A week ago when I visited my village with my cousins and walked out of one of the small shrines, it was twilight: that time on earth just seconds before the light fades into night. One moment you could see the fading light of the sky through the leaves; the next moment the same patch was inky black. The temple set in a sort of dip in the natural contour of the land has a long narrow path leading in and out of it which seems hewn out of the hill itself with walls of mud and foliage rising a good seven feet on both sides. By the time we stepped out and retraced our steps, the people approaching us from the opposite direction were shadows. For no particular reason, I felt a thrill of apprehension.
For a few minutes we walked along that by-lane unlit by electricity. “Do you remember the stories when we were young?” asked my cousin, adding how we were afraid to even look at a cat or a cow after dark when the petro-max flared only in the verandah and there were oil lamps in the rest of the house throwing huge shadows everywhere. Fragments of memories flitted across the years.
In the backward and unelectrified villages of Kerala 50 years ago, it was not difficult to manipulate fears drawn from medieval times locked into deep beliefs in serpent lore and forces both unseen and unknown. Chathan, kuttychathan, odiyan and yakshi. Where did they reside? How did they kill and maim and terrorise into submission? Even rationalists and qualified engineers raised by European teachers, locked their windows and latched their doors at night.
Odi vidya is linked with black magic and is used to demolish enemies. Therefore, those people who engaged in Odi Vidya were known as Odiyans. It was widely performed by people belonging to certain communities. To perform Odi Vidya against a person one needed to know certain personal details about him or her such as birth: date, month and the star under which he/she was born.
It is believed that after completing various rituals, the Odiyan breaks a little stick. With it breaks the victim’s backbone, leading quite naturally (or unnaturally ) to his end. “What’s an Odiyan?” my friend had asked me when I told her about Kerala lore. I explained as clumsily as my eleven-year-old understanding permitted that an Odiyan was a spirit harnessed by one who knew the black arts and deployed its power turning the Odiyan into a sort of ‘hired gun’. They were let loose on enemies. They could see at night. They attacked from behind you. They came in the form of familiar animals but there was always one feature or limb missing. It might be a leg, a ear, an eye or the tail. Sadly, perfectly harmless creatures with some part of their physiognomy missing were thrashed to death. Other explanations were that the Odiyan knew the arts of black magic with which they acquired different shapes — not just of animals but perhaps, of a rock or a wicket gate which would appear in unexpected places and shock the victim.
To achieve their goals for which invisibility was a key strength, they sought something to be found only in the unborn human foetus. Therefore, pregnant women were especially vulnerable. There are other accounts that their sorcery extended to appearing to the viewer as something but being, in truth something else. In fact, the Odiyan could choose what image of itself to project.
Such powers, both suggestive and otherwise, are present all over India. And so grow legends about mysterious and secret powers that control and can be controlled by people who train in the twilight zone. Though discouraged by post-industrial rationalism and modern education, these figures of folklore and superstition still occupy popular imagination straying into both film and popular literature.
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