By Lights Camera Review | Culture & Cinema | ~2,500 words
Before Kantara became a phenomenon, before Rishab Shetty’s face was plastered across every film discussion in 2022, a ritual was already happening. It had been happening for over 2,000 years. Every December through May, in coastal Karnataka and parts of Kerala, a man would don a towering headdress, hear ancient ballads sung in his direction, begin to tremble — and stop being himself.
That ritual is called Bhuta Kola or Daiva Kola. And the more you understand it, the more you realise that the film — as visceral and genuine as it is — only caught a few seconds of something that takes all night to unfold.
This is your full guide.
What Does the Name Actually Mean?
Let’s start with the words themselves, because they carry everything.
Bhuta (also written as Buta, Bootha) comes from the Sanskrit root meaning “to be” — not the ghost-monster the word conjures in Bollywood. In Tulu Nadu, a bhuta is a guardian spirit: a being that was once human, or a totem of the natural world, who achieved divine status and now protects a specific community, land, or lineage. They are also called Daivas (divine beings).
Kola simply means “play” or “performance” in Tulu. So literally: a performance for the spirits.
The ritual is also called Daiva Nema, Bhootaradhane, or Daiva Aradhana depending on the form and the region. The word Nema refers to a version involving multiple spirits invoked in hierarchical order, while Kola typically honours a single spirit.
Where Does This Happen, and Who Practises It?
Bhuta Kola belongs to the Tuluva people — the native speakers of Tulu, a Dravidian language spoken in Dakshina Kannada, Udupi, and parts of Kasargod in Kerala. This coastal belt is collectively called Tulu Nadu, and it has produced one of India’s most distinctive folk-spiritual traditions.
The tradition is closely related to Theyyam, the more widely documented ritual from North Malabar. Scholars consider Theyyam to be a later, evolved form of Buta Kola — carrying the same logic of divine possession, elaborate costume, and oral epic, but adapted to a different coastal community.
The rituals run from December to May, timed to the post-harvest season, and take place either near village shrines (sthanas) or in private homes for family-specific ceremonies.
What Are Bhutas, Really? The Cosmology Behind the Ritual
This is where it gets genuinely fascinating — and where Kantara, to its credit, was philosophically on point even if cinematically compressed.
The Tuluva people believe in over 500 distinct bhutas. They are not gods in the Puranic sense. They exist somewhere between the human and the divine, and their stories are almost always rooted in real things: a farmer’s land, a fisherman’s sea, a tree, a wild animal.
Broadly, bhutas fall into several types:
Totemic/animal spirits — the most iconic of which is Panjurli, the boar deity. The story goes that a wild boar, raised as a pet by Parvati in Shiva’s garden, grew too ferocious for heaven. Shiva sent it to earth with a covenant: protect the people, receive their worship in return. Today, Panjurli is worshipped primarily by farming communities because wild boars destroyed their crops — and so, rather than simply fearing the animal, they brought it into the sacred.
Deified heroes and martyrs — humans who died unjustly or heroically and were elevated to guardian status. Koti and Chennayya, twin warriors of the Billava community, are worshipped in this way. So are Kalkuda and Kallurti — a sculptor and his sister whose story involves a king cutting off the sculptor’s arm and leg so he could never create for another ruler. The sister’s rage elevated both of them.
Sea and nature spirits — Bobbarya is the protector of fishermen and coastal communities. Pilichamundi takes the form of a tiger. Malaraya has the head of a boar and the body of a woman, venerated particularly in Kasargod.
And Guliga — the most ferocious of them all. Dark, insatiable, described as having a hunger so great he once began swallowing the earth itself. Lord Vishnu, understanding that only divine peace could calm him, offered him the tip of his finger to bite. It is said that moment of contact stilled Guliga’s rage enough to make him a protector. He is paired with Panjurli precisely because they are complementary: care and consequence, harvest and justice. In the ritual, Panjurli cannot be invoked in many villages without Guliga standing witness.
What holds all of these figures together is a consistent moral framework: bhutas are protectors, but they are not to be tested. Neglect the ritual, and the covenant breaks. Break the covenant, and misfortune follows — not as divine punishment, but as the natural consequence of abandoning the agreement that holds a community together.
The Structure of a Bhuta Kola: What Actually Happens Over Those 8–10 Hours
A Kola is not a performance in the way a film is a performance. It has no audience in the passive sense. The community is the ritual.
Weeks before: The date is fixed in the presence of the village chieftain and community members. The patri (the spirit medium) begins a period of spiritual preparation — fasting, ritual restrictions, withdrawal from ordinary social life.
Arrival of the paraphernalia: The Kola begins with the formal arrival of the deity’s sacred objects (bhandara jappuni or kirval jappuni): the sword, the mask, the headgear, the waist ornament (ani). These are brought to the shrine and placed on a decorated pedestal.
The pandal and venue: The performance ground (kodiyadi, meaning “under the flag”) is consecrated after a flag hoisting. The venue is decorated with kolams (rice flour patterns), and palm leaves shaped into birds, animals, and geometric patterns.
The Paddana: This is the spine of the ritual — and perhaps the most underappreciated element. Paddanas are oral epics, long narrative poems sung in Old Tulu, that recount the origin story of the specific bhuta being invoked. Every bhuta has its own paddana. These are not static texts; they are living, flexible compositions that may be adjusted in phrasing but maintain an unwavering ethical core: truth-telling, promise-keeping, and restitution. Scholars treat paddanas as primary historical documents, because they encode the social memory of communities who had no written tradition. When the paddana is sung, the community is collectively remembering who it has promised to be.
The costume and makeup: The patri is dressed by assistants. For major Kolas, the costume involves elaborate face paint (no brushes — the paint is applied using specific tools tied to the deity), an enormous layered skirt of palm leaves, and the mudi — the towering sacred headdress that can be several feet tall. The moment the mudi is placed on the performer’s head is considered the moment the deity enters the body.
Possession: As the percussion intensifies (the tembere, along with pipes and chanting), the patri crosses from preparation into trance. This transition — kola kattuni in Tulu — is physical and observable. The body changes. The energy becomes something the community recognises as not entirely the man they knew. Performers are reported to bear extreme heat, dance all night, and consume raw offerings (rice, chicken blood, coconut milk) with an energy that exceeds ordinary human capacity. After the ritual, the patri typically cannot recall what occurred.
The Court of Justice: In the second half of the Kola, the bhuta — now embodied — holds court. Villagers approach with their disputes: land conflicts, family feuds, debts, stolen cattle, broken promises. The bhuta hears them and pronounces judgment. These judgments are considered binding. In feudal times, this was the actual judicial system for these communities. Even today, in villages where formal courts feel distant, the bhuta’s verdict carries moral authority that no government institution quite replicates.
Here is something remarkable: during this court session, the entire social hierarchy of the village inverts. High-caste landlords prostrate before a low-caste performer. The man who spends the rest of the year at the bottom of the village power structure is, for these hours, the mouth of justice itself.
The Caste Dimension: The Politics Hidden in Plain Sight
This inversion is not incidental. It is load-bearing.
The patri — the performer — almost always comes from Scheduled Caste communities: the Pambada, Parava, Nalike, Koopalam, or Paanara castes. These are communities with hereditary roles as spiritual mediators. The knowledge, the paddanas, the ritual technique — all of it passes through specific family lines across generations.
Meanwhile, the ritual is traditionally sponsored by the upper-caste landed families (Bunts, Brahmins, Jains). The Guttu lineages — feudal patron families — were responsible for organizing and financing the Kola. Their political authority was, in part, legitimised by the bhuta’s presence in their village. But this also meant that a village could withdraw from the ritual — refuse to participate — and thereby undermine the landlord’s claim to authority.
Scholar Peter Claus, who documented Tulu paddanas extensively, noted that the bhuta kola was always both a spiritual and a political institution. The commons managed by the bhuta (land collectively dedicated to the deity) was redistributed among villagers. The ritual wasn’t separate from the economics of the village — it was the economics of the village.
This is why some activists, post-Kantara, pushed back on the film’s framing of Bhoota Kola as purely “Hindu culture.” Some argued that what is being called Hinduism here is in fact a much older Dravidian tradition that pre-dates the Vedic framework — that the Pambada and Nalike communities are the actual custodians of this knowledge, and their labour has long been underpaid and under-credited.
That debate is unresolved. What is not debatable is that the tradition cannot be separated from the communities who carry it.
Four Types of Worship: Not All Kolas Are the Same
The Tuluva tradition distinguishes four forms of bhuta worship:
Kola — the grand public ritual at the village shrine, focused on a single deity. The most elaborate form.
Bandi — similar to Kola, but includes a chariot that is dragged through the village with the performer seated atop it.
Nema — a private household ceremony, performed for a single family on their own schedule (sometimes every year, sometimes once a decade or more). Smaller in scale, but no less sacred to those involved.
Agelu-Tambila — the most intimate form, an offering of rice, meat, coconut, and alcohol placed on banana leaves for family spirits and ancestors. A maintenance ritual rather than a grand invocation.
What Kantara Got Right, and What It Couldn’t Show
Kantara earned its emotional resonance because it treated the ritual with sincerity, not exoticism. Rishab Shetty reportedly worked closely with actual practitioners, and the climactic possession sequence reflects a genuine understanding of what possession looks like — the physical abandon, the identity-crossing, the terror-adjacent awe that the community feels.
What the film couldn’t show — because no film can — is time. A real Kola takes 8 to 10 hours. The paddana alone can last hours. The court session is drawn-out, specific, and mundane in the most elevated way possible — a widow’s land dispute, a merchant’s broken oath, a family’s unresolved grief. The magic is not in the spectacle. The magic is in the patience.
Kantara also compressed the politics. The film correctly identifies the covenant between a forest guardian and a village as its central theme — and correctly shows what happens when that covenant is violated. But it sidesteps the caste dimension almost entirely. The landlords in the film are not Brahmin, but neither is the performer’s hereditary role as low-caste mediator made fully explicit. The film gives you the ritual’s emotional texture without its social architecture.
That’s a filmmaking choice, not a failure. You can’t make a two-hour film and simultaneously produce an ethnographic record. But as viewers, knowing the social architecture makes the ritual legible in a way the film alone cannot achieve.
Why This Matters for How We Watch South Indian Cinema
Regional Indian cinema has always had a more direct relationship with its cultural traditions than Bollywood does. Kantara is not unique in this — Iraivi, Visaranai, and even older Malayalam films like Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha all draw on specific rituals, oral traditions, and folk cosmologies that don’t require explanation for their intended audiences.
Bhuta Kola matters to film culture for a reason beyond Kantara: it is a reminder that oral tradition and live performance were the original cinema. The paddana is a story told to invoke an emotional and spiritual response in a gathered community. The performer is a character actor becoming someone else. The costume design is elaborate and intentional. The narrative involves heroes, injustice, divine intervention, and justice. All the bones of cinema are here, 2,000 years before celluloid.
When Rishab Shetty frames the Kola in close-up — firelight, percussion, trance — he is not borrowing from an alien tradition. He is returning cinema to one of its ancestral forms.
Final Thought
There is a line from a local practitioner quoted in a post-Kantara essay that has stayed with me: “They got the look right. The dance was good. But what they showed in 15 minutes takes us all night.”
That gap — between 15 minutes and all night — is not a criticism of the film. It is an invitation. Bhuta Kola does not exist for cinema. Cinema borrowed from it briefly. The ritual will continue long after Kantara’s cultural moment passes, in December-to-May cycles, in coastal Karnataka villages, in the bodies of men from Pambada and Nalike families who learned their paddanas from their fathers and their fathers’ fathers.
Go to the film. Then go further.