[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":208},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-en-papare":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"category":173,"description":174,"era":175,"extension":176,"featured":177,"heroImage":178,"imageCredit":179,"imageLicense":180,"imageSource":181,"meta":182,"navigation":183,"path":184,"rawYear":185,"seo":186,"sources":187,"stem":206,"translated":183,"url":190,"__hash__":207},"storiesEn\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fpapare.md","Papare: The Kovil Horn That Became the Cricket Ground's Voice",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":164},"minimark",[9,13,21,24,29,32,47,50,53,56,60,67,73,101,104,108,111,114,117,120,124,127,134,137,144,148,161],[10,11,12],"p",{},"In February 2011, with the Cricket World Cup about to open in Colombo, the Sri Lanka Police published a list of things that could not be taken into the grounds. Sharp objects. Banners. Alcohol. And papare bands.",[10,14,15,16,20],{},"The reaction was immediate enough that the ban was revoked before the tournament got going. \"How can you ban the papare?\" M. A. Clarence Perera, then fifty-three and playing since he was fifteen, asked the ",[17,18,19],"em",{},"Sunday Times",". \"If there is no papare, there is no cricket. The cricket we know comes with the papare.\"",[10,22,23],{},"That is a strong claim about a music with no notation, no canon, no conservatory and no recordings anyone buys. It is also more or less true. Papare is probably the most widely heard live music in Sri Lanka, and almost nobody in the country thinks of it as traditional music at all.",[25,26,28],"h2",{"id":27},"the-kovil-or-the-church","The kovil, or the church",[10,30,31],{},"Ask where it came from and you get two answers, both from the same newspaper.",[10,33,34,35,37,38,42,43,46],{},"The musician Kumara Karunanayake told the ",[17,36,19],{}," in 2014 that the roots run to the kovil: the ",[39,40,41],"strong",{},"nadeswaram",", the long South Indian reed pipe he described as \"a type of clarinet\", and the ",[39,44,45],{},"davul bera",", the double-headed drum he called \"an oriental equivalent to the bass drum\". From the Kataragama devale festivities, he said, the music moved out into peraheras, where it became the infectious accompaniment for the kavadi dancers. That lineage is easy to hear: papare's engine is still a horn on top of a drum, and it still plays for men dancing under a decorated arch.",[10,48,49],{},"Three years earlier the same paper had been told something different. Clarence Perera's account began in Negombo and the Catholic villages around it, where band members belonged to a parish, played for days at church festivals, and named their bands after popular saints. Only afterwards, on his telling, did the music move outward into devalayas and kovils and then into carnivals, weddings, political rallies and corporate sales days. He added a detail that reconciles the two versions rather neatly: the kavadi music at Kataragama, he said, is played by papare musicians.",[10,51,52],{},"Accounts differ, in other words, on whether papare is a Hindu tradition that Catholics took up or a Catholic one that spread into Hindu festivals, and there is no reason it cannot be both. What is not in dispute is the hardware. The nadeswaram has gone; the trumpet, trombone and saxophone that replaced it are European instruments that arrived with colonial rule, through church bands and garrison bands. It is often said that the habit of playing while walking came from British military bands specifically. That is plausible — a brass band that marches is not a South Asian idea — but no source consulted for this article documents the link, and it is better held as a likelihood than stated as a fact.",[10,54,55],{},"The davul bera never left.",[25,57,59],{"id":58},"no-reeds-no-sheet-music","No reeds, no sheet music",[10,61,62,63,66],{},"A papare band is small. Three men can do it: one on the bass drum, one on the side drum, one on the trumpet. Forty is possible for a big occasion. The kit runs to drums, cymbals, trumpets, trombones, an occasional saxophone, and the ",[17,64,65],{},"molama",", a set of cane beaters and drums that produces the tumbling, feverish undercurrent.",[10,68,69,70,72],{},"The brass is played without reeds, which is why the players' lips split. A. K. S. C. Alwis, fifteen years in the business when he spoke to the ",[17,71,19],{},", was blunt about the physical cost of keeping a tent going from morning to evening, and equally blunt about the skill: \"Very few papare musicians read music. You have to have a good ear for it.\" A band has to be able to hear any tune once and play it for as long as the crowd wants it. \"Even if we could use music notation,\" he laughed, \"it would be a bit difficult\" — the places they play from include moving buses, lorries and rooftops.",[10,74,75,76,79,80,83,84,79,87,90,91,79,94,97,98,100],{},"What they play is whatever is current, run through the same treatment. \"Even if the song is slow, we can increase the beat and create a fast tempo,\" Perera said. The playlist is Sinhala, Tamil and Hindi, with the occasional English number; a visiting cricket writer at the Premadasa in 2014 found himself listening to five men hammering out something that sounded a great deal like \"Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da\". A large part of the repertoire is baila, which is why the drums so often sit in that rolling 6\u002F8. Wikipedia's short entry on papare lists staples including ",[39,77,78],{},"කැකිරි පැලෙන"," ",[17,81,82],{},"Kekiri Pelena",", ",[39,85,86],{},"යමන් බන්ඩෝ",[17,88,89],{},"Yaman Bando"," and ",[39,92,93],{},"එන්න නංගී එන්න මල්ලී",[17,95,96],{},"Enna Nangi Enna Malli"," — although the single citation it offers is the 2011 ",[17,99,19],{}," piece, which names none of them, so the list should be read as folklore rather than reporting.",[10,102,103],{},"Nobody has published a papare songbook. It would be out of date by the following season.",[25,105,107],{"id":106},"rupees-three-thousand-and-a-split-lip","Rupees three thousand and a split lip",[10,109,110],{},"The economics are unglamorous and worth stating, because they are the reason the tradition survives at all.",[10,112,113],{},"Alwis began with a group of seven and by 2014 had a hundred and thirty-five musicians working under him at the Royal–Thomian, spread across the tents. The Royalist camp paid about two thousand rupees a man a day; the Old Thomians' band, run by H. P. Fonseka, got about three thousand, out of which came transport and food. Bands took as little as six and a half thousand rupees for a session in 2011, split among however many turned up.",[10,115,116],{},"For the drummers this is often the whole living. For others it is a second job done for the pleasure of it — Alwis had two friends with good careers who had been playing beside him for eight years and did not need the money. Fonseka's case is the more revealing one: fifty-four years old, four generations of his family in the band business, playing since he was ten, in his father's band before he could lift most of the instruments. He played his first Royal–Thomian from the back of a moving truck, decided it was intolerable, and was still doing it forty years later. Most of the United Band started with him as boys of ten.",[10,118,119],{},"That is transmission by apprenticeship inside families, which is exactly how every music this article's readers would readily call \"folk\" has always been passed on. \"It's like a tradition passed down from generation to generation,\" Karunanayake said. \"We like to think of it as an art form in itself.\"",[25,121,123],{"id":122},"following-the-team","Following the team",[10,125,126],{},"The bands travel now. Perera had played with the touring side in Doha, Dubai and India. Sri Lankan supporters abroad have pooled money to fly musicians out from home for tournaments.",[10,128,129,130,133],{},"The International Cricket Council has not always made this easy. It tried to restrict instruments at the World Cups of 2007 and 2011, and in Sri Lanka's case the fuss was loud enough that the edict was reversed. At the T20 World Cup in the Emirates in October 2021, families arriving at Sharjah with drums were turned away at the gate and had to walk back to their cars; supporters wrote to the ICC pointing out that instruments had been allowed at games in the Emirates in 2011, 2013 and 2017–19. The ICC relented within days. \"Some instruments were not allowed,\" a spokesman told ",[17,131,132],{},"The National",", \"but we are liaising with venues and our security advisers to lift those restrictions, since we understand the need to build up the atmosphere.\"",[10,135,136],{},"The threat papare has not seen off is the vuvuzela, which crossed the Indian Ocean after the 2010 football World Cup and does not blend with anything. Attempts to outlaw it have gone nowhere.",[10,138,139,140,143],{},"There is a phrase that goes with all of this: ",[17,141,142],{},"nava gilunath baan choon"," — even if the ship sinks, the party goes on. It is sung at grounds where the home side is losing badly, by men who are being paid three thousand rupees, on instruments a colonial army brought, over a drum from a temple procession, in a tradition four generations deep that has never once been called traditional.",[25,145,147],{"id":146},"what-we-know-and-how-we-know-it","What we know, and how we know it",[10,149,150,151,153,154,157,158,160],{},"Almost everything specific here — the instruments, the fees, the band sizes, the two origin stories, the working lives of Alwis, Karunanayake, Fonseka and Perera — comes from two ",[17,152,19],{}," features, one from February 2011 and one from March 2014, each built on direct interviews with working papare musicians. The atmosphere, the vuvuzela problem and the ICC's earlier instrument bans are from Alan Gardner's 2015 essay for ",[17,155,156],{},"The Cricket Monthly","; the 2021 Emirates episode is from ",[17,159,132],{},".",[10,162,163],{},"What we do not have is a documented history. There is no study of papare, no dated first band, no agreed etymology of the word, and no evidence beyond assertion for the frequently repeated claim that the parading habit descends from British military bands. The two origin accounts above are the recollections of practising musicians in their fifties, not archival findings, and they disagree. For a music this audible, that is a remarkable gap — and a solvable one, since the men who learned it from their fathers are still alive and still playing.",{"title":165,"searchDepth":166,"depth":166,"links":167},"",2,[168,169,170,171,172],{"id":27,"depth":166,"text":28},{"id":58,"depth":166,"text":59},{"id":106,"depth":166,"text":107},{"id":122,"depth":166,"text":123},{"id":146,"depth":166,"text":147},"genre","Trumpet, trombone and a davul bera, played by ear, for twelve hours, for about three thousand rupees. Papare is a living folk music that nobody in Sri Lanka thinks of as folk music.","1900s-present","md",false,"\u002Fimages\u002Fstories\u002Fpapare.webp","Mayooranathan","CC BY-SA 3.0","https:\u002F\u002Fcommons.wikimedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FFile:Kaavadiyaaddam_Jaffna.jpg",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fpapare",2011,{"title":5,"description":174},[188,191,194,197,200,203],{"title":189,"url":190},"'A traditional symphony' — Sunday Times, 16 March 2014","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F140316\u002Fsunday-times-2\u002Fa-traditional-symphony-89135.html",{"title":192,"url":193},"Smriti Daniel and Yashasvi Kannangara, 'Let's get the papare going' — Sunday Times, 27 February 2011","http:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F110227\u002FPlus\u002Fplus_01.html",{"title":195,"url":196},"Alan Gardner, 'Papare rules, ok?' — The Cricket Monthly, April 2015","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.thecricketmonthly.com\u002Fstory\u002F853681\u002Fpapare-rules--ok",{"title":198,"url":199},"Ramola Talwar Badam, 'ICC allows Sri Lanka's beloved, noisy papare bands play at T20 World Cup in Dubai' — The National, 28 October 2021","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.thenationalnews.com\u002Fuae\u002Fheritage\u002F2021\u002F10\u002F28\u002Ficc-let-sri-lankas-beloved-noisy-papare-bands-play-at-t20-world-cup-in-dubai\u002F",{"title":201,"url":202},"Papare (music) — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FPapare_(music)",{"title":204,"url":205},"'Baila for Dummies: A Quick Guide to Sri Lanka's Afro-Portuguese Pop Music' — Afropop Worldwide","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.afropop.org\u002Farticles\u002Fbaila-for-dummies-a-quick-guide-to-sri-lankas-afro-portuguese-pop-music","en\u002Fstories\u002Fpapare","nvjLjgDiwc2oARkyalrhTKv1gtX1Ni37lYAdmdie_XI",1787999338023]