as a complex pedagogical process of teaching women to be ‘ideal women’ subjects. Media, especially women’s magazines, and to some extent films and theatre in some parts of the country were deployed for this purpose. In Kerala, women’s magazines such as Vidyavinodhini, Sukhasamsi, Lakshmibai and novels such as Indulekha instructed women on how to be ideal modern female subjects. In films the ‘other’ woman was posited as a foil for the ‘ideal’ woman or as a warning of what might happen were she to stray from the ‘ideal’. While most of these studies focus on the period from when the printing press made it possible to print and circulate newspapers and magazines, many teyyam myths of ‘goddesses’ reveal oppressions and complex resistances of women to patriarchal strictures even prior to this. It may therefore be instructive to treat these narratives as micro-histories of the North Malabar region. Besides social mores, they reveal cultural anxieties that arose with new settlers, their religious practices, and the readjustment of social hierarchies. Such layering and sedimentation of oral tellings and new ritual modes likely produced changes to earlier versions. These changes in turn expose fissures in the construction of either single or linear stories. It is through these ruptures that the older myths continue to whisper their presence. Finally, one might also ask: are concepts such as ‘ideal’, ‘other’ and ‘expendable’ vis-a-vis women reverse projections onto myths in order to align with a specific view or toward the construction of a particular kind of society? Teyyam myths (along with many other mythical and legendary tales) therefore may function as a repository for contemporary issues pertaining to identity, subjectivity, community, history, nation, and politics.