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Gawai Dayak comes from Gawai meaning festival and Dayak a collective name for the indigenous peoples of Sarawak, Indonesian Kalimantan and the interior of Borneo. The population estimate is two to four million people. The Dayaks, previously known as the Sea Dayak are mostly Iban people.
[77] [78] [79] Sarawak is the only state in Malaysia to declare the Gawai Dayak celebration a public holiday. [80] It is also the only state in Malaysia that does not gazette the Deepavali celebration as a public holiday. [81] Religious groups are free to hold processions in major towns and cities during festivals. [82]
There is an emerging category of life-building gawai called dream festivals such as Gawai Lesong (Rice Mortar Festival) and Gawai Tangga (Notched Ladder Festival) and some newly innovated variants of the gawai proper as a result of dream by a person or several individuals. These are popular among the Iban in the upper Rajang region.
Since conversion to Christianity, some Iban people celebrate their ancestors' pagan festivals using Christian ways and the majority still observe Gawai Dayak (the Dayak Festival), which is a generic celebration in nature unless a gawai proper is held and thereby preserves their ancestors' culture and tradition.
Many Dayak especially Iban continue to practice traditional ceremonies, particularly with dual marriage rites and during the important harvest and ancestral festivals such as Gawai Dayak, Gawai Kenyalang and Gawai Antu. Other ethnicities who have a rapidly dwindling and trace amount of animism practitioners are Melanau and Bidayuh.
Tidung, Sino-Murut, Dayak, Kadazan-Dusun, Lundayeh, Orang Ulu and other Austronesian peoples The Murut , alternatively referred to as Tagol/Tahol , [ 2 ] constitute an indigenous ethnic community comprising 29 distinct sub-ethnic groups dwelling within the northern inland territories of Borneo .
The Iban language (jaku Iban) is spoken by the Iban, one of the Dayak ethnic groups who live in Brunei, the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan and in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. It belongs to the Malayic subgroup , a Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family .
Gawai may refer to: Gawai, A village in Chitwan, Nepal; Gawai Dayak, annual festival celebrated by the Dayak people in Sarawak, Malaysia; See also. Gavai, a surname