The Rabana

   Distant sounds of rabana playing reach your ears. If anything is representative of folk culture of the villages, it is the urban with its distinctive rural flavor. With the raban installed on its stand, and village maidens disposed round it on low stools or sitting on their haunches, singing the raban kavi (songs) to their rhythmic drumming the Alut Awrudu Devatawa (New Year God), strides over the lives of these humble folks, filling them with hopes & aspirations of the year just born. Despite the vast range of folk sports, nothing is more impressive than the rabana New Year greetings.

 Alarge variety of outdoor & indoor sports are indulged in most assiduously. In outdoor sports, the unchillava leads. The swing runs into a number of mechanized types scarcely seen outside Ceylon. The Gus Unchillava, suspended from branches of high trees is the common type. A type largely seen in Malabar too. In the New Year season, nowhere out of Ceylon prevail such mechanized swings, as those seen in the far flung villages the island.

  During two successive years it has been my great delight to see and study two of these highly developed appliances, the Bambara Unchillawa, spinning like a huge top on its axle planted in the ground, and the Kudu Unchillawa, with its cage like structure, from which depend a number of swing. These revdve up and down with the turn of the large wheel revolving on a centre axle, the whole erected between two stout coconut plants. The swing arouse in you admiration for the folk mind that could create such technologically perfect mechanical devices.

  Alone of all festivals, the new year is distinguished as the national day. The reason is not far to seek. It is a day of days. It does not stand isolated. A day of celebration all over south India & Ceylon. It is the astronomical New Year day when the sun passes from meena rashi (pisces) ti mesha rashi (Aries) not only it is the first of the Sinhala month a bak (April), it is also the first of the Malayalam month of medam (Mesham) & the first of the Tamil moth of chittrai.

In Ceylon as in Malabar, it used to be the custom of the astrologer to pay a round of visits to the households of his village with the avrudu sittuwa as it is known in Ceylon or the Vishnu phalam as known in Malabar, a strip of palm leaf inscribed by the stylus giving a forecast of the year, the prospect of the harvest the weather the favored dress & the general economic outlook. In both the lands, the practice is dying out or has already disappeared replaces by the annual calendar, the panchanga.

The last few hours of the last days of the old year are the sankranthi, the interval of the passing of the sun from one rasi to the other from the old year to the new. This interval of time is nonagathaya. Folk belief in Ceylon have associated this interval with all that is inauspicious.