Kasargod, Kerala
All Photos © Mohit Gupta, All Rights Reserved

An audiovisual attempt at capturing the exhilarating Theyyam experience, I wrote about in my last post.

“For twenty minutes now a troup of six sweat-glistening half naked, dark-skinned Dalit drummers have been raising their tempo: the insistent beats they are rapping out on the goat-hide ‘cenda’ drums with their small, hard tamarind-wood drumsticks are getting gradually yet distinctly louder and faster and more frenzied. The song telling the myth of the god about to be incarnated has been sung, and in front of the shrine, at the centre of the clearing, the first of the dancers has just been possessed – seized by the gods, as they put it…”

- William Dalrymple in Nine Lives