Updated: Aug 25
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.
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.
