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Authors: William Dalrymple
Tags: Hewer Text UK Ltd
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the top of the palm trees and collect the fermented coconut juice.’
‘So you are only part-time gods?’
‘Only during the theyyam season, from December to February. We give up our jobs and become theyyam artists. For those months we become gods. Everything changes. We don’t eat meat or fish and are forbidden to sleep with our wives. We bring blessings to the village and the villagers, and exorcise evil spirits. We are the vehicle through which people can thank the gods for fulfilling their prayers and granting their wishes. Though we are all Dalits even the most bigoted and casteist Namboodiri Brahmins worship us, and queue up to touch our feet.’
His costume is now on and he picks up the mirror, preparing to summon the deity. ‘For three months of the year we are gods,’ he says. ‘Then in March, when the season ends, we pack away our costumes. And after that, at least in my case, it’s back to jail.’
Separated from the rest of India by the towering laterite mountain walls of the Western Ghats, the wet, green and tropical slither of coastline stretching along the south-west flank of the Indian subcontinent is perhaps the most fecund and bucolic landscape in India – ‘God’s own country’, as the Malayalis call their state.
For many centuries Kerala was the Indian terminus of the Spice Route, and the most important trading post in the great medieval trading network which stretched from Venice through Egypt down to the Red Sea and across the Gulf to India. The ancient trade in the spices and pepper that for centuries grew – and still grow – so abundantly here brought generations of incomers to this part of India, all of whom in turn slowly became absorbed into its richly composite civilisation.
Kerala was probably the biblical Ophir from where King Solomon received apes, ivory and peacocks. It was at this period that pioneering Jewish traders seem to have first crossed the Red and Arabian seas to bring the pungent flavours of India to the Middle East and the Mediterranean world. The now-vanished Keralan port of Muziris, described by Pliny the Elder as primum emporium Indiae , was the spice entrepôt to which the Roman Red Sea merchant fleet headed each year to buy pepper, pearls, spices and Indian slave girls for the Mediterranean market.
The Arabs followed the Jews and the Romans. Then on 18 May 1498, the Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama reached the Malabar coast from Europe, intent on wresting the spice trade from the Moors. The beach where Da Gama landed, a little to the north of Calicut, is today marked by an obelisk. Two hours’ drive further north is the coastal town of Tellicherry, site not only of Hari Das’s notorious jail, but also of one of the earliest East India Company trading posts.
Behind the grim black stone walls with pepper-pot sentry posts, and beyond the gatehouse with its Elizabethan belfry decorated with unexpected statutes of two Jacobean gentlemen in cavalier breaches and wide-brimmed hats, lie a succession of spice warehouses, arsenals and dungeons. Here the very first Britons in India stocked their merchandise and made plans to expand out from their warehouses to seize control of the wider hinterland. Some of them lie here still, resting in their domed classical tombs on the headland above the breakers where once were loaded the cargoes that went to spice the stews of Shakespeare’s London.
The almost unearthly fertility of the soil, which attracted centuries of merchants, still defines this land. Everything, it seems, is teeming with life here, and the life spills out from the backyards on to the backwaters and waterways, the wide lagoons and overgrown canals. From the steps of the canals comes the slap of wet cloth on stone where the women in smocks stand ankle deep in water, busy with their washing, or peeling their vegetables, or cleaning the day’s rice amid a scattering of blue water hyacinths. Nearby, their menfolk are repairing their boats or weaving coir
‘So you are only part-time gods?’
‘Only during the theyyam season, from December to February. We give up our jobs and become theyyam artists. For those months we become gods. Everything changes. We don’t eat meat or fish and are forbidden to sleep with our wives. We bring blessings to the village and the villagers, and exorcise evil spirits. We are the vehicle through which people can thank the gods for fulfilling their prayers and granting their wishes. Though we are all Dalits even the most bigoted and casteist Namboodiri Brahmins worship us, and queue up to touch our feet.’
His costume is now on and he picks up the mirror, preparing to summon the deity. ‘For three months of the year we are gods,’ he says. ‘Then in March, when the season ends, we pack away our costumes. And after that, at least in my case, it’s back to jail.’
Separated from the rest of India by the towering laterite mountain walls of the Western Ghats, the wet, green and tropical slither of coastline stretching along the south-west flank of the Indian subcontinent is perhaps the most fecund and bucolic landscape in India – ‘God’s own country’, as the Malayalis call their state.
For many centuries Kerala was the Indian terminus of the Spice Route, and the most important trading post in the great medieval trading network which stretched from Venice through Egypt down to the Red Sea and across the Gulf to India. The ancient trade in the spices and pepper that for centuries grew – and still grow – so abundantly here brought generations of incomers to this part of India, all of whom in turn slowly became absorbed into its richly composite civilisation.
Kerala was probably the biblical Ophir from where King Solomon received apes, ivory and peacocks. It was at this period that pioneering Jewish traders seem to have first crossed the Red and Arabian seas to bring the pungent flavours of India to the Middle East and the Mediterranean world. The now-vanished Keralan port of Muziris, described by Pliny the Elder as primum emporium Indiae , was the spice entrepôt to which the Roman Red Sea merchant fleet headed each year to buy pepper, pearls, spices and Indian slave girls for the Mediterranean market.
The Arabs followed the Jews and the Romans. Then on 18 May 1498, the Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama reached the Malabar coast from Europe, intent on wresting the spice trade from the Moors. The beach where Da Gama landed, a little to the north of Calicut, is today marked by an obelisk. Two hours’ drive further north is the coastal town of Tellicherry, site not only of Hari Das’s notorious jail, but also of one of the earliest East India Company trading posts.
Behind the grim black stone walls with pepper-pot sentry posts, and beyond the gatehouse with its Elizabethan belfry decorated with unexpected statutes of two Jacobean gentlemen in cavalier breaches and wide-brimmed hats, lie a succession of spice warehouses, arsenals and dungeons. Here the very first Britons in India stocked their merchandise and made plans to expand out from their warehouses to seize control of the wider hinterland. Some of them lie here still, resting in their domed classical tombs on the headland above the breakers where once were loaded the cargoes that went to spice the stews of Shakespeare’s London.
The almost unearthly fertility of the soil, which attracted centuries of merchants, still defines this land. Everything, it seems, is teeming with life here, and the life spills out from the backyards on to the backwaters and waterways, the wide lagoons and overgrown canals. From the steps of the canals comes the slap of wet cloth on stone where the women in smocks stand ankle deep in water, busy with their washing, or peeling their vegetables, or cleaning the day’s rice amid a scattering of blue water hyacinths. Nearby, their menfolk are repairing their boats or weaving coir
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