[wpspoiler name=”Wilbur teaches us how to Baila” open=”true” style=”aatw-video”][/wpspoiler]
[Information about baila coming soon.]
Baila
Countries Archives: Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka–Cricket
Sri Lankans are crazy about cricket, and why shouldn’t they be? It’s a thrilling sport, packed from start to finish with intense competition between top-flight athletes that just as often raw as a fistfight as it is graceful as ballet…or is it? In the U.S., where most All Around This World classes take place, all most of us know about cricket, if we know anything at all, is that it’s something like baseball and that most Americans know nothing about it. Cricket is a sport that stirs the passions of billions of people around the world, mainly in former British colonies such as India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Americans know nothing about cricket…? Maybe we should.
Here are the basics. Much like baseball, cricket is a sport played between two teams — one sends up batters to hit a ball while the other takes the field to play defense. At the center of the field is “the pitch,” which is a rectangular area that has two “wickets” about 72 feet apart (as opposed to 60′ 6″ between the pitcher and home plate in baseball). A wicket is a set of three wooden poles, known as “stumps,” with more wood resting across them — the “bails”. Two batters from the team stand at either end of the pitch. The bowler — similar to the baseball pitcher — throws the ball with the goal of hitting the wicket and knocking off the bails. The batsman tries to prevent the ball from hitting the wicket by swinging his bat.
If the batsman misses the ball and it knocks the bails off the wicket, he’s out and the next batsman bats. If the batsman hits the ball and one of the fielders catches it in the air, he’s out (much like baseball). If the batsman hits the ball and it drops into the field, he and the other batsman dash back and forth between wickets, counting how many times they go back and forth as “runs” until the fielders are able to get the ball back to the wicketkeeper (who’s sort of like a catcher in baseball). There are different kinds of cricket matches lasting a variety of numbers of “innings” (again, sort of like baseball), but the basic goal is for each team to try to score more runs (like baseball) than the other team.
Get it? Good.
More information:
A basic cricket overview | “This is cricket”: only four minutes of YouTube viewing stand between you and your future love of cricket | Wikipedia on cricket | There really is something called a googly.
Sri Lanka–Music
After over a thousand years of continuous Buddhist practice in Sri Lanka you won’t be surprised find many Buddhist chants in Sri Lankan traditional music, and of course there are substantial musical strains from India — specifically, music from Bollywood films — but the music of Sri Lanka also provides many unexpected surprises. You may not expect to hear Portuguese cantiga ballads, which originated when the Portuguese arrived in the mid-1400s, or an African-inspired music called “baila,” which came with African settlers called “kaffrinhas.” Sri Lankan musicians with an ear to the Caribbean brought Calypso to the island in the 1960s, resulting in a jubilant blend of Caribbean, African and Indian sounds. More recently, Sri Lankan musicians have embraced international styles like disco, hip hop and even, for better or worse, Europop.
More information:
Wikipedia on Sri Lankan music | About baila music
In class we’re going to listen to:
— Annesley Malewana: “Gon Wassa.” Malewana was the lead vocalist of the Moonstones, one of Sri Lanka’s most beloved baila acts of the 1960. Malewana reunited with Moonstones’ composer Clarence Wijewardena in the ’70s to form the Super Golden Chimes, another one of Sri Lanka’s most popular bands.
More about Anneley Malewana:
A bit about Malewana, Wijenwardena and the Moonstones | Listen to “Gon Wassa” while looking at a very happy Malewana | Clarance Wijewardhena trapped in a rainbow, overcome by fog, then attacked by bubbles and flying colors | The Super Golden Chimes reunited!
— Bathiya and Santhush: “Arunodaya Wage” from the album “Naththara.” One of Sri Lanka’s first singing groups to sign with an international record label (Universal, in 2002), Bathiya and Santhush have released pop and rap songs in Sinhalese, Tamil and English.
Unfortunately, you’ll have to “please await” Bathiya and Santhush’s official website, but if you toss the words “Bathiya and Santhush” into the YouTube search engine and you’ll get a wide array of video choices, from smooth Sri Lankan pop to not always-kid-appropriate, yet infectiously catchy hip hop.
— Prince Udaya: “Dath Hamim” from the album “Suwanda.” There’s not much information about Prince Udaya available online, but you can find him on YouTube singing very sweetly, though incredibly unenthusiastically.
One of Sri Lanka’s best known musical exports is the British-born, Sri Lankan-raised Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, otherwise known as M.I.A. M.I.A. is an outspoken rapper and political activist whose father was a Tamil separatist organizer. In the ’80s she moved back to London with her mother and siblings where she finished her schooling and went on to become a visual artist and internationally known rapper.
M.I.A. raps about very grown-up topics such as war, colonialism, racism and life on the streets and her lyrics aren’t meant for kids so there won’t be any links here, but her gritty, passionate and utterly danceable music is well worth a listen.
More info about M.I.A. UK’s
| A subtly snide profile from the NY Times
Sri Lanka–Language
The two official languages of Sri Lanka are Sinhala — since the 1956 “Sinhala Only” Act — and, since 1987, Tamil. Some Sri Lankan Burghers speak Portuguese, Creole and Dutch and some Malay speak Sri Lankan creole Malay.
The Tamil language is several thousand years old and is considered one of India’s true classical languages. Sri Lankan Tamils are proud of their dialect of Tamil, and of their historical and cultural distinction from the Indian Tamils. Sri Lankan Tamils (sometimes known as Ceylon Tamils) are descendants of the Tamils from the old Jaffna Kingdom and other east coast “chieftancies.” Indian Tamils who live in Sri Lanka (also called Hill Country Tamils) came to Ceylon in the 19th century from India’s Tamil Nadu region as bonded laborers to work on British tea plantations.
More information:
A Tamil overview from UPenn’s South Asia Center | Kwintessential’s Tamil Language page | Tamil’s elegant written script | A quick quiz about Tamil
Sri Lanka–When you go there
Lonely Planet’s Sri Lanka page describes Sri Lankans of all ethnic origins as proud people — proud of their cuisine, their wildlife and landscape, their long history of Buddhism, their two thousand years of independence before colonization, their eventual separation from their colonial rulers, and especially of their national cricket team.
Since the Sri Lankan government declared the end of the war with the Tamil Tigers in 2009, Sri Lanka has promoted itself as a safe, welcoming, European-friendly tourist destination. In January, 2010 the New York Times, placed Sri Lanka at the top of its “The 31 Places to go in 2010” list. This outraged Sri Lankan-raised international rap star and Tamil activist, M.I.A., whose rant against the Times for declaring Sri Lanka a tourist gem while almost simultaneously reporting on its government’s human rights abuses inspired fiery debate between Sinhalese, Tamils and many others with a stake in Sri Lanka’s future. (M.I.A.’s choice of language condemning the Times is far from kid-friendly so there won’t be a direct link here; you can easily ride Google to more information about the controversy.)
More information:
Wikitravel on Sri Lanka | Sri Lanka promoting Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka–Overview
In the 16th century Portuguese colonized the island now known as Sri Lanka (once known as Serendip), ending two thousand years of local rule. For the next several centuries Sri Lankans fought the Portuguese, who called the island Ceylon, then the Dutch, then the British, and in 1948, after acting as an Allied military base during World War II, finally became independent. In 1972, Ceylon changed its name to Sri Lanka, which means “venerable island” in Sanskrit. This marked a break from Ceylon’s colonial-era past. (It also required the nation to print a whole lot of new stationery.)
In the years after independence the primarily Buddhist Sinhalese — comprising over 80% of the Sri Lankan people — dominated national politics, marginalizing a primarily Hindu Tamil minority that had long played a significant role in Ceylonese society. For example,
the nation’s new flag featured a lion, symbol of the Sinhalese fight for independence, and had only a single strip of orange to represent the Tamils. In 1956 Ceylon adopted the “Official Language Act” (locally known as the Sinhala Only Act) which made Sinhala the
official national language, forcing many non-Sinahalese-speaking Tamils out of the civil service. There was also an attempt to make Buddhism the nation’s official religion, as well as the installation of Sinhalese “affirmative action,” which supporters deemed necessary to counteract policies of the British that many Sinhalese deemed to be pro-Tamil.
Most Tamils protested their marginalization within Sri Lanka’s legal structures, but in 1983 a separatist movement called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), known internationally as the Tamil Tigers, went to war to demand and independent state in the North and East of the island. The war was brutal and both sides accused the other of human rights abuses. In 2009 the Sri Lankan national government declared victory, though not everyone’s confident the conflict is over.
More information:
Wikipedia on the Sri Lankan civil war…blame the British? | “Seredipity on the Tear of India”: from serendipity to separatism | Sri Lanka: a multi-ethnic society? (a more detailed history) | About the Sri Lankan flag | The Council on Foreign Relations’ take on the Tamil Tigers | The U.N. investigates Sri Lankan human rights abuses (issues discussed in this link are primarily for grown-ups)|Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu culture | Wikipedia on the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which devastated much of Sri Lanka’s coast (this link is not necessarily for kids)
Lesson 12: Sri Lanka
This week in music class we head into the Indian Ocean where we find Sri Lanka, an island nation just off the southeastern tip of India. Sri Lanka is a South Asian island nation that’s famous for its exports of cinnamon, rubber and tea, its unbridled enthusiasm for cricket, and, unfortunately, for a 16 year long civil war between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils.
START HERE:
— OVERVIEW: In the 16th century Portuguese colonized the island now known as Sri Lanka (once known as Serendip), ending two thousand years of local rule . . .
— MUSIC: After over a thousand years of continuous Buddhist practice in Sri Lanka you won’t be surprised find many Buddhist chants in Sri Lankan traditional music, and of course there are substantial musical strains from India, but the music of Sri Lanka also provides many unexpected surprises . . .
— LANGUAGE: The two official languages of Sri Lanka are Sinhala — since the 1956 “Sinhala Only” Act — and, since 1987, Tamil.
— WHEN YOU GO THERE: Lonely Planet’s Sri Lanka page describes Sri Lankans of all ethnic origins as proud people . . .
— CRICKET: Sri Lankans are crazy about cricket, and why shouldn’t they be . . . ?
