Feature

How an editorial decision altered a 600 year old festival

4 min read

Researching commissioned stories, we sometimes come across informational gems. This story—on how the current format of Sri Lanka’s traditional Sinhala and Tamil New Year was shaped by an editorial decision—is based on one such discovery.

Sri Lanka’s traditional Sinhala and Tamil New Year, celebrated in April, is not a calendrical reset. It’s more accurately described as a choreography of land, sky, and communal intention. Celebrated by both Sinhala and Tamil communities, it’s an astrological, agricultural and lifestyle celebration that highlights the hybrid beauty of Sri Lankan culture. Today, the New Year feels timeless, but it is in fact a recent curation—a cultural remix made so by printing technology, political movement, and the pressures of scaling.

An editorial decision that reshaped culture

The traditional new year, in its earliest form, was a sprawling, many-weeked observance. This oldest form of the festival incorporated ayurvedic practices, environmental sustainability, musical offerings, as much as it drew from prehistoric harvest rituals, indigenous customs, Vedic astrology, and animistic reverence. Throughout the weeks, there were rituals for sound offerings through musical instruments to wake the land and human spirit. There were rituals for saving seeds from the last harvest for the new year. Ceremonial tree planting was a ritual practiced in each household as well as communally, with royal patronage. Ancestors were remembered not through photos but through gestures of charity and visits to ancestral homes and villages. Some regions lit nightlong fires. Others observed absolute silence. But not all of this survived.

In 1855, Epa Appuhamy set out to print the first local panchaanga litha (almanac) with traditional new year rituals. Epa had to list all the auspicious times practiced in the entire island and print them on a single sheet of paper to keep it affordable to the market. It was impossible. He made a decision. Being a highly experienced astrologer, Epa was confident enough to distill the rituals down to a curated few. It was the beginning of the now iconic Epa almanac that hangs in kitchens to this day. The ‘Epa Panchanga Litha’ went on to become a household name and trusted guide. Epa almanac’s lasting success almost single-handedly reshaped the traditional new year. The rituals that Epa left behind were not necessarily unimportant—only unprintable. Yet, what didn’t make it to print were forgotten and lost to the tides of time.

The official gazette of Ceylon recognizing Epa alamanc as a printed publication.

When editorial act becomes cultural legacy

Concurrently, Sri Lanka’s nationalist movement did something similar—this time not for layout and marketability, but in the name of unification. Keen to reinvigorate identity under colonial rule, nationalist leaders repopularized the traditional new year. By making it compact, the traditional new year was easily parceled and packaged as part of the national campaign. The rituals were streamlined following Epa’s almanac, leaflets were distributed, and the idea of a national new year tradition was born. The regionally diverse rituals were further compressed or omitted. Unification, while it brought visibility and focus, also brought erasure of diversity. Village-specific customs and rituals got limited to memory, lore, and scholarly articles—if not faded into oblivion.

In 1993, the Ministry of Religious and Cultural Affairs began convening the State Auspicious Committee, consisting of expert astrologers, to prepare and publish the official ritual times for each year. They inherited not just tradition, but Epa’s editorial logic, carrying forward the rituals retained by the Epa almanac. It solidified the long-term influence a single editorial decision had on shaping one of Sri Lanka’s most popular celebrations at a national scale. This shows how what we call ‘tradition’ is, in truth, once a choice made by a mere human, like you and me.

Does culture shape us or do we shape it?

Understanding the true, evolving nature of our rituals liberates us from false nostalgia. Culture is not a fossil. It's not fixed. It's a living reflection of its people, tools, and arts, as much as its constraints and dreams. How Epa Appuhamy’s editorial decision changed a six-hundred-year-old cultural festival is a reflection of how culture is a living phenomenon shaped by people, their creativity, technology and tools.

Which means we have a choice. If tradition was once rewritten by the printing page size, word counts and a political campaign, then we, too, as living mirrors of our times and the members of current society, are entitled to shape our cultures as we see fit.

What would you choose to set as culture in a world marked by environmental collapse and the quiet unravelling of natural systems? We are not only witnesses—we are still participants. Culture is not something we inherit untouched; it is something we craft, refine, and carry forward with intention. In this present day of information overwhelm, what rituals should we nurture? As global conflicts, economic disparities, and the ease of the privileged few shape our daily lives and fragile local economies, what gestures of care, protest, or remembrance might we use to meet the challenges of our time? We are called, perhaps urgently so, to ask what new expressions of culture could help us remain human, connected, and awake.

Because either way, the sun will still cross our hypothetical line and enter what we label a ‘new year’, continuing its natural course regardless of our microscopic lives. But the decisions we make today can still set our cultural context for the times to come. It’s worth a shot to use our imagination and conscience to try and mold it for the better.

A system for wrath: Social code to express big emotions

3 min read

Across cultures, some rituals are often formed as structured social expressions for deep emotions—grief, joy, disgust, and anger. Their formalization reflects a society’s attempts to channel powerful feelings into comprehensible acts. Among the Vanniyela Aetto, known more commonly as Veddas—the first people and the jungle folk of Sri Lanka—there is a striking example of this. This extraordinary practice is recorded by anthropologists C.G. and Brenda Seligmann.

Their 1911 study, ‘The Veddas’ reveals how the Vanniyela Aetto once used a piece of dried human liver, obtained through personal acts of violence, to summon courage and resolve in moments of profound insult or challenge. This was no casual outlet for aggression but a response to situations that struck at the very foundations of an individual’s dignity—instances such as the theft of a spouse, betrayal, or the violation of land or belongings.

“Every group of Veddas except the most sophisticated village Veddas believe that it was formerly the custom for a man to carry in his betel pouch a small piece of dry human liver. It was essential that the liver should be taken from a man killed by the individual who proposed to carry a portion of the dried liver in his pouch.”

The ritual was reserved for wrath, for extreme situations, far removed from the mundane outbursts of frustration. Their approach to such intense anger was measured, deeply symbolic, and tied to the core of their identity as hunters and defenders.

The act of chewing this dried liver was not just symbolic but a visceral reminder of personal power, a ritual of transformation that turned indignation into action. As the Seligmanns describe, the practice seems to have vanished several generations ago, but its echoes remain in oral traditions. The liver served as a talisman of strength, a bridge between the act of past vengeance and the courage required for future justice. This practice—ritualized, extreme, yet deeply tied to the Vanniyela Aetto’s social codes—embodied their understanding of controlled fury, situating anger as a tool wielded only in moments of utmost necessity.

“The purpose of the dried liver was to make a person strong and confident to avenge insults. As far as we could understand a Vedda might thus work himself up into a condition of berserker fury, but this was only done after very serious insult, as when a man’s wife had been carried off or been unfaithful, or when his bow and arrows had been stolen or an attempt made to take his land or caves.” - C.G. and Brenda Seligmann

This story offers a glimpse into how the Vanniyela Aetto transformed raw human emotions into structured responses, embedding their struggles within acts laden with cultural meaning. It provokes broader reflection: How do rituals shape our responses to emotional situations? The Vanniyela Aetto ritual was practiced by men; what about other genders’ use of rituals to express emotions? How do societies, ancient and modern, formalize emotions into symbols, forging connections between personal identity and collective values? Protests, riots and vigils, are current examples of forms expressing collective anger. What are their personal counterparts? What are ‘accepted’ forms for an adult to express their personal anger right now? Vanniyela Aetto’s practices make us question our response toward anger, our ways of demanding justice, and whether we still need systemized ways to communicate our deepest emotions through ritual. Perhaps, having a socially-accepted method to channel a deeply unsettling emotion is convenient, as our systemised responses to other emotions, like love and gratitude, show.

Emotions are essential to human communication. Expressing emotions in a calculated, measured manner has been part of Eastern creative practices since the 4th century BC. We bring this into practice as part of our commercial story design methodology. Read more.

The taste of yesterday (Food stories P1): Taste as a time capsule in retracing family threads

3 min read

Updated: Mar 18

“My mother had four siblings. They met once a year for an all-encompassing family potluck lunch at one of the siblings’ houses. Although the lunch itself and the location changed every year, one thing never changed—this was the arrangement for four types of dessert.

My oldest aunt was a woman with a spirit larger than life and a joyous primary colour personality. A sworn ally of us children in all matters against adults, she always brought jelly to the family potluck for dessert. She brought two, sometimes three, brightly coloured jellies cooled in faceted glass bowls. Flipping them was an occasion anticipated by all the cousins who would stand around the table while she carefully unmolded the jellies mirroring the bowl patterns in trembling delight to rounds of applause.

My mother’s trophy dessert was chocolate biscuit pudding cradling layers of Marie biscuit soaked in full cream milk and melted chocolate; it was a family treasure. One year, she experimented with an orange zest top layer and the entire family protested. “It was so perfect!” “Oh, but the classic CBP is the best.” “I wait for it all year…” “But, why?” My mother was in a strange mix of pride and annoyance that day, but we never endured the orange zest again. The chocolate biscuit pudding remained perfect for as long as we got it.

My uncle—a gentle botanist and a living encyclopedia of leaves, flowers, fruits, and everything trees—made a delicious peach dessert with fruits grown in his small hill estate. Peach slices in coconut sugar syrup blanched with a dash of cloves was a rare treat that made us children forget our general aversion to fruits. While we ate them, Uncle would tell us about how he took great care to grow peaches in the tropics that were so alien to the species and the difference in taste between the regular peach and the dwarf variety, getting us to guess which one he had used that year.

My youngest auntie hated cooking of any kind. But, her mother-in-law—a formidable matriarch, fantastic cook and baker who considered it blasphemy to attend a family lunch with no special dish—made a devastatingly good lemon meringue coconut pie for the family potluck. Each year, there would be requests around the table to repeat the recipe, although everyone already knew we would never dare to attempt it. It was the dessert that subdued the noisy household into a helpless afternoon coma in front of the TV, nodding on chairs and collapsing across every divan and sofa until some coffee arrived.

That was the 1980s. As the cousins dispersed one by one for higher education, jobs, new businesses, marriages and life’s other pulls, the family potluck also slowly came to an end without anyone quite noticing it. But, it remains a core memory holding place for precious conversations, expired jokes, and the close circle we grew up in. The four desserts—the bright jellies glistening merrily, subtly spiced cold peaches bringing upcountry cool to sweltering Colombo, the perfect chocolate biscuit pudding, and the crowning lemon meringue coconut pie—are the cardinals of this evergreen place I hold in my memory. Still, even the most mediocre lemon meringue pie or soulless peach in syrup can trigger longing in me. Still, seeing the giddily shaking surface of coloured jello puts a skip in my heart, momentarily returning me to the edge of the table, waiting for the jellies to be unmolded. Still, when I return home and my mother makes the ‘classic CBP’, we sit together and enjoy a bowlful together, remembering the family in those days—preserved in a technicolour filter, monumentalized at their very best, and still here to visit through taste, smell, and texture.”