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Paper short abstract

This paper explores intergenerational shifts among Vannan Dalit Theyyam performers, showing how dignity, livelihood, and caste identity are negotiated amid cultural valorisation, economic change, and enduring caste hierarchies.

Paper long abstract

Theyyam is a Hindu ritual tradition commissioned largely by upper-caste (Savarna) households and performed predominantly by Dalit communities in North Malabar, Kerala. Through the invocation of a deity into the body of the Dalit performer, Theyyam enacts both ritual authority and caste hierarchy. While often studied as a form of ritualised resistance, where performers voice critiques of oppression and inequality, it also remains a hereditary caste occupation that constrains economic and symbolic mobility.

Among the Dalit castes associated with Theyyam, the Vannan community maintains a long-standing relationship through cherujanmavakasham, the inherited right and obligation to perform. This claim offers ritual legitimacy but also binds families to caste stigma, coercive service, and social sanction, producing intergenerational desires for dignity through distancing from caste-bound labour.

In recent decades, Theyyam has been transformed through tourism, corporate patronage, and political appropriation as a celebrated cultural symbol of Kerala. This valorisation has increased performers’ visibility and economic opportunities, yet often erases the ritual’s caste foundations and critical edge.

Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper examines how different generations of Vannan performers negotiate livelihood, dignity, and caste identity within this altered cultural economy. It argues that caste polarisation is not a fixed binary but a dynamic field where hierarchy and critique, recognition and erasure, are continuously reproduced and contested. Vannan performers’ lives reveal uneven and reversible pathways in which mobility aspirations remain deeply entangled with caste reproduction.