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bandula-nanayakkarawasam

The Bandula Nanayakkarawasam Story

November 18, 2016 by admin
Bandula Nanayakkarawasam, Lyricist, Sinhala Lyricist, uditha, Uditha Devapriya

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Bandula Nanayakkarawasam [Pics by www.sooriya.lk/malinda-seneviratne]

Lyricists are fascinated by the word. Some are selective in what they write, others aren’t. They grow to appreciate that there’s more to a song than verses. There was a time, though, when I thought they didn’t, when I thought they’d grown so accustomed to words that they were hindered by them. I believed then, as I don’t now, that a work of art was best assessed in terms of its moral content. In a song, for better or worse, this moral content was based on the message its lyrics drove home. The closer that message was to my sympathies (political or otherwise), the more likely I’d rate the song highly.

That was then. Since that time I’ve wondered whether a song really is a series of lines etched by the poet or something else, and I’ve come to realise than even the worst songwriters pay deference to more than just words. Especially when it comes to the Sinhala lyric. Bandula Nanayakkarawasam, I’m willing to bet, would no doubt agree.

He’s considered as a lyricist, among the best we have right now, but that’s not all. He doesn’t just pen words or lyrics. He has a voice, he has indulged in script-writing, he has sung, and he knows life. This is his story, coloured as it is by anecdotes which probably do more justice to him than a simple biographical sketch.

Bandula was born in Galle, about two or three kilometres from town. His childhood was, in his own words, quite fortunate in terms of the aesthetic education he received. His first encounter with music had been a large Mullard radio brought by his uncle, a connoisseur of the arts who apparently had been a collector of rare items and instruments. “I was about three when he died,” Bandula remembers, “and since we lived at a time when not even the richest families in our neighbourhood owned a radio, the Mullard was a big deal for a child my age.”

The contraption had entranced young Bandula in more ways than one. “Back then we had only two local services run by one station, Radio Ceylon. It was on this radio that I first received my education in music. I was also the youngest in my family by a wide margin, my podi akka being eight years older than me. Naturally, I was a bit of a loner in my house, and in my free time, which I never lacked even when I was at school, I used to place my ears on its speakers and listen to every song with unabated interest.” He jokingly tells me here that he once believed that the singers and announcers who sang and spoke were hidden in the device: “So when I listened to it during a thunderstorm and my loku akka warned me that if lightning struck it would break apart, I honestly thought people would come out. Obviously they didn’t. I was about five at the time.”

I ask him here whether he looked for the lyrics in a song then. “Not really. We first hear a tune, then a voice, then a name,” he explains, “You must understand that it was in my time that people like Victor Ratnayake and Sanath Nandasiri emerged. Amaradeva was before them. But as a child, I went for Victor aiya’s songs because of his voice.” I put to him that the likes of Victor emerged as a result of the efforts Amaradeva made, and he agrees. “To be honest, it was after listening to Victor aiya that we realised how complex and poetic Amaradeva’s lyrics were. Poetry didn’t figure very highly in me then.”

His interest in the arts developed beyond music as the years went by. His father (a firm leftist and an avid reader) and would usually give him as much as 100 rupees to buy books. “I used to go to a store owned by a man called Lionel and buy a lot, because back then a book cost about four or five rupees.” He would get hooked on to literature, above everything Russian literature, which as he says made him see the world in a different light even through translations. “We also had novels, short story collections, and poetry published by Progress Publishers. Naturally, I indulged in them all.”

Young Bandula was sent to Richmond College, where his teachers inculcated in him a wider appreciation of what he’d already grown to love. “One of my English teachers was a man called W. S. Bandara. He introduced me to the English translations of Chekhov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev. It was then and there that I realised how woefully inadequate our translators were. Of course there were exceptions like K. G. Karunathilaka, but apart from them the others didn’t really feel the text they were working on.” Musically too he prospered, with various stints at singing in concerts and even some inter-school competitions to his credit.

Apparently the radio figured so much in his life at this point that he couldn’t really do without it even when studying. “A man called Jinasena lent me some flexible wires, which I then used on an American speaker which belonged to my uncle. Our house oversaw a wel yaya. When I listened to the radio in my room while studying Arithmetic, that wel yaya was always in my sight. That was the kind of childhood and education I had.” As he grew up though, it wasn’t just songs that he listened to but other programs as well, among them E. W. Adikaram’s “Vidya Dahanaya”, Mahinda Ranaweera’s “Sithijaya”, Lucien Bulathsinghala’s “Sandella”, H. M. Gunasekera’s “Irida Sangrahaya”, and Tissa Abeysekara’s “Art Magazine”. To this date, he says he finds it easy to concentrate on something while listening to a song or radio program.

Curious as to what his musical tastes are, I then ask whether he differentiated between “low” and “high” art in his day. He says he doesn’t think so. “That came later. But back then we read and we exchanged newspapers with our neighbours. So we weren’t completely ignorant of the divide between high and low art. For instance, I would come across Jayawilal Wilegoda’s articles on the cinema. Wilegoda lambasted Sinhala films which imitated Bollywood. The same went for music. People like him were always asking questions like how a popular verse like ‘jeevithaye kanthare / thurunu wiyali walle / uthura gala yayi adare’ made sense, when they didn’t. By the time we’d grown up as schoolboys, we knew about this divide. Not that it deterred us from indulging in everything that came our way, of course.”

Bandula’s reference to films isn’t arbitrary: apparently even the cinema had entranced him. “I fell in love with movies at an early age. Back then I was regularly taken to the theatre by my sisters. They considered me a nuisance because of how I’d emotionally react to what they watched. I still remember, for instance, how I cried at Dommie Jayawardena ‘singing’ Milton Perera’s ‘Umba Kiya Kiya’ in Hathara Maha Nidhanaya. When I saw those scenes of cattle awaiting their death at the hands of butchers, I inadvertently remembered the cattle that roamed near our home. I even had names for them, so when I saw a cow that bore some resemblance to one of them I broke into tears. My sisters weren’t in the least happy,” he remembers with a smile.

In his later years, as the Sinhala cinema matured and as film halls became receptive to better selections from world cinema, Bandula would expand his horizons. “The first film I saw was Suhada Sohoyuro, back when I was in Grade Four or Five, although the only thing about it which struck me at once was the scene of Asoka Ponnamperuma crying alone in an ambalama. Considering how I’d been thinking that grownup men didn’t cry, this was an unprecendented sight for me,” he laughs. Apparently he had also patronised the Russian Cultural Centre and the British Council, visits to which broadened his mind and opened him to the rest of the world. He watched and studied the French New Wave, the Eastern European renaissance, and the American counter-cultural revolt.

He also entertained the idea of being a scriptwriter at one point, even getting into the Sri Lanka Television Training Institute (SLTTI) along with the likes of Sumitra Rahubadda, K. B. Herath, and Douglas Siriwardena. “I was taught by Tissa Abeysekara,” he remembers. I urge him on.

Abeysekara had been more than just a guru, and as Bandula confesses he would become almost a hero to him. “The way he took us through the history of the cinema, from Eisenstein and his Odessa steps to the American blockbuster, was incomparable. In later years we associated with each other very closely. Once when he had to leave the country while leaving a documentary of his unfinished, he insisted that the only person who could narrate it other from himself was me. I’m glad I knew him.” Notwithstanding his stints at the SLTTI, though, he didn’t get to become a full-time scriptwriter, apart from a television adaptation of T. B. Ilangaratne’s ‘Vilambita’ directed by Lakshman Wijesekara and broadcast on Swarnavahini, and various other one-episode teledramas.

Getting back to his musical career, I ask him whether he has taken a side in the divide between the aesthetic (saundarya) and the political in lyrics. There’s a name that obviously crops up here, and needless to say it does crop up.

“Sunil Ariyaratne wrote ‘Sakura Mal Pipila’ when I was in Grade Four. That was what first made me realise how abstract music was. In later years, as he and Nanda Malini went on to endeavours like ‘Sathyaye Geethaya’ and ‘Pavana’, I matured. Even now, when you listen to ‘Perahera Enawa’, you feel nothing but admiration for a man who rebelled against tradition and order in what he wrote. The two of them felt injustice and spoke against it. They taught me about the potential of a song or for that matter any work of art. I can’t really write about the things they explored with such vigour, but that doesn’t take away my admiration for them.” He adds that his encounters with Russian novelists left a deep impression in this regard. “To this date, I prefer the poetry of Pushkin to that of Wordsworth. That’s not to say that Wordsworth doesn’t have merit, but the Russians were incomparable in how they observed life and reality.”

What about the present? Bandula is noticeably glum here. According to him, the Sinhala lyric is progressively deteriorating in quality. I ask him whether this is because our generation isn’t as receptive to the abstract in art as his had been, and he says he doesn’t think so. “We’ve commercialised art, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but then we’re confused about what a popular song is. Forget songs, we don’t even know how to rate radio programs! That’s something I realised when I was doing ‘Rae Ira Pana.’ It won awards and was popular but didn’t show up as popular as per surveys conducted by ratings agencies. The way these agencies conduct such surveys is quite questionable. And this applies to the kind of songs we have conditioned ourselves to listen to today. I mean, think of it this way: when was the last time you heard a proper, meaningful song when you were travelling by bus?”

I suggest here that things would certainly have been better in his time, but he agrees only half-halfheartedly. “You implied earlier that we’ve de-sensitised ourselves so much that we can’t appreciate the abstract in art. This isn’t something new. In my day, to give you an example, there was a singer called Piyasiri Wijeratne. He isn’t remembered today because his output wasn’t prodigious. But what little he sang, we sing and celebrate, songs like ‘Bedda Pura’ and ‘Ratak Vatina’. The problem was that we had a habit of putting down talent even then, an unfortunate trait in us which persists to this date. In later years, Tissa Abeysekara would publicly observe that Piyasiri had among the best voices in this country. But did we recognise him then?” I see his point at once: blaming some imaginary malaise for the “cultural desert” we seem to find everywhere today, to an extent at least, blinds us to the fact that in each and every epoch our music “industry” as such has faced a huge deficit.

Yes, these are reflections. Opinions. Time has proved them. That shouldn’t really bother us though, at least not those among us who’ve grown to love the kind of music that Bandula has. Speaking superficially about his lyrics, I can say this much as a final note: whether he’s writing about injustice (“Rae Wada Muraya”) or love (“Ahasai Oba Mata”) or childhood (“Mal Pipeyi”), he has realised how simplicity can inject relevance to an otherwise overused message. Which brings me to my first point: no matter how potent that message is, a lyricist isn’t or rather shouldn’t be entranced by words alone. Bandula Nanayakkarawasam no doubt can testify to this. Amply.

By Uditha Devapriya

Uditha Devapriya

A freelance writer and a commentator who has written to several publications in Sri Lanka; Ceylon Today, The Nation, The Daily News, and The Sunday Island, particularly on the performing arts.

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October 23, 2016 by admin
Bandula Nanayakkarawasam, Mahagama Sekara, Malinda Seneviratne

Perhaps it is because of a discernible suppression of Mahagama Sekera in the larger discourse of 20th Century Sinhala literature that people sometimes express the wish that the great man be elevated to his rightful place among literary greats.  It might be for this very reason that some who attended an event at the Light House Galley on April 7, 2014 curiously titled ‘Rae Ira Pana’ with a ‘Sekera Mahima’ tag may have left believing that justice was done.  Sober reflection might yield the following fact: Good literature does not need media boost and a giant doesn’t need a leg-up.

‘Rae Ira Pana – Sekera Mahima’ is not strange to those who are interested in the Sinhala lyric.  Themahima or wonderment of Mahagama Sekera does not require elaboration but the idea, let’s say, of ‘Sekera’ had a lot to do with ‘Rae Ira Pana’ the radio program and ‘Rae Ira Pana’ the event.  Let’s begin with the program.

Bandula Nanayakarawasam (Malinda Words)
Bandula Nanayakarawasam (Malinda Words)

‘Rae Ira Pana’ was a unique radio show.  It ran continuously for 115 weeks.  Bandula Nanayakkarawasam, eminent lyricist and presenter, hosted the show.  He wrote the script, presented the show and had a hand in all creative efforts associated with the program.  He drew extensively from the archive that is his memory, coloring song with anecdote and flavoring it with history.  He re-drew well-known figures of the Sinhala music scene, accentuating already known facets and detailing the lesser known to give depth to face and word.

Bandula knows that for all the fixations with things commercial, there exists a sizable population that seek a superior creative, a song where there is complementarity between words, composition, music and voice.  It was thus an exercise that instilled in listener the feeling that he/she is not alone.  What began as a peripheral program a fair distance from ‘prime time’ gained so much popularity that it affected a veritable shift in ‘prime time’.  The 7 pm to 9 pm Sunday program was repeated from 8 am to 10 am the following Saturday.  Sri Lankan expatriates made a weekly date with the program via the internet.  ‘Rae Ira Pana’ was adjudged the best music program at the State Music Awards 2013.

Bandula dabbed his narrative often with literary and musical fact and anecdote outside the island, drawing from other cultures, other literatures and other genres.  It had, therefore, an educational element to it.

The response, he says, was phenomenal.  Appreciation flowed in from all parts of the country and from people belonging to different generations.  And that’s how we got ‘Sekera Mahima’ this evening.

Among the listeners was Ananda Wickramarachchi, a 64 year old ‘fan’ who was a retired Chemistry teacher at St Joseph’s College.  He had seen an ad about the program and had listened to it.  This was in late September 2011 (‘Rae Ira Pana’ was launched earlier that month).  Since then he hadn’t missed even one ‘show’.  The reason was ‘Sekera’.  Bandula devoted several episodes to the work of Mahagama Sekera. Wickramarachchi, who had made it his lifework to collect everything written by Sekera and everything written about Sekera, had found a kindred spirit.  Bandula sought him out to obtain hitherto unknown or lesser known knowledge of Sekera’s life and work.  Wickramarachchi, as a mark of appreciation for Bandula’s work, decided to gift the collection to the man behind ‘Rae Ira Pana’.  Bandula had suggested that an event which celebrates the great literary personality would be the appropriate ‘stage’ for such a gift-giving.  That’s how ‘Sekera Mahima’ got tagged to ‘Rae Ira Pana’.

‘Rae Ira Pana’ was struck down in December 2013 much to the dismay of the considerable fan base it had engendered.  This, then, was a moment to reflect, step back and reassess, and what better way than to do all this in a context where the man who inspired so many, including Bandula, is remembered and celebrated?

‘Rae Ira Pana’ had already ‘gathered’ a disparate and eclectic crowd.  They gathered around their radios and listened to Bandula. There was togetherness, a community, a solidarity that got built over weeks that stretched into months and more than two years.  They were left hanging by the particular station.  And so Bandula devised a way to bring them together.  That’s the genesis of the show, with the unintended but fortuitous outcome of ‘scrapping’: the launch of a website that gives us all the episodes whenever we want to listen to them, www.rairapaana.com.

And they came.  First and foremost, there was Sekera’s family, his son and daughter and the grandchildren he never saw. There was W.D. Amaradeva whose songs are remembered as much for his incomparable voice as for the lyrics into which that voice was mixed to give the world countless memorable songs. Bandula’s friends and teachers, formal and otherwise, were all there.  There were young people, artists of one kind or another, known to Bandula.  There was Bandula’s family too. There were fellow lyricists, many whom he had revered in his formative years and who consider him not student or ‘junior’ but equal.  There were ‘Rae Ira Pana’ fans.  There were people who loved and revered Mahagama Sekera.

They came from all parts of the country. They cancelled appointments considered ‘important’.  This, many would have thought, is a must-go.  ‘Must-go’ because they all love Bandula and more than that, they are acutely aware of the massive contribution that Sekera made to Sinhala literature.  No one was disappointed although things got off the ground late.  I didn’t want to miss even a minute, so I got there right on time, dragging a reluctant friend who had time to kill and no one to kill it with. Hafeel Farisz was glad he came along.

There was a script but then again Bandula Nanayakkarawasam is too creative to stick to any script, even his own. He improvised.  He entertained with anecdote. He referred to connections and built and strengthened ‘connectivities’.    He laid out his life and demonstrated what a critical part the community of literary figures, past and present, played in shaping it in particular ways.  Again and again he returned to Sekera.

Amaradeva was asked to speak a few words and then, gently, persuaded to sing ‘Ese Mathuvana’ with Bandula at the maestro’s ear prompting.  Amaradeva, as always, recalled that his creativity and that of Sekera were intertwined, using the line gee pothai mee vithai (the book of verse and the glass of wine), even though Sekera had a life outside of Amaradeva of a magnitude and versatility that Amaradeva’s life outside of Sekera just cannot match.  But there was indulgence of course.  Sekera would have been 85 today.  Amaradeva just passed that mark.

There were speeches.  Many.  That’s because Bandula is by nature someone who celebrates inclusivity. He wanted a lot of people to ‘say a few words’. They all did. They kept it short and they spoke sense.  There were two ‘special’ speeches, one by Wickramarachchi and the other by W.S. Bandara, Bandula’s disapamok anduru thuma at Richmond.

Bandara spoke at length. He entertained. He taught.  He spoke about education and educating. He drew examples from Richmond, spoke of the use and abuse of libraries, critiqued education policy and inter aliaspoke of values that sustain civilization and the threats engendered by the abandonment of the same.  It was not hard to understand why and how Bandula Nanayakkarawasam does the things he does.

If that was introduction to ‘beginning’ then Wickramarachchi’s speech described the end (pertaining to the particular moment that was this event). He spoke of his fascination of Sekera and his appreciation of Bandula’s efforts through ‘Rae Ira Pana’.  Fittingly, Sekera’s children gifted him with a printed copy of one of Sekera’s paintings.

Ravinda Mahagama Sekera later explained, ‘the original of that copy is not with us and no one knows where it is.’ Indeed there many of his paintings are lost.  Ravinda said that there are a few at home but there could be over a hundred others.  Some had been sold at the one and only exhibition Sekera had held.  He had gifted away many to his friends.  Most did not even carry his signature. Ravinda observed that it is possible that those who possess the paintings might not even know they have in their possession a Sekera painting.

He was a giver.  And giving and sharing was what Sekera stood for or represented through his work. Bandula pointed out that Sekera reminded everyone that nothing is taken away when we go away forever but in the intermediate hours of living sharing is possible and wholesome.

Bandula had lined up songs for the evening and they were slotted in nicely amidst comments and speeches.  They were well-picked.  He’s good at that; this is why ‘Rae Ira Pana’ was so popular after all.  He prefaced each performance with a relevance-note.  All of it was poetic as befitted reciter and occasion. Most poignant was a rendering of ‘Ese mathuvana’ by M.R. Shah, former President of the Bank Employees’ Union.  Bandula, in introducing Shah, spoke of union politics and things that cut across ideological preferences and political affiliations.  Shah is no Amaradeva of course, but his rendition was nevertheless beautiful.

Asanka Liyanaarachchi, an undergrad and winner of ‘Kavitha’ the university version of ‘Super Star’ sang ‘Aetha Kandukara’, coincidentally just as Pundit Amaradeva arrived.  The song and the lyric are not the preserve to the recognized and honored, Bandula often says.  This is why he had an employee of the Galle Post Office and friend sing ‘Wasanthaye Mal’.  Nelu Adhikari sang ‘Parasathu Mal’; Sujatha Attanayake would have been proud. Kapila Poogalaarachchi sang ‘Seethala diya piri sunila vilai’ a song that Bandula had picked from Sekera’s unpublished lyrics, thereby foregoing an opportunity to pen a song himself, again very ‘Sekarist’ of him.  There was Gayathri Ekanayake, a teacher at Visakha, who sang ‘Ruwan wala duhul kadin’.  They were all very good.

Bandula is a treasure house of anecdotes.  He has a fantastic memory for seemingly inconsequential things.  He recalled how Kularatne Ariyawansa had indulged in mild browbeating one night and how he, Bandula, had ended up writing a song that ‘Kule Aiya’ had been asked to write, ‘Nim Therak’ (Sunil Edirisinghe).  Kule Aiya had turned up at the studio and had been livid that Bandula had let his, Kule’s name remain as lyricist.  That’s respect, he said.  Kularatne Ariyawansa would have none of it, not least of all because it was beautifully written.  Bandula always acknowledges the influence of the pera parapura, the greats who came before, of whom he claims that Sekera was the foremost.  This is perhaps why he asked a host of guests to offer comments, some many years old, some his contemporaries.  And so we had Buddhadasa Galappaththi, Samantha Herath, Praneeth Abeysundera, Lal Hegoda, Rohana Weerasinghe and Sunil Ariyaratne making brief observations of the event, Bandula, Rae Ira Pana and of course Mahagama Sekera.

‘Listening to all this, doesn’t it give you hope for this country?’ my friend Hafeel asked me.  ‘When was I ever pessimistic?’ I replied.

Optimism apart, the fleshing out of hope or giving it corporeality of some kind requires hard work, tender hearts and the seeking out and strengthening of solidarity.  Bandula, true to form, put it best.  Here is a rough translation:

‘Let all that is best in all of us come together and create another Mahagama Sekera who would then unravel who we are and the world we live in and thereby show us the pathways we ought to choose so we can reach a better, more tender, more knowing world.’

What better tribute to that beautiful human being.

 

Source: http://malindawords.blogspot.com/

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