Ushering in the New Year in Culturally Meaningful Manner in Colombo -by Uditha Devapriya and Pasindu Nimsara
Source:Thuppahis
whose preferred title is “Kévum, KrÏda, and Kadé: Avurudu in Colombo” … from The Island, 19 April 2024
No Avurudu would be complete without an Avurudu Ulela. It has become part of our national social calendar, an event that must be organised, a tradition that must be kept. Practically every institution, from nurseries to universities to companies to Rotaract Societies, has a shot at holding one. The result is that somehow or the other, an Avurudu Ulela unfolds somewhere every other day until the end of April.
In Colombo, and most major cities, Avurudu Ulela, or Festivals, serve a decorative function. They are designed, structured, and “ordered” to represent the ideal of Avurudu. In a typical Avurudu Festival, at least the best among them, spectators are made to imagine what Avurudu means, or is supposed to mean. Our contention is that such festivals focus on the basic elements of Avurudu, a trinity of sorts: kévum (food), krÏda (games), and kadé (shops, stalls, and kiosks). This is rather simplistic, but it reinforces the point.
Christmas is often touted as a time for family. Avurudu, by contrast, is a communal affair, even if consumerism, urbanisation, and the mass media have made it more individualistic and family oriented. In line with this, Avurudu Festivals strive to be as communal as they can, promoting shared experiences. And yet, the idea of communalism – in the positive sense, not negative – has undergone a transformation over the years, particularly in the cities. Today you “take time off” for an Avurudu Ulela: you take the bus or your vehicle, travel all the way from somewhere or the other to the location. The event itself becomes a highly formalised affair, resembling a function rather than a festival.
Such transformations are only to be expected in a society that is becoming more specialised and specialist every day. These transformations did not begin yesterday. They are part of a broader cultural sea-change. Over the last 25 or so years, there has been a radical shift in the social composition in cities like Colombo, including suburbs. In light of these developments, the very character of Avurudu Festivals has transmogrified.
This is true not just of the events we take part at these festivals, or the food we eat, but even what we wear. Ever since batiks took off and became a “cultural industry” here, lungis and baniyans have become highly exoticized things. We wear them and take them off: they enable us to become “locals”, or more specifically, “villagers.” They are as decorative and ornamental as the masks and sculptures at Laksala and Barefoot.
At first glance, of course, this seems a radical way of looking at Avurudu – specifically, the way it is celebrated and viewed in Colombo. But there is nothing really radical here. In Colombo – and in cities and even in villages which are fast being swamped by the “civilising” forces of “modernity” – the most traditional events get “routinised.” In that scheme, the most rudimentary element, including music, gets “scheduled.”
Simply put, in a culture where work and leisure have become atomised, these festivals offer a form of leisure that sits in well with the modern sensibility.
Without idealising or fetishising what life in a typical Sinhala village would have been like hundreds of years ago, it is evident that work and leisure were never compartmentalised as they are today. Rituals were not something to be kept at a distance: they formed a part of everyday, ordinary life. Avurudu marked the end of a harvest season and the beginning of another. The festivals were incidental to this transition: they did not lie away from them. Most of the Avurudu songs performed today celebrate this. But in celebrating it, we have externalised it – or as the purists would have it, commercialised it.
Avurudu is not the only festival that has been ruptured this way: Christmas, even Vesak and Poson, have radically transformed, sometimes beyond recognition. Like Christmas, Avurudu is a “pagan” ritual: it incorporates a mishmash of pre-Buddhist rites which have since been absorbed into Sri Lanka’s uniquely Buddhist ethos. And like every such festival that has been “modernised”, it has also become a highly exotic affair.
Yet, unlike Christmas, Vesak, and Poson – which have transformed so much that it is hard to imagine what they looked like before the “forces of modernity” crept in – Avurudu gives us a chance to revisit and reimagine the concept of the village, or gama.
Every year, hundreds of Avurudu Festivals crop up in Colombo. In almost all of them, there is a subconscious attempt to replicate the gama, mainly through that trinity of rites mentioned before: kévum, krÏda, and kadé. By replicating it, the organisers try to reimagine it, though not always accurately. Thus, more than Christmas, Vesak, and Poson, in an Avurudu Festival one comes across a fixation with the Sinhala village.
Such conceptions of that village may be at odds with the historical reality. And more often than not, they are. Yet Avurudu Festivals in Colombo, though following a certain pattern, offer a window to that ideal, a chance to relive it and regain it.
In that sense, the most interesting Avurudu Festivals in Colombo would be those organised by villagers. Such festivals would reveal not just how those in the city reconceive the Sinhala gama, but also, crucially, how Sinhala villagers reconceive the city and refract Colombo’s reimagining of the gama. While this looks like an oddity, something that simply does not happen, there is one such festival that unfolds every year at the heart of Colombo which is organised by “villagers” – and intriguingly, is open to a large crowd.
This is the Avurudu Ulela organised by the Hostel of Royal College. Home to over 300 students, the Hostel has today transformed into what can best be called a nexus between the city and the village. Most of the localities its students hail from come more than 50 kilometres from Colombo. This has enabled a transmission of cultural values, but more importantly, an exchange of those values: from the rural to the urban, and, as crucially, from the urban to the rural. Such transmissions and exchanges are evident in the many events and festivals that these students organise.
The Hostel Avurudu is no exception. Unlike most school Avurudu Festivals, the parents don’t get involved in the organising: the students do. This enables them to structure the event in line with their conceptions of village and city. It unfolds in a set pattern, beginning with a customary milk boiling ceremony, moving on to a satirical skit, then segueing into breakfast, games, lunch, and still more games, well into the night. At the centre of it all is a telling titled gama gedara, which represents the household of an influential villager: a reflection of the social class to which most students – sons of teachers, public health inspectors, bus owners, and other rural middle-class professionals – themselves belong.
What is interesting is how culturally syncretic the Festival becomes, which puts it a cut above most other festivals organised in Colombo. The rural seeps into the urban, but the urban seeps into the rural as well. To give one example, the skit which unfolds at the gama gedara in the morning is dominated by an arachchi, perhaps the most recognisable rural archetype in Sri Lanka. In popular Sinhala culture, including Sinhala teledramas, the arachchi invariably has a wayward son and a pretty daughter, not to mention a group of servile acolytes. This is reflected in the skit itself. Yet, interestingly enough, and no doubt because of the origins of the organisers, there is an authenticity in the way the actors playing these parts deliver their lines and play out various situations.
The Hostel Avurudu is, in that sense, an exception. The function of an Avurudu Festival, at the end of the day, is to bring people together. In Colombo, it has acquired a logic and a character of its own, helping us reimagine the Sinhala gama in the most creative, exotic, yet “orientalist” ways possible. The Hostel Avurudu strays from this tendency, and presents a view of the gama that is at once urbanised, refined, and much more authentic. We have been to many Festivals, in the village and city. The Royal College Hostel Avurudu represents something of a synthesis. At one level, it is an interesting study for scholars.
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Uditha Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst based in Sri Lanka who contributes to a number of publications on topics such as history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.
Pasindu Nimsaa was the Deputy Head Prefect of the Royal College Hostel in 2022. He is now preparing for his higher studies. An ardent reader of anthropology, he hopes to study and pursue the subject. He can be reached at pasinim19@gmail.com
