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lyricist

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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About a month ago I sat down with a prominent composer and vocalist. He was a veteran and as with most veterans, he had a lot to talk about. So we talked. We ambled along the past, revisited certain milestones he’d gone through, and eventually came to a point where we exhausted any possibility for more ambling. We didn’t stop talking though. We instead went off to other topics and points, which he (being a veteran) knew intimately and was only too willing to wax eloquent on. Being the interviewer, I let him remember. And took down what he said.

The subject was music, obviously. So I asked him about the debate between what’s referred to as ape de (ours) and the Oriental tradition, the latter of which has clearly influenced the former for reasons not too difficult to discern. I’m no musicologist, but it doesn’t take a musicologist to figure out the “revolution” as such that compelled itself in the early sixties, when the then Radio Ceylon brought over experts from North India to assess, pass, and if necessary filter musicians who’d call the shots for the next few decades.

I then put across a question I’d been dying to ask the man. Here it is, word to word: “In the light of this cultural invasion, how would you assess those who were forcibly removed from Radio Ceylon or went on self-imposed exiles because their music was considered too ‘plebeian’ for the tastes of those refined outsiders?” The man was quick with his reply: “Well, no one can seriously contend that those outsiders, or their so-called ‘agents’ in here back then, did a disservice to the music industry.”

I mentioned some names. Firstly I mentioned Piyasiri Wijeratne. Piyasiri wasn’t an exile, but thanks to the “Raghadari Revolution” (as I like to call it) his voice drifted away until we forgot him. The musician was adamant with his verdict: “He didn’t have a great voice.” I then mentioned a singer who composed or sang or wrote more than 250 songs and hence, can’t be ranked alongside the more obscure Wijeratne: Sunil Shantha.

The man was slower to reply, but he had a verdict to deliver on him too: “He didn’t possess a great voice either. His melodies were simple and he was basically a ‘kantharu’ singer. People commend him for nourishing Sinhala music, but the truth of the matter is that he came from a tradition which subsisted on hymns and sermons in the Church. And while we’re at it, let’s not forget that he was a Catholic, hardly a qualification for someone venerated for his contribution to folk music.” There was, as always, a hint of bigotry there (what’s not musical about kantharu after all, and what’s wrong in being a Catholic when it comes to contributing to our music?) but for me, his comment merits attention for another reason.

For years, decades, and more than a century, Sunil Shantha was ridiculed. He was marginalised and belittled. Some claimed that his vocal range was limited. Others claimed that his melodies were too simple. Few, very few in fact, saw in him the musical prodigy that he was. They either passed away soon or had their opinions rubbished by what I referred to in my article on Clarence Wijewardena as “bamunu critics.” I make no apologies for that term and I make no exceptions for anyone, be it a newcomer or a veteran from our music industry.

I believe it’s time to reassess the man. He deserves approbation. Not ridicule. As no less a figure than the late Tissa Abeysekara frequently noted, he was the first musician from here who aligned his melodies with the syllables, permutations, and essence of the Sinhala language. Yes, his melodies were simple, yes they were meant for the ear and not the academe, and yes they were aimed more at the aesthete than the musicologist. But in all seriousness, was there anything in what the man did that made him deserve his later exile from his career? The simple answer, no.

Sunil Shantha was born as Don Joseph John on April 14, 1915 in Dehiyagatha, Jaela. His parents were staunch Catholics but didn’t live long enough to see him grow up: he was not quite three months when he lost his father and not quite three years when he lost his mother. He was raised thereafter by his maternal grandmother and some uncles from her side of the family.

Don Joseph passed from his school, St Aloysius’ in Galle, and became the first in the island at his final exams. Around that time, in 1933, he was trained as a teacher at the Roman Catholic Teacher Training School in Maggona and began his career at Mount Calvary College in Hapugala, a school in which he eventually developed a formidable music culture. It’s probably a measure of how committed he was that, within the next six years, he was able to lead his students to three consecutive victories at the Southern Schools Music Competition.

Not surprisingly, by 1939 his worth had been noticed, measured, and praised, and that year, he passed the intermediate level in the prestigious Gandharva Examination. Within the next six years his life moved quickly: he went to Shanthiniketan where the North Indian tradition was in sway and then proceeded to the Bhathkande, where the more plebeian, Bengali tradition fired his imagination intensely. He received his Visharada Degree from there in 1944, and by that time he’d had enough with what Professor Carlo Fonseka once wittily described as a very “unmusical name.” So off went Don Joseph John, and in came Sunil Shantha. He joined Radio Ceylon barely a year later, when Sri Lanka had gained independence. He was 30 at the time.

When he arrived in Sri Lanka, much had happened. Ananda Samarakoon had initiated a revolution of sorts to cleanse our music of any foreign accretions. He was not very successful at it. That was expected. After all, it was hard to shake off the raghadari tradition and it was hard to forge a musical idiom that could subsist for long without it.

True, Samarakoon had valiantly made an effort, and much of his work – like “Ennada Menike” and “Vile Malak Pipila” – testified to that. But for a complete and unhindered process of cleansing and purification, there needed to be an authority, someone strong enough to challenge the conventional wisdom and wield an idiom that was at once rooted in our land. To do that, he needed to align his melodies with our language.

Shantha began achieving this with the first ever song recorded for Radio Ceylon, “Olu Pipila.” It was an instant success, needless to say. At a time when both the well-to-do and the less well off found it fashionable to insert Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” at a marriage ceremony, Shantha’s simple and folksy tune gushed in wildly. Soon enough, whenever there was a wedding, that tune would almost always be played out.

And in a sense, his other songs caught on in much the same way. They became simpler and less frilled as the years went by – notice the difference between the likes of “Emba Ganga” and “Mal Mal Mal” and the likes of “Poda Dam Sisile” and “Ho Ga Ralla Binde” – probably reflecting his need for austerity, simplicity in a music tradition that combined language and melody.

But there were commonalities that brought them all together: like the poetry of the English Romantics and the more melodramatic ruminations of Tagore, they were meant for the aesthete. With their praise of village life, the waves of the sea, and the quiet dignity of the peasantry, they remind me of the later poetry of Wordsworth: simple, enchanting, essentially inbred, and without a doubt quaint.

Notice, for instance, the lyrics that open up “Mal Mal Mal”
මල් මල් මල් රතු රතඹල මල්
මල් මල් මල් නිල් මානෙල් මල්
මල් මල් මල් සුදු අරලිය මල්
මේ හැම හොඳ රුව ඇති මල්

Shantha gives the impression of being a witness to the beauty and sense of wonderment in these flowers. He lists them, one by one, ending each verse with a reminder that they are filled with just that: beauty and a sense of wonderment. In these songs, which to me represent his most fruitful period (until his fall from grace after the Raghadari Revolution), he becomes a witness and receptacle to the land of his birth: a witness, not player. He doesn’t bring out any message per se (though some of his work, such as “Walakulin Basa”, inspired development drives that sought to make use of our natural resources), and for this reason, he was like Keats and the later Wordsworth.

I don’t see any point in dwelling on what befell him later on. Compilers and historians have recorded all that and have condemned those who should be condemned. He didn’t deserve the fall he had to suffer and he didn’t have to suffer the indignity he had to bear up with until his death. Sure, no one would believe that he worked as a mere radio repairer today, but that’s because no one with any sense of decency would expect that a man who composed “Olu Nelum Neriya Rangala” and “Pruthugeesi Karaya” could be forced to stoop to such a level.

From those still living with us, I can think of only one person writing in English who seriously considers him as a worthy: Carlo Fonseka. Here’s what the good Professor once said: “Sunil Shantha belongs to the ‘ancient period’ of the history of modern Sinhala music. It is generally agreed to have dawned in the 1940s. It was during the brief period from about 1945 to 1950 that Sunil Shantha created the veritable torrent of songs that took the world of Sinhala music by storm.”

That “ancient period” of modern Sinhala music had to evolve. Evolution, however, shouldn’t be at the cost of rubbishing the past. What happened to Shantha was tragic and avoidable, going by that.

Yes, I find it difficult to believe that more than 35 years after he died and more than a century after he was born, there are still those who deride him on account of his religious background. No, I shan’t stir up a hornet’s nest here. All I will say is this: he could have been treated better. And if he had, he would have gone on composing, gone on writing, and gone on singing. We wouldn’t have been worse off because of that and we would have profited if he’d been allowed to go on.

He wasn’t. Consequently, we lost.

By Uditha Devapriya

On those who write on love for others to sing

November 18, 2016 by admin
ajantha ranasinghe, Lyricist, uditha, Uditha Devapriya

sunil-ariyaratne

Photos by Upul Devapriya

Every budding poet, at some point in his or life, tries to love on love. Experience is their biggest trump card and if they lack experience, they try to make up for that through words. The truth however is that there’s no guarantee that the experienced lover (jilted or requited) can be an experienced poet on romance, just as much as there’s no guarantee that the poet who writes on love though he or she hasn’t encountered it will turn out to be a dabbler. Keats, Shelley, and Mahagama Sekara wrote on the subject, after all, and none of them (they all died relatively young, let’s not forget) could be said to have indulged in what they wrote of considerably.

It’s a different matter when you write for others to sing, though. Sekara did that. He had Amaradeva. But Sekara was not alone. He lived at a time when people wrote on different themes and when lyricists didn’t stay fixated on one in particular for too long. Premakeerthi de Alwis, for instance, is reported to have written over 5,000 songs. Sunil Ariyaratne has written almost as much. They could have easily set themselves up on top of that forever insurmountable terrain called love and carved their careers there. They did not. Neither did Sekara.

And neither did Ajantha Ranasinghe, who like Premakeerthi, Ariyaratne, and their contemporaries was bequeathed to our literary and music fields after the revolt that transpired in 1956.

Ranasinghe came to us in the seventies and eighties, each decade special for different reasons: the seventies, because of the veritable stream of indigenous artistes who superseded and got rid of the foreign domination our performing arts industries had been subjected to until then, and the eighties because of the freedom granted to every budding artiste to come into those industries thanks to liberalised economic, cultural, and social policies.

True, the man was there before all that, but he came to the forefront when he began versifying for some vocalists and when he entered our cinema (both of which and whom blossomed in the transition from one decade to the other). In his own special way (and this is probably why I took to him) he turned love into verses, lines, and veritable wordplay. He wrote of love in so many ways that it was difficult to keep up. Perhaps that was meant to be, perhaps not. For the truth of the matter is, he entranced an entire generation.

Ajantha Ranasinghe was born in Thalammahara in the Kurunegala district. It was there that he received his first education, a point he drove home rather emphatically when I interviewed him about two years ago. “We revelled in the village. In fact you can say and assume that most of my songs owe their legitimacy and feel of life to what I encountered in my childhood,” he explained, adding quite cogently, “Only someone who has moved intimately with rural life could have written what I wrote.” Today’s generation, he observed, were not fortunate.

He was educated firstly at the Pannala Government School, again in Kurunegala. After some time his family decided to educate him in English, so they sent him to St John’s College in Nugegoda. Given the fidelity that artistes exhibit towards their schools, I naturally asked him to elaborate on how his education in Colombo helped.

To my surprise, he was not nostalgic. “Unlike in the game iskole, we didn’t come across our culture. I’m not finding fault with such schools, but you must remember that missionary establishments were there to spread their faith first and only then embrace our culture. Apart from the Sinhala and Literature periods, I didn’t encounter that culture in Nugegoda.” For that reason perhaps, after he completed his GCE Ordinary Levels, he left St John’s.

He did not idle, however. By the time he left school, he had established himself among a group of like-minded lovers of the arts, led by Sunanda Mahendra. They would all buy books together, read them, and critically appraise Sri Lankan and world literature. They would also meet every fortnight for various discussions. “We were interested in language, in culture, in literature, in religion, and not just what textbooks provided.” No doubt all these helped his later career, in particular owing to the link between the written word and the articulate lyric. That was what provoked him to comment: “We found time to dabble in fruitful conversations on the arts. You just don’t see that kind of interest among youngsters today.”

Stints at Radio Ceylon, where he joined the Lama Mandapaya program, and at Lake House, where he was not only a cub reporter and local news editor but also a short-story and lyricist, would follow. It was during this time that 1956 “happened” and spilt over: Ranasinghe would feel its impact almost immediately, in how aspiring artistes like himself were being perceived by his countrymen. Eventually, he found himself working under the formidable Karunaratne Abeysekara at the SLBC, where he met one of his most frequent collaborators, H. R. Jothipala.

Jothipala had heard of Ranasinghe through his sister. He had come to meet the man to make a request: “He wanted me to write the ‘world’s most beautiful lullaby’ for his newborn daughter. I asked him how. He gave no reply. Instead, he told me to meet and talk with Mohamed Sali, who was to direct me. I felt helpless at the time. It seemed impossible in every sense of that term.” Nevertheless, the challenge was accepted, and Ranasinghe came up with the lyrics for a lullaby. The song, “Mage Wasanavam”, marked the first time he and Jothipala got together.

From then on, every other song, dirge, and lament that Jothipala sang, Ranasinghe wrote.

We cherish them even today, as original and as transcribed melodies, which opened him to a torrent of composers: from Sarath Dassanayake to Premasiri Khemadasa. Khemadasa entered the cinema through the films of K. A. W. Perera, who paved the way for Ranasinghe to write on songs that were as cherished as the plots of those same films: who doesn’t remember “Mey Gee Eda” from Janaka saha Manju, or “Pokuru Pokuru Mal Sanakeli” from Wasana, or “Manamalai Manaharai” from Hingana Kolla? For these he wrote down a torrent of lyrics that were seeped in love and romance, the themes that Perera went for in his stories. No wonder we took to them. Anyone would.

Khemadasa in particular occupied a cherished spot in his memory. I doubt he had a favourite he could pick from the 50 plus songs he wrote for films, but if I were to pick, I would pick on “Mala Gira.” I didn’t mention this to him but I mentioned the song, and he lightened up at once. He reflected: “That reminds me of how much our childhood encounters shape our later careers, particularly in the arts. As I told you before, only a person who has gone through village life could have written the songs I have: lines like ‘gomara pethi male’ are not easy to come up with, but they were all there, in ‘Mala Gira’.”

He was, however, no pedant. “When we think of the Sinhala lyric we think of high-flown rhetoric. That is not always the case. You can’t remain fixated on the classics forever. You can’t be writing down ‘gal lena bindala / len dora arala’ all the time, and if you do, you will court the risk of alienating your audience.” Not that he absolved the practice of most modernists to discard the past altogether: “There must be a balance between fidelity to tradition and flexibility. I have come across so many instances where the composer or the vocalist or even I had to compromise on rigid linguistic rules for the sake of the melody.”

He believed strongly in the coexistence of quantity and quality in his field. In the case of most singers (and songwriters) today, however, and as a final point in our conversation, he contended that quantity had more or less superseded quality. “Name one really popular song from today,” he challenged me. Needless to say, I couldn’t. Earnestly, he went on: “Look at the singers we had then: Amaradeva, Victor, Latha, Jothipala. People still go after them. Why? Not just because they were popular in their time, or because they were giants, however true that may have been, but because no one is there now to continue from where they left off.”

sunil-ariyaratne-1

He could have been talking about himself. When he died last February (suddenly and tragically), he left behind a void. Who’s there to fill that void? No one, we can contend. We will continue to think of him as we listen to what he wrote: we will croon “Suwada Danee” as we watch Kamal Addarachchi and Sangeetha Weeraratne courting each other in Saptha Kanya, “Sanda Pem Yahanen” as we watch the two lovers in “Wasanthaye Dawasaka” steal away at night, and “Sili Sili Seethala Alle” (which to me represents a near-perfect fusion of romance and silliness in a Sinhala song) as we remember Raj Seneviratne featured in probably one of the first music videos produced in this country.

Yes, we will remember. And as we remember, we will regret.

By Uditha Devapriya

Mahinda Algama (Malinda Words)

Mahinda Algama: His Lyrics will Resist Editing

October 23, 2016 by admin
Lyricist, Mahinda Algama, Malinda Seneviratne

[This was written on February 13, 2014 for The Nation of February 16, 2014.  Mahinda Algama will not read this piece.  He passed away on the 15th of February.]

Talk of lyricists and there are names that drop off the lips of announcers, presenters and guest speakers, names that drip off the pens of scribes in Sinhala newspapers.  Mahinda Algama is a name that’s not hard to pronounce.  His presence in the Sinhala music scene is such that he is not easy to forget.  And yet, name-droppers rarely mention him.  Perhaps this is because there’s a politics to art and art critique, never mind the perennial debate whether art is or should be political or whether it is for art’s sake and nothing else.

The 16th day of February has no significance to a man called Mahinda Algama.  It is not his birthday.  He hasn’t been honored by some state or other award.  And yet, there are many reasons why he should be written about.  The important among them is the fact of an absenting that one has to conclude is deliberate considering the man’s work over many decades

He did not write thousands and thousands of songs.  Some three hundred over a period of fifty years does not add up to ‘prolific’.  And yet, as he himself has observed, only that which is qualitatively superior has the fuel to move from and move generation to generation.

ma2

He will be remembered mostly for his contribution to the corpus of children’s songs in Sinhala. Several generations have listened to, learned from and been inspired by his work in the field of broadcasting where his focus was children’s songs and radio plays.  ‘Tharumuthu Kumariya’ published in 2010 has a collection of 60 songs, many of which would spark childhood memories.

His lyrics lend themselves to easy and catchy melodies, with word and music blending in ways that made erasure from memory difficult.  Perhaps this is because, as Sunandra Mahendra has pointed out, his ability to draw from folk literature and therefore touches the taproots of culture engrained in what might be called genetic signature.

He will not be known, from generation to generation, for his educative role in his field.  Saman Athaudahetti has written how ‘Mahindayya’ was always keen on doing something new, something fresh.  He also acknowledges that there are dozens of singers, song-writers, actors and actresses whose awakening, so to speak, was the Lama Ranga Peetaya.  He obtained help from experienced artists but never forgot to encourage new entrants.  This is why Saman says that Mahindayya was a teacher in addition to being a poet and lyricist, a radio program producer etc.  He was quiet and this everyone in his field knows.  Perhaps it is because he was not one to stamp feet, announce presence and brag that he is ‘passed over’ in the politics of Sinhala lyrics.

Not all students acknowledge the role of those who guided them in their journey towards success in chosen field.  Mahindayya, on the other hand, has readily acknowledged that he would have been no one if not for the encouragement of his old elder brother Jayampathi Algama and Madawala S Ratnayake.  He also mentions Chandraratne Manawasinghe, Mahagama Sekera, Arisen Ahubudu, Doltan Alwis and Karunaratne Abeysekera as having influenced him greatly in his early days.  Interestingly, of the above, Abeysekera and Sekera shares Mahinda Algama’s ‘absenting’ fate.

But that’s politics.  It is also a product of envy, ignorance and arrogance. Of the true recipients of Algama’s creativity, not many will know that it was he who penned the lines that echo in their hearts throughout their lives; we tend to identify song with singer, not lyricist or composer of melody.  But if you mentioned ‘Chandramadulu vala suranganaavan’ in a room full of people who are keen on Sinhala songs and lyrics, there’s bound to be lots of smiles.  The same with ‘Rukkaththana mala mudune’.  Timeless.

Were they ‘children’s songs’ though?  In a sense, yes.  Easy words, vivid imagery and simple lines of thought are what make children enjoy, remember and treasure songs.  The power of his creativity however can be measured by the fact that simple as the lines are they speak of profound things.

Even today, for example, one of Nanda Malini’s most loved songs is Algama’s ‘Chandramadulu vala’.   Through the fairytale imagery the lyricist offers an important life lessons.  He takes the child through known narrative to a state of consciousness that alerts him or her to deceit, all through the voice of the most trusted one, the mother.

චන්ද්‍රමඩුළු යට සුරංගනාවන්
දූ සනහන්නට ගීත ගයනවලු…
දුවේ එපා ඒ කතා අහන්නට
මේ නැළවිලි ගී මමයි කියන්නේ…

They will tell you, little girl
that beneath the moon’s bright glow
there are angels singing to please…
but don’t listen to them
it is I that sings to you.

රන් තැටියට කිරි පැණි පුරවාගෙන
හදහාමී දූ බලන්න එනවලු…
දුවේ එපා ඒ කතා අහන්නට…
හඳහාමී කෙලෙසද මෙහි එන්නේ

With a golden dish filled to curd and treacle
Uncle Moon will visit you, they’ll say…
But little girl, ask yourself,
How can the moon come here?

කිරි මුට්ටිය නුඹෙ ඟගේ ගියාලූ
ඟගට උඩින් කිරි කොක්කු ගියාලූ…
දුවේ එපා ඒ කතා අහන්නට
මමයි නුඹට ලේ කිරිකර දෙන්නේ…

The gourd of milk floated downstream
And above it flew the flock of storks
But little girl, don’t listen to them,
It is I that turns blood into milk just for you.

දූ අල්ලන්නට හැන්දෑ යාමේ
මල්ලක් අරගෙන බිල්ලෙක් එනවලු…
ධීර දුවේ මා බිය නොම වන්නේ
සිහළ ලෙයයි නුඹ සිරුර දිවෙන්නේ…

The bogeyman will come at dusk
With a big, big bag to catch and take you away,
They’ll say,
But little girl do not be afraid
For it is Sinhala blood that runs in your veins.
So Algama says, essentially, ‘do not be swayed by the sweet words of strangers’.  He also says, ‘do not bend to threat’.  These are things that stand us well in our daily lives, bombarded as they are with the lies that go with commerce. These are things that stand us well in darker times, when enslavement is sought more through threat than its execution.

It is perhaps apt that in these very times of sweet-talk and censure, it so happens that it was the last verse of this very song that was deliberately, brutally and crudely ‘edited out’; most cruelly too because it was Nanda Malini who was executor here.  She or those who have used her voice and acted with or without her permission as definers of her political and ideological position.

She is reported to have explained to Algama this slashing thus: ‘There wasn’t time to sing that part’.  This is not true.  The track was made in anticipation of this edit.  There’s a politics to this too.  That’s a different article, one supposes.

But it is symptomatic of how Algama has been (made to be) read over the years.  His silence, quiet ways, generosity, sense of equanimity and civilized ways have been taken as ‘weakness’. He has therefore been seen as ‘prey’.  He has been or has sought to have been ‘subbed out’ of the larger narrative of the Sinhala lyrics; along with Sekera, Sunil Sarath Perera, W.A. Abeysinghe and Karunaratne Abeysekera, one should add.

But we will listen to the songs. Those he nurtured not just in writing, broadcasting etc., but in identifying the most salient elements of the human condition, will continue to add value to that which is best in the human being.  And we will still remember Nanda Malini with fondness for lending voice to those lovely lyrics.  She will drop verse for reasons best known to her, but we will not.  In fact she would do well to remember that her fans stand with the original and not the castrated version.  And that, perhaps, is the best testimony to the greatness of a simple Sinhala man, Mahinda Algama.

 

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

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