Features
Profound significances buttress rites and rituals of Aluth Avuruddha
The profoundest significance of the soon approaching Aluth Avurddha is that in most countries it has its parallel and they are all very ancient, with various rites and rituals. Equally profound is that they are mostly harvest festivals: celebration after the main grain harvest has been gathered and tables are fully laden. Very importantly, thanks are given to Almighty God, gods, or the weather, or even Karma, exhibiting gratitude that ancients promoted in a big way.
Our own Sinhala and Hindu New Year is a harvest festival as it comes soon after the Maha rice crop has been gathered, threshed and grain stored; and before work starts on the Yala crop. We’ve had, very recently, the Aluth Sahal poojawa in Anuradhapura, attended by the President, when rice from the recent harvest is collected in a huge brass pot and dané offered to the sacred sites in the ancient city.
Other country festivals
Referring Internet I read an interesting account of the ten most famous harvest festivals around the world. Top of the list is the Thanksgiving, Plimouth Plantation, Massachusetts which is now celebrated in the USA as Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It exceeds in celebration even Christmas. It commemorates their second year’s plentiful wheat and vegetable crops gathered by the Pilgrims who moved from Europe and landed in Massachusetts. It was first celebrated in Plimouth Plantation in the fall of 1621 where the hosts – the now settled Pilgrims – shared their meal of partridge, wild turkey and fish with the Massasoit and Wampanoag native American tribes, whom they had dispossessed of land or bought it off, armed with gunpowder, for beads and baubles. Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday on November 3, 1863, expressing gratitude to the Union Army’s victory at Gettysburg. Stuffed turkey and pumpkin are musts on the table.
New beginnings
I reckon that many of the rites followed in preparation for Aluth Avuruddha denote the preparation for new beginnings. Total household cleaning was a must in village homes of long ago, where the rich houses colour washed their walls while in lesser dwellings the roof covering of straw – stalks of threshed paddy called piduru – or plaited coconut leaves were replaced. The ground, overlaid with cow dung, was redone so that women mixed the dung with water and squatting on haunches, applied the thick greenish liquid. Even in maha gederas with their polished cement floors, the nether regions such as the kitchen, the wee kotana maduwa where a stone slap was embedded, had cow dung spread floors
It was also customary to replace kitchen pots and pans with new clay ones. Even now we prefer to buy a new pot for the boiling of milk till it overflows when the auspicious time arrives for cooking the first meal of the New Year.
What about another must of Aluth Avuruddha? I mean new clothes. We children, completely unsophisticated then, waited for our new clothes and proudly flaunted them when New Year dawned, the first meal was had and we then went to temple.
Soon after the new year was actually marked with the first meal, we had another beginning. We restarted work: veda alleema. Remembered is Mother’s insistence that we all take school books, read a bit, do an arithmetic sum; the older sisters pound some paddy and the boys twiddle with their bikes or dig the ground with a mammoty. The elders resumed their business with exchanging money wrapped in betel leaves: ganu denu. Mother who had to be careful with monthly incomes, would prefer her ganu denu with a so-named hettiya. Thus after our first meal in the New Year we would walk to the Dalada Maligawa. Religious observances complete, we trekked to Suppiah Pillai and Sons on Trincomalee Street so Mother could exchange betel leaves. Thanks to the magnanimity of the old man, Mother was always the recipient of a larger amount than she gave in her betel leaf, heralding a successful year ahead.
A time to rest
Rest and relaxation is a dictated-to custom at this time. A complete period of time is set apart for this – the nonagathe. Astrologers now play their role by demarcating this time and other auspicious times for the various rituals, but I feel it was compulsory taking time off that necessitated the setting down of a definite period of inactivity, so much so that as kids we were made to believe it was bad, maybe injurious to future cleverness, to even read a book during nonagathe. Strict dousing fires in the hearth and a makeshift fireplace made in the garden with three bricks. Water for tea and milk for children were boiled on this fireplace, and if the nonagathe was long, well we sort of starved but were delighted as it was lunching on kavili and bananas. (bread was hardly eaten).
We need to admire our forefathers’ foresight in insisting on a period of relaxation when games were indulged in. Thus the use of spare time by housewives to play the rabana, indulge in indoor games like pancha bello and swing on rope swings strung up on strong tree branches. They even had time to join the kids in plucking jambu and eating it with salt. The men too happily relaxed from their field labour with a tot imbibed and card games. Younger bucks built a kathuru onchillawa – a ferris wheel of sorts – and had a whale of a time in the paddy field kamatha, enticing the damsels to swing!
Health was also catered for with the nekatha for ceremonially anointing medicinal oil on the head. What preceded it, sometimes by a couple of days, was having the last bath in the old year. It was a bit of a mess as we ran around and sweated with our unoiled hair all awry, but no bathing till the decreed time.
Tasting the good life
With the dawn of the New Year, the yield of hard labour was savoured. The men had tended the paddy fields and brought in the harvest. The women had made sweets earlier on and at the auspicious time cooked tasty kiribath and prescribed accompaniments.
Religion and back to business
Whichever country it was, whichever religion followed, significance was given to spiritual matters during harvest festivals.
In Sri Lanka Buddhism and Hinduism are the religions given prominence during this season, though Aluth Avurudha to us Buddhist Sinhalese is a secular festival. Our wise forefathers recognizing that man could not live on rice alone, but needs to follow the Buddha’s teaching, decided to allocate a separate time, before and after the actual start of the new year and named it punya kaalaya. Thus with the rituals, religion was included; a good lesson to younger generations,
There was also the custom of including gratitude and generosity into the rituals. Parents and elders were visited and gifts given, and received. Domestic aides, paddy field cultivators, and others like the postman, the orange seller , the rickshaw puller and all other helpers were gifted clothes and money.
And then it was resumption of one’s usual routine, whether an office job or studies or even manual labour; again at an auspicious hour, also facing a certain direction.
These profound considerations were the foundation of and buttressed Aluth Avurudhu celebrations, and thus satisfyingly, thanksgiving, gratitude, family loyalty, rest and recreation, enjoying a good spread and sharing were all included; religion too.