The Island By Rohana R. Wasala
The Aluth Avurudda or the Sinhala Hindu New Year day falls on the 14th of April every year. But the day before the Avurudda – the 13th of April – is also important because it is observed as the Parana Avurudda or the Old Year. So, the Aluth Avurudda is actually a two-day affair. But unofficially it spans even a longer period, for the celebrations go on for a number of days after the main event on the 14th of April.
The customary rites and rituals (e.g. lighting of the hearth, cooking and partaking of milk-rice, transactions, etc) performed at the given auspicious times on the New Year day are followed by a wide range of other activities: exchanging visits, meals, and gifts with relatives, neighbours, and friends; traditional forms of entertainment including singing and dancing, playing on the swings, kotta pora (an event in which two players straddle a horizontal bar face-to-face with one hand behind their backs try to topple each other by hitting them with a pillow), and bello demima (a form of fake gambling using a handful of cowry shells); sports activities both old and new (e.g. elle - a traditional game similar to American baseball, and bicycle races). The ritual known as hisathelgama or anointing medicinal oil on the head indicates the great importance attached to the maintenance of physical health and personal hygiene in our culture (The auspicious time at which this is done is for "bathing and anointing oil").
Read moreThe various ritualistic activities and forms of rejoicing are meaningful and appropriate for all – children and adults - alike. Use of intoxicants in any form for celebrating the occasion is not even mentioned. I can’t think of any other festival in which parents and children can share in the usual merrymaking on an equal footing free from all filial or parental inhibitions.
In my childhood half a century ago the Sinhala Hindu New Year (the Aluth Avurudda) was an event that we looked forward to eagerly for months on end. Our only regret was that the new year was so tardy in coming, for the Aluth Avurudda was such a joyful occasion, particularly for us children. With schools closed for the April holidays, it was extended playtime for us anyway. In the dry stubble-plains left fallow for a few weeks after the rice crop was harvested from the paddy fields, we ran races, played games like rounders (our own version, with just a ball and no bat), and expended our youthful energy. There was an atmosphere of vernal splendour, rain-washed freshness and vitality in the natural surroundings with abundant fruits and flowers, and exotic birds of bright plumage calling from copses in the vicinity. The same pervasive sense of exuberance and carefree abandon was unmistakable even among the adults; we overheard our parents utter words like "one day from 365 days to relieve the tedium of our work a day life!"; their wishes and hopes were reflected in the newly painted walls of the houses, the rich plumes of smoke rising from rooftops accompanied by the aroma of sumptuous meals and the smell of traditional sweetmeats like kevum, asmi, and kokis being baked wafting in the air, and their children dressed in new clothes playing about utterly relieved of the stress of school and homework. It was during an Aluth Avurudda that I made the happy discovery that even big people like my parents loved to laugh and play the way we, the small ones, did.
I hope that my younger readers will bear with me for reminiscing about a past that can never be recalled, and that had come to an end decades before they were born; my memories relate to an overwhelmingly agrarian rural Sri Lanka that is today almost totally gone. But there’s a reason for me to be dwelling on those memories: the charm and the fascination of this hallowed cultural event that we experienced then, and its relevance to our lives today seem to have survived other changes.
The quasi-sacred element associated with the rites and rituals of the festive occasion generates its mystique. These ceremonial observances are said to hark back to a form of sun-worship that once existed in ancient Sri Lanka. The Aluth Avurudda is in essence a harvest festival held annually to offer thanks for the rich crops gathered in, and the object of the thanks-giving in this case is the Sun god. Hence it is also sometimes called the ‘Surya Mangalya’ or the ‘Sun Festival’. Because there is no regular faith system based sun-worship today it cannot be described as a religious festival. But, this spirited acknowledgement of the ‘divine’ (the mysterious power and majesty of Nature) gives the Aluth Avurudda its characteristic mystical attractiveness.
The myth, magic, and meaning that the Aluth Avurudda is associated with, as a part of our cultural heritage, has unique significance for sustaining our national identity for evermore. Though celebrated by the Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils the religious element is actually incidental to the strictly secular nature of the festival. Its non-ethnic, non-religious character seems to encourage even Christians and Muslims to take part in celebrating the Avurudda. Thus, not only does the Sinhala Hindu New Year bring different communities together, but also crystallizes a unique cultural history that is truly humane and inclusive.
However, despite the enduring charm and the profound cultural relevance to the community of this national festival, the emotional commitment that it demands of the celebrants for realising its true magic and meaning may be on the wane. Needless to say, the Sri Lankan society on the whole was much less modernised then than it is now. Modernisation in terms of material development is something to be cherished; there’s no regret for what has been replaced. But such improvement of the physical conditions of living usually occurs along with changes in the characteristic ideas, beliefs, and social mood of the day (in other words, the changing zeitgeist), which usually includes a movement away from what is considered among educated people as outdated superstitions, and practices based on them. Nevertheless, these fictitious ideas and quaint customs usually have a strong hold on the imagination of not only the unsophisticated village folk, but the more modernist city dwellers as well. The latter are required to surrender to a kind of "willing suspension of disbelief" for the occasion, to borrow a phrase from S.T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) in which, of course, the writer is talking about how to read poetry. When we were children we were among those who never questioned the validity of the traditional lore about the Aluth Avurudda that our knowledgeable adults explained to us, or the literal truth of their statements about the momentous cosmic events that occurred bearing on human affairs; there was no question of suspending "disbelief" among the tradition-bound villagers, and children who shared their ‘naivety’.
However, such apparently fictitious beliefs and practices account for much of the fascinating individuality of the Aluth Avurudda. In the popular mind in our youth, I believe, the earthly show that happened before our eyes was paralleled by a chain of celestial events that remained unseen, though real all the same. The Sun ‘transits from Pisces to Aries’ just before he starts again another year-long journey along the circular zodiacal path crossing the twelve constellations. This was a critical period for that celestial being whose supposed tribulations we the earthlings shared with him emotionally. It was mandatory for us to spend that inauspicious period in religious activities in order to protect ourselves from the malefic influence of that event. Observing auspicious times to light a fire, boiling a pot of milk, cooking milk-rice, partaking of it with the family, exchanging gifts, visiting neighbours, relatives, and friends, organizing beauty contests, sports events, ….. all such routine activities added to the general fascination of the Avurudda.
However, today, as grownups with education (i.e. informed enough to recognise the customary astrological beliefs and practices as either not based on fact or not strictly relevant to our current way of living) we cannot go back to that time and enjoy the mystique of the Aluth Avurudda the way we were then able to enjoy it as innocent children. I think that this is an emotional loss that perhaps we could never make good.
In his short poem "The Oxen" the Victorian English poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) expresses this wistful sense of loss of an innocent childhood capacity for truly enjoying the magic of traditional beliefs without allowing the intellect to shatter the romance of what I would like to call an aesthetic experience. ‘The Oxen’ is about Christmas. Hardy refers to the traditional folk belief of the day among the people of his community according to which the oxen in their shed kneel down at midnight, as the Christmas Day dawns, in remembrance of the birth of Christ. He recalls his childhood when, if an elder told him "Come; see the oxen kneel", he "should go with him in the gloom - Hoping it might be so"! Hardy laments the passing away of such innocence among them nowadays: So fair a fancy few would weave In these years!... He might as well have composed similar lines about the Aluth Avurudda had he been one of us.
The Aluth Avurudda, therefore, is not just another celebration based on a mere mundane theme like the May Day, the Independence Day, or the National Heroes’ Day. It is far more significant: not only is it a firmly secular festival that reaches out to all sections of the population across ethnic, religious, and other artificial barriers, but a delightfully mystical celebration that acknowledges with gratitude the natural sources of our life and sustenance on earth. It is through its ritualistic dimension that the New Year day harmonises the humans with Nature; it bonds people with people, within the family and the society at large; it renews our commitment to maintaining a healthy, happy, and moral life, free from want. What more is there to celebrate? The mystique of the Sinhala Hindu New Year may be less than before, but its meaning will endure.
