Kevum,Krida , and Kade : Avurudu in Colombo
By Uditha Devapriya and Pasindu Nimsara
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. This is hardly a radical suggestion, but it underlies an important point: in a typical Avurudu Festival, or at least the best among them, spectators are made to imagine what Avurudu means, or rather is supposed to mean. Our contention here is that such festivals focus on the basic elements of Avurudu, a trinity of sorts: kevum (food), krida (games), and kade (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 atomised affair, resembling a function rather than a festival.
Boys who made the Avurudu Ulela possible
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 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 undergone a transition.
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 exoticised things. We wear them and then 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. Like anthropologists, we descend on these practices every year, turning the very idea of a communal gathering into a function, an event, or for the lack of a still better word, a spectacle.
At first glance, 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.” We no longer “have” fun, we “experience” it.
The most rudimentary element, including music, gets “scheduled” and forms part of an agenda. Avurudu songs become as predictable as baila at a Big Match: they are there to bring out the joie de vivre of the event, but organisers ensure they are in line with a set pattern. In a culture where work and leisure have become atomised, these events and festivals offer a form of leisure that sits in well with their sensibilities.
Without idealising or fetishising what life in a typical Sinhala village would have been like hundreds of years ago, it’s 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 that are 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 been radically transformed, sometimes beyond recognition. Like Christmas, Avurudu is a “pagan” ritual: it incorporates a mishmash of pre-Buddhist rites that have since been absorbed into Sri Lanka’s unique Buddhist ethos. And like every such festival that has been “modernised” and brought up to date, it has also become a highly exotic affair. Yet unlike Christmas, Vesak, and Poson – which have been transformed to such an extent that it is difficult to imagine what they looked or felt like before the “forces of modernity” crept in – Avurudu gives us a chance to imagine the concept of the village, or gama.
Every year, hundreds of Avurudu Festivals crop up in Colombo and other cities. In almost all of them, there is an almost subconscious attempt to replicate the gama, mainly through that trinity of rites we mentioned earlier: kema, krida, and kade. By replicating it, the organisers try to reimagine that village, though not always accurately. More so than Christmas, and certainly more so than Vesak and Poson, in an Avurudu Festival one discerns a fixation with the Sinhala village which has permeated and continues to permeate our thinking.
Our conception of that village may be at odds with the historical reality. And more often than not, it is. Yet Avurudu Festivals in Colombo, though following a certain pattern, offer a window to that ideal, a chance to relive and embody 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 Hostellers of Royal College Colombo. 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 lie more than 50 kilometres from Colombo. This has enabled a transmission of cultural values, but more importantly, a two-way exchange of cultural 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, transitioning to 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 of the students – many of whom are sons of teachers, bus owners, public health inspectors, and the like – themselves belong.
What is interesting is how culturally dualistic 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 just one example, the satirical skit which unfolds in the morning at the gama gedara is dominated by an arachchi, one of the most recognisable Sinhala rural archetypes.
In popular culture, including 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 rural origins of the organisers, there is an authenticity in the way the actors playing these parts deliver their lines and act 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 also much more authentic. We have been to many Festivals, in the village and city. The Hostel Avurudu represents something of a synthesis of them. At one level, it is an interesting study for scholars.
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 .
Pasindu Nimsara 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 .
