How an editorial decision altered a 600 year old festival

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.

Chilli will save the day

Jagath took out a half-full chilli powder packet from the pocket, undid the rubber band, and sprinkled a generous amount on his omelette. Seeing the bright red powder dotting the blandness of the beige egg instantly made his mouth water.

“Ado, don’t you have gastritis?”, shouted Hilmi, his bar mate, from across the table. Six men—all religiously present for their wife-pardoned weekly bar banter—joined in chorus, cautioning Jagath on the dangers of chilli powder as they soaked their livers in double distilled arrack with 66% alcohol content.

Jagath dismissed them with a wave of his left hand while its right counterpart got busy attempting to cut up the chillied omelette with the fork edge. His tongue prickled alive with the burning red thrill of chilli.

“You know gastritis is a disease of doing it halfway. If you eat chilli, you’ve also got to cool your gut after with some curd. I don’t do halfways… I go all the way…” he picked up a piece of egg-tinged flaming chilli red and shook it in front of Hilmi’s face with an obnoxious smirk.

Hilmi laughed and reached over into Jagath’s pocket asking “Do you actually carry around a chilli packet?”

Jagath swatted Hilmi’s hand with his, leaving an oily chilli splatter on his skin. All the tipsy men around the table laughed like a chorus of Sunday crows.

“You laugh. But, do you know, one of our buggers saved his life and escaped slavery because he had a packet of chilli handy?” asked Jagath from the table.

“What tall story you have there?” laughed Alles.

“Tall? This is a true story, son. Straight from the news. You buggers don’t watch the news, noh? So, listen to your old Jaga now. I’ll tell you what’s happening in this world and how a packet of chilli will save you,” Jagath assured.

Hilmi, Alles, Devro, Lalith, Punchi and Ranjith all turned their heads to listen.

The only thing that Jagath loved more than chilli and arrack was telling a good story. He drank deeply from his arrack and smacked his lips in preparation for the delivery.

“So, one of our young buggers thought he was doing the right thing, flying off to Thailand for a job. But, it was a scam..and he was sold to some Myanmar terrorist group…and got put in a slave camp with some hundred-odd more prisoners where everyone was being forced to scam people online…imagine…they were given nine days to secure a target, otherwise beaten until blue…”

“This is for real?” asked Ranjith.

“Yes machan, yes. News, noh? And you know who they were forced to target? Lonely old men who chat up girls on the internet…” Jagath said, looking pointedly at Punchi (who avoided his eyes and returned to the glass of arrack).

“Yeah…,” Jagath continued; “so these buggers had to pretend to be some young girl and lure men in, and then, these scammed old men who bit the bait were passed onto the actual women in the slave camp for the second step…calls with videos…when they would ask for some thousands of dollars for a plane ticket to visit those old men…and you know the rest, noh?”

Six bloodshot eyes around the table stared transfixed at Jagath, who shook his head and devoured another piece of omelette.

“One of these old men that our local bugger had lured into the scam, lost everything to it and took his own life…tsk…damn shame… This was the turning point for our bugger, who thought he couldn't do this anymore, collecting bad karma for the benefit of terrorists, and planned to escape. But, you can’t just escape a terrorist camp, you know?”

Jagath savoured having all eyes and ears hung on him for a few seconds before continuing.

“So, the next time their location was being routinely switched—small groups of prisoners being shuffled around in a van—our bugger tried to bribe the driver…but the driver refused. So, you know what our bugger did? He reached for the packet of chilli powder that his Ma gave him when he left the country—something this poor bugger kept at hand to remind him of home—and threw it in the driver’s eyes. The prisoners got together and beat the driver up, snatched their passports and ran into the jungle. After walking for miles, they met some monk who connected them to the embassy, and this bugger came back home alive to tell the tale.”

Alles shook his head in disbelief, others drank or sighed deeply, finding themselves momentarily sobered from the story.

“And that my friends, is why you always carry a packet of chilli around, eh? It’ll save your life from slavery; whether it’s to terrorists or bland food…” Jagath chuckled at his own joke, but no one else did.

“Son, bring me a curd to appease my gut, will you?” Jagath shouted at a disgruntled waiter.

This fictional story was based on the true accounts of a Sri Lankan man who escaped the Myanmar terrorist-operated cyber crime enslavement camp, in November 2023. Read another story about Jagath from our shadow series.

Creativity is a wild bird

Illustration based on a photograph of young Laki Senanayake from Laki's Book of Owls, 2013

It was 2012, and the world still hadn’t collapsed, and Diyabubula had not yet become a resort. It was simply the house of the master creator, Laki Senanayake. No furniture, no walls—no standard way to live, no boundaries fearing the wild… It was simply Laki. Birds flew in to eat the treats Laki kept on his balcony lounge; the monkeys were only shooed away if they got too close to Laki's computer. The way nature flew in and out of Laki’s unwalled house, making it thick with experiences, reminded us how life flits in and out of the creator’s open mind, making it a fertile bed for creative harvest.

It was the first time he met us, but our presence didn’t even stir a molecule out of Laki’s true self. He sat on the balcony with us, bare-chested, in a pyjama sarong, chatting; just as he would with a wild bird using a whistle that perfectly matched its call. Laki had a way with whistling. He whistled to himself—old Sinhala songs and impromptu tunes—he whistled in response to birds, to call someone over; sometimes he seemed to whistle for the jungle, at the sky, for life, for no reason in particular… 

Wild tortoise came by to eat leftover pieces of vegetables from his kitchen; the freshwater fish in the pond were fed from minute scraps left behind; nothing was wasted, everything had its place in the mind of the creator.

‘What kind of music do you listen to?’ was one of the first things he asked us. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, for Laki, music was a road to meet someone in a personal sanctuary—where they were bare, free and themselves. Laki himself used music as a vehicle to transport himself to other worlds. 

After quietly watching a red sun fall into the black jungle in a spectacular descent, Laki politely said that it was time to listen to his ‘weird music’. It was a ritual time to return to that inner place where all artists feel compelled to retreat. One by one, lamps lit Laki’s jungle in fleeting glimpses of his sculptures, moving leaf and water. As hypnotically bizarre music echoed from speakers scattering the wild, theatrics fed from nature, sound and our imaginations unravelled. His music was a curious mix that reminded us of sound poetry and Dadaist meditations; it transformed everything—living and nonliving— into animated extensions of the jungle. Bathed in that furiously wild music and cinematically placed lights, his metal sculptures seemed to flick, bob and twitch from the corners of our eyes. Even Laki’s pond fish came out to gracefully circle the surface in time with the music or our fancy—we can never be sure. For hours no one spoke.

We realized that we just got a rare entry into the secret place where Laki’s genius was let loose to run free. We’re not sure when he returned from that strange place at all that night. He simply seemed to fade into it, leaving the world behind.

Long after we left Laki in his jungle, the lesson he gave us remains. This lesson on what it means to live a creative life—like all lessons given by great masters—was not taught in words or actions. It was something that penetrated us from his being. From Laki, we learnt that creativity is a wild bird. You may analyze its habitat, build charts about its behaviour, and write books about its biology; but to know the wild bird, you must simply visit the jungle. You have to return to the wilderness again and again; and, to have it come perch on your shoulder, you must become as wild and as unlearned as the jungle. Laki taught us that creativity is the most natural thing that there is. It’s the way of the world that recycles life and death; it’s the way of the jungle that’s far stranger than fiction. Yes, creativity is a wild bird. It permanently altered our very perceptions about what it means to inhabit this world as creators.

This is why when we think of what it means to live a creative life,  we like to remember Laki on his balcony, whistling with a bird. He knew that creativity was not a secret, but simply naked nature—wild, practical, genius. 

Rest wild Laki; thanks for pointing to us where the wild birds live.

Listen to this playlist that captures the emotions and moods that Laki inspired in us.