Malinda Seneviratne: Three poems and a life

July 13, 2020 by shamilka

Easily one of the most discernible occurences in the last 20 years within our local English literary sphere has been the ascent of Malinda Seneviratne. Before I get to Malinda the poet, whom I am acquainted with only barely, I need to get to Malinda the man, whom I know personally. There are clear connections between the two, so much so that I can’t separate the one from the other. To understand the reasons behind his rise and ascent, I think it best that we go through his biography before delving into his poetry.

Malinda Channa Pieris Seneviratne was born on September 23, 1965 in Colombo to Gamini Seneviratne, a Civil Servant and a poet on his own right who would eventually retire as the Chairman of the Coconut Development Authority, and Indrani Seneviratne, who taught English Literature and Greek and Roman Civilization in various schools, her longest tenure being at Royal College, Colombo. Both of them were English honours graduates from the University of Peradeniya. Malinda was the second in his family, with an elder brother, Arjuna, and a younger sister, Ruwani. They were all born to a culture of connoisseurship and appreciation of the arts. Malinda’s later forays into literature were consequently initiated by his parents, especially his father, who got him to write a poem when he was 12 revolving around a tune played on the family piano.

He attended Royal College, where he dabbled in Literature and Chess among other activities. Having won all major awards for English literature, he wound up as Prefect and Chess Team Captain, winning the National Championship in 1983. That year he sat for his A Levels, where he offered Mathematics and obtained adequate results to enter the University of Peradeniya. However, he opted to sit for his A Levels in the Arts Stream the following year, where again he secured good enough results to enter University. He entered Peradeniya in 1985 for a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology.

Owing to his exceptional academic performance in his first year, Malinda was selected to an exchange program at Carleton College, Minnesota for a Trimester. During the infamous UNP-JVP bheeshanaya of the eighties Universities were shut down in Sri Lanka. After sitting for both TOEFL and SAT, Malinda got a scholarship to Harvard University in December 1988. As with Peradeniya, he studied Sociology, returning to Sri Lanka two and a half years later towards the end of the bheeshanaya.

Following various stints at politics and teaching, including one as an ELT Teacher at the Medical Faculty of Peradeniya University in 1992, he was hired as an Editor at the Agrarian Research and Training Institute in March 1993 before leaving it the following year. He then resumed his higher studies, when upon a friend’s advice he applied to the University of California’s School of Urban and Regional Planning, got in, applied a year later to Cornell University, and managed to read for a PhD in Development Sociology there. However he never completed his PhD: having left his thesis (titled “Journeying with Honour: In Search of the Vague and Indeterminate”) halfway through, he was instead given a conditional Master’s Degree. As of today, he has not completed it.

His first collection of poetry, “Epistles: 1984-1996”, was published in 1999. He submitted his poetry, in manuscript form, for the Gratiaen Award on six occasions between 2007 and 2013. Five of these collections were shortlisted: Threads” in 2007, “The Underside of Silence” in 2008, “Some texts are made of leaves” in 2011, “Open Words are for Love Letting” in 2012, and “Edges” in 2013, while “Stray Kites on Stringless Days” didn’t make it to the shortlist in 2010. He won the Gratiaen for “Edges”, his best anthology by far. Two years earlier, in 2011, he had won the H. A. I. Goonetilaka Award (also with the Gratiaen Trust) for his translation of Simon Navagattegama’s acclaimed Sinhala novel Sansaranyaye Dadayakkara, which he first read at Cornell University and translated, in part, for a class exercise on Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.

I would hazard a guess here and contend that of his literary influences, outside his immediate family that is, Neruda and Navagattegama take a prominent place. Malinda’s interest in Neruda – his subtle, effortless use of imagery in verbal terms – is there in his best poetry, and to me that is what characterises his prose as well. In Neruda you don’t see the technical gimmicks that are so nakedly apparent in, say, e.e. cummings or Ogden Nash; you see instead the displacement of myth and conjecture and convenient fictions (whether conceived on the personal sphere or by officialdom) through the use of understatement. There is never a rift between the personal and the social. They get together in ways that one essay can’t do justice to.

Malinda is at his most characteristic, and I’d like to think his most enduring, when he abandons the social for the personal and embraces the kind of life he has grown up on and grown up to love. His poems on his daughters, for instance, merit particular scrutiny:

I’ve held you both
together and separately
in wakeful hours and while asleep

The cutting of a whole sentence into a set of lines is characteristic of Neruda and Latin American poetry in general, but it’s interesting to note that Malinda, unlike most young poets here who are entranced by Neruda (not unlike their descendants who were entranced by what they erroneously felt to be the essence of Rabindranath Tagore’s work), doesn’t confuse technical gimmickry for mastery of language.

But there’s one issue that bothers me. Critics, in their attempt to get at the man, tend to fault him for resorting to religious imagery in his poems. Some of them have faulted him in front of me. Their argument is as follows: for a poet to be truly universal, he or she must transcend his or her affiliations to a particular collective. In the case of Malinda their allegation is rooted in what they feel to be his desire to belong, his exhilaration at being at one with a faith and an ethnicity. I would like to examine two of his poems in this respect, because I know that the yardstick those critics use is a largely mythical image of an artist as a transcendentalist. (They don’t even want him to affirm humanity; they are content in making him reject his ethno-religious garb.)

The first poem is disarmingly simple: “To a little boy holding (onto) a Buddhist flag over his head.” In 24 lines he draws a link between the flag and the collective it represents. While superficially easy, his attitude towards his own faith comes out strikingly in the last line: “It [the flag] is for holding and breaking son.” The flag is a symbol, at most a quasi-secular symbol. What transcends it is the faith it embodies.

Malinda’s politics has reflected his poetry to a lesser extent than his prose. It’s interesting to note that, not unlike his political essays, he is content in dichotomising between the secular and the mythical whilst remaining respectful of the latter. It’s no coincidence that he refuses to indulge in his faith so much in The Underside of Silence, which is chock-a-block with idealisations of his family and his country. He becomes more confident of indulging in faith and ethnic identity, however, in Open Words are for Love Letting (from which the above poem is taken), and even more so in Edges.

In “Dhamma” he goes a step further: he enters his faith without merely gazing at it.

… words can be clap
and can be clasp
some are lit
and others light
this Vesak
and always.

Again you see a dichotomy, between clap and clasp, between lit and light, congealing to this Vesak and all time. It now seems as though polar opposites are reconcilable through his faith. There is a transcendentalism here that one comes across very rarely in his other poems. It’s almost a new sensibility, but is it enough to counter what his critics are saying? The answer to that question lies in another poem: “Temples”, also included in Edges and manifestly more lengthy, and exploratory, than the above two.

… their altars crumble
for want of flowery word
and clasped hands
in those timeless
rituals of evermore love
grass peeps from stone-edge
listening for footfall
that tripped on word-edge

In that first poem I mentioned, Malinda differentiates between the flag and the collective: the latter in effect overwhelms the former. In the second, “Dhamma”, he draws a dichotomy between the mundane and the supra-mundane that faith trivialises. He has grown more vociferous here: the altars he refers to (which can be from any place of worship, by the way) thrive on an attitude of devotion among their patrons. Patronage, in other words, is constructive, if not essential, to a faith and a collective. He has let go of any transcendentalist tendencies, and embraced a more frank and sincere conception of the relationship between the laity and the clergy. What can we say to his critics, then?

That they are correct in their observation, but wrong in their remedy. Poets are not uprooted secularists. They do not abandon their religious fervour, and some of the best poets one can name derived their themes from their faith. The myth of a transcendentalist poet can be shattered when considering that transcendentalism was in effect an offshoot of Orientalism, or the belief that the two main world systems – the West and the East – would come together through universalised conceptions of the faiths adhered to in the latter (Buddhism, Taoism, the Upanishads). It evolved from the essays of Thoreau and had its finest hour in the poetry of Whitman. The humanism in their works was largely derivative and decorative, which means that they had to give way once they moved on to the 20th century. To consider that humanism a sign of a poet’s ability to abandon faith and collective is erroneous, because they were informed less by the secular than by the supra-mundane. Malinda is no transcendentalist, but nor is he the obsessive religious devotee he is touted as, by those who happen to take issue with his politics.

Written for: Daily Mirror, November 28 2017

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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Lionel Ranwala Foundation leaves a footprint in Zhangjiajie

April 11, 2018 by admin

Folk Music, Lionel Ranwala, Malinda Seneviratne, Sahan Ranwala, Zhangjiajie, Lionel Ranwala Foundation

On the 8^th of September, 2011, a young Sri Lankan, a medical student studying in China, had visited Zhangjiajie. On his t-shirt was a Sri Lankan flag. It was not the first time he had worn this t-shirt in China but it was the first time it was noticed. In fact, wherever he went, there were people wanting to photograph him and be photographed with him. He did not understand for it had never happened before.

Then he met Sahan Ranwala.

Sahan Ranwala was in that city for a week, from September 10^th to the 16^th, attending an International Folk Music Festival. The troupe he led, that of the Lionel Ranwala Foundation, was one of 29 teams from 28 countries, not counting 21 Chinese groups that were participating.

All the teams had to perform twice a day for an entire week. Most had come ready with one or two programmes. The Sri Lankan troupe performed 15 different items. They had in fact stamped the Sri Lankan signature on the entire festival from day one, theirs being the best item of the opening ceremony.

Of the fifty groups, 6 were adjudged as the top performers. Sri Lanka’s flag fluttered proudly among these winners, the rest of the elite group comprising the United States of America, Russia, France, Georgia and South Africa.

Ten young people well versed in all aspect of Sri Lankan folk music stood out from the rest on account of their versatility. Sahan told The Nation that they were focused on expressing in their performances the amazing diversity of the Sinhala folk song. The audiences were treated to a fine mix of traditional music, with the troupe having put together pieces that were representative of the three main traditions, Udarata, Pahatharata and Sabaragamua. There had been nelum gayana, raban gayana and the songs associated with shanthikarma.

‘We received accolades from all quarters, but almost everyone praised our performances for being able to give the message of the lyrics in dance and music,’ Sahan said. He mentioned especially the ‘Vessanthara Velapuma’ which had moved many to tears. The explanation was simple: ‘The melody and performance would give them the idea of the item and they recognized that each item contained a central and profound concept with which they could identify’.

More than presenting new material at each performance, they were unique in that they were able to get the audience involved as well.

‘It was a very proud moment for us to see the Lion Flag among the flags of bigger and better known nations. We sang deshabhimanee gee (patriotic songs) all the way from the hall to the hotel. When we arrived in the city, no one knew us or about us; few indeed knew of Sri Lanka. By the time we were ready to leave, there was no country bigger than Sri Lanka.’

It was bound to happen, though. On the first night, i.e. after the opening ceremony, there had been a function. Everyone had brought their drums. Everyone played. After some time we tried out the traditional drums of our fellow participants from other countries. They were all surprised that the Sri Lankans could play their drums. All they did was to watch and then try their hand at these instruments they had never touched before. The Israeli troupe was made of all drummers. Their leader had tried to play the traditional Sinhala drums but hadn’t been able to demonstrate the kind of mastery that Sahan’s team had shown playing their (the Israeli) drums. Whatever dance they saw, they watched carefully and danced themselves. Needless to say they were noticed, applauded and highly appreciated.

Their versatility, freshness and unique ability to transcend language barriers and touch hearts of people from vastly different cultures had endeared the Ranwala Foundation troupe to everyone.

Sahan said that they did not expect anyone in Sri Lanka to have heard about their exploits and that they were pleasantly surprised when a special felicitation was organized for the troupe at the BMICH and when they also received a special award from the Buddhist Congress.

The troupe representing the Lionel Ranwala Foundation and the nation were sponsored by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Sahan expressed gratitude to the Minister of Cultural Affairs, Hon. T.B. Ekanayaka, the Secretary, Mr. Bimal Rubasinghe, the Director of Cultural Affairs, Mr. Vijith Kanugala and Prasanna Batiks who provided the costumes.

A few weeks ago, the citizens of Zhangjiajie did not know about Sri Lanka. Today, few would not know about Sri Lanka. That’s the secret of everyone wanting to take a picture with that random Sri Lankan medical student wearing a T-shirt with a Sri Lankan flag. The people of Zhangjiajie know the Lion Flag. They know the rhythms of Sri Lanka. They have heard the traditional drums. They have heard folk songs born in the Udarata, Pahatharata and Sabaragamuwa.

Maybe there’s a lot we can give the world. Maybe all it takes is to be ourselves. In all the glory, all the giving, all the erros and tragedies. If this country has a culture, it must have a rhythm. It’s good to know that we have something unique. Something that people of other cultures can related to, admire and applaud.

More power, therefore, to the Sahans of our land.

by MALINDA SENEVIRATNE

Sri Lankan textures, colors and diversity

April 11, 2018 by admin

J.B. Dissanayake, Malinda Seneviratne, Naadro, Pradeep Ratnayake, Rakhitha, Ranwala Balakaya, Sahan Ranwala, Lionel Ranwala Foundation

A question was put to a chef at lunch recently: ‘What is uniquely Sri Lankan when it comes to cuisine?’ The person who asked the question responded himself: ‘colour and texture’. Even in the most humble kitchen there is a manifest effort to obtain diversity of colour and texture. Sri Lankan cooking in its evolution over time seems to have focused on producing diversity not just in the number of different dishes but in the ways that a single article is cooked.

There is a certain openness to ‘new’ that enhances rather than subtracts from what is authentically Sri Lankan. As Dr. Nalin De Silva has frequently pointed out potatoes are not ours, but ala thel daala (devilled potato) is ours. Carrots are not ours but they are not foreign when they are grated, mixed with coconut, onion, and a bit of lime juice and turned into a sambol. Not all our pickles are ‘ours’ but we do add a dash of us-ness to make them so. As Prof. J.B. Dissanayake has pointed out, there was never a ‘fa’ sound in Sinhala and therefore no corresponding character in the alphabet, but there was enough flexibility to conjure up one and legitimate it as well.

Sri Lanka cuisine is however not a salad-like gathering of borrowed dishes. Its variety in colour and texture is enhanced be what is borrowed but certainly not obtained by imported diversity. Rather, it is a unique focus on these attributes that is at the core of overall culinary objective, I believe.

Listening to that conversation my thoughts drifted to something as delightful, colourful and diverse. Drums. And of course the attendant dance sequences as well as vocal accompaniment. Three distinct music-moments came to mind.

The first was a conversation with Pradeep Ratnayake, Sitarist a few months back. Pradeep’s Kuveni Double-Concerto with Symphony Orchestra (with Ramon Jaffe on the Cello), arranged by Prof. Patrick Zimmerli of Columbia University, was performed in Berlin and received a standing ovation. Pradeep told me that it had taken 6 months to compose this arrangement in 4 movements, that all rules of ‘Western Music’ were contained in it etc. All Greek to me. He played a recording for me. Even to the untrained ear of someone who is not particularly excited by classical music of any kind, it was a glorious performance. Most important, in that complex intertwining of different sounds from different instruments, the traditional drums of Sri Lanka did not appear as add-on or after-thought but as ‘core’
.
The second was a conversation with Rakhitha, the leader/found of a percussion band called Naadro. All fascinated with drums, I was told. I was made to listen to one of their ‘street performances’ at Galle Face. On youtube, that is. Mesmerizing. Greek, however. Rakhitha told me that Naadro draws from percussion traditions from all parts of the world. And yet, they’ve not forgotten the traditional drums and rhythms. They’ve sat at the feet of the top exponents of the genre of their choice and learned well. That’s core. A solid core that allows for and indeed cries out for experimentation, engagement with the universe and a blending that enriches without diminishing.

The third was what I believe is a relentless examination of the ‘core’ with the objective of understanding who we are, where we came from and what we are about so that we can go forth into the future with confidence and dignity. The individual concerned is Sahan Ranwala, current articulator of philosophy and approach pioneered among others by his father, the late Lionel Ranwala.

The conversation was about the latest production put together by the ‘Ranwala Balakaya’, ‘Three’. They have dubbed it thus: ‘thri sinhalaye thrivida sampradaaye thunkal yaakeruma’ or the conjoining of the three (dance) traditions of the three ancient provinces (Ruhunu, Maya, Pihiti) with fidelity to time’s timeless trinity (the past, present and future). That’s a roll of identity, ideology and vision finding articulation in the form of dance, rhythm, music and song. It is a celebration of the diverse traditions within this island, the Kandyan, Low-country and Sabaragamuwa schools of dance.

‘Three’ had its maiden performance on January 22, 2011 at the Tower Hall, following other highly acclaimed productions such as‘Me Avuduru Kaale (This time of the New Year),’ ‘Gama Avulangngang’ (I shall burn/incite the village), ‘Ahase innavalu’ (‘Resident in the sky, apparently,’ the precursor to Gama Avulangngang), Ahase Innavalu (Apparently resident in the sky) and Yuddetath Avith (We have declared war also), not forgetting ‘Podi Ayata Jana Gee’ (Folk songs for the little ones), the term-end concert put together by students (6-18 years of age) attending the workshop-type programmes held at the Jana Kala Kendraya, Battaramulla to educate a new generation about these traditions. They count over 500 performances all over the island.

I’ve had opportunity to watch the rehearsals on several Sundays while waiting for my children to finish their class at the Jana Kala Kendraya. The enthusiasm, energy, discipline and wonderful talent was truly amazing. More importantly, in sequence and movement, the play of tone, volume, melody, rhythm and beat, there was what I felt was a reiteration of something uniquely Sri Lankan. Colour and texture. In rich diversity.

Sahan explained the thinking behind the production and sketched out the items in the programme. In keeping with the ‘trinity’ trope, the Balakaya had decided to invite as special guests representative Theros of the three nikayas as well as representatives of the Army, Navy and Airforce. Most importantly they had decided to show appreciation and celebrate the work of three senior exponents of the three traditions: Babanis Gurunnanse (Sabaragamuwa), Aedis Weerasinghe Master (Pahatharata) and Siril Makehelwala (Udarata). This too is ‘tradition’. It is consistent with the colour-texture diversity that marks ‘Sri Lankan’.

The Ranwala Balakaya is not intimidated by the financial power, public presence and acquired glamour associated with those groups that think fit to ape what they believe are superior and unique traditions. They draw from contemporary themes and are not only aware of different types of music but recognize these in the traditional folk music. They seem to have a very good sense of core-texture and core-colour and relevant extrapolation. They can cook up quite a meal, so to speak.

All things considered, if we don’t know who are, we can go only thus far. If on the other hand we dwell too long in the past, we freeze and get fossilized. There should be balance. And, if it is to be authentically ‘Sri Lankan’, then diversity of colour and texture need to be recognized as ‘core’ and that ‘core’ should be explored, celebrated and reaffirmed if articulation and synthesis with other traditions are to yield a more splendid feast, in music and other things too.

‘Three’ shows how to be ‘traditional’ without letting tradition being a weight that stops innovation. It shows also that sometimes when we see something as ‘foreign’ it is because we don’t know much about ‘tradition’. We vilify in our ignorance, both ways. It is a show that would enrich all school audiences and this is something that principals who see the importance of children knowing their roots, being proud of their parents and being sheltered from the evils of rejecting uncritically things ‘traditional’ or embracing uncritically things ‘foreign’ would do well to take cognizance of.

Ideally, ‘Three’ should be performed in every school. Some can afford it, some can get parents to pay while others can draw funds from educational authorities and still others persuade the Ranwala Balakaya to perform free of charge. If we lose out textural diversity and collapse the rainbow into shades of grey, we could be impoverished indeed. It is good that we have a Pradeep Ratnayake. Good that we have Naadro. I am sure there are others. I feel blessed that we have the Ranwala Balakaya, fighting with such tremendous energy and such winning smiles, for our children.

This article first appeared in the ‘Sunday Island’ in February 2001. Malinda Seneviratne is the Editor-in-Chief of ‘The Nation’ and can be reached at msenevira@gmail.com

by Malinda Seneviratne

Reflections on the ‘microchip of our civilization’

April 11, 2018 by admin

Ariyaseela Wickramanyake, Lionel Ranwala, Malinda Seneviratne

Some time ago I wrote about Lionel Ranwala, the indefatigable archivist and exponent of traditional Sinhala music. A line at the end of the article prompted a response. Here’s the line: ‘Our ancestors live in us in some form or another, as remnant and life-thread. It awakens us to who we are and therefore inspire us to become who we want to be.’ Here’s the response:

‘Ariyaseela Wickramanyake used to say that we all carry in each of us a microchip of our
entire civilization, which could be tapped. The idea is that we as a nation could repeat our greatness over and over. That is the only explanation for our spectacular victory at the last war which propped up from nowhere. So we cannot be just written off.’

The email was sent by Gamini Gunawardena, Sanskrit scholar, retired DIG, father-figure, friend and occasional contributor of comments to newspapers. Too ‘occasional’ I might add. The above contention, though, could well be articulated by any patriot in any country, especially those that have survived all manner of invasions. There are nations that survived and those that did not and we could surmise that the former could perhaps attribute their survival to the presence of civilizational micro chips in heartbeat and sinew, folk gaze and folk archive.

The 'Ranwala Balakaaya' led by the master's son, Sahan

We ourselves suffered for five hundred years under the jackboot of colonialism. Those who invaded us were armed with guns and moral license issued by the Vatican in the form of Papal Bulls. That’s a history that ought to be but is not taught in our schools. Certain things are swept under the carpet in the name of ‘inter-religious amity’ but those who make such decisions fail to realize that censorship and half-truths amount to mis-education and in the end do a huge disservice to the faiths themselves. Catholicism ought to be embraced by the convinced not out of ignorance but out of a clear understanding of the history of the Catholic Church and that this is not the fault of Jesus Christ.

Yes, we came out of all that. Today we don’t have to contend with Papal Bulls but this does not mean that the core of who we are is not under threat by those forces that would obliterate our culture in order to facilitate all manner of take-overs. This is why Gamini Gunawardena’s email reminded me of something that a batchmate of mine from Peradeniya Campus told me a few days ago.

We are too old to give anyone blank cheques, especially politicians. We are mature enough not to get emotional about things political. We were talking about politics in general and Mahinda Rajapaksa in particular.

‘There is something about him that makes me feel that deep down Mahinda understands what this country is about. He doesn’t talk about it much. It’s there as a frill in his rhetoric and policy statements, but the core of who he is comes out unannounced, in unpredictable ways, in the little observations he makes.’

He rattled off three examples. On one occasion, the President had said ‘divyaloketa giyath maubima amathaka karanna epaa’ (even if you go to heaven, never forget your motherland). On another, he had said, ‘nivaaduwata yanna anuradhapurayata; gihin balanna mirisawetiya ruwanweliseya, balala avith iskole eva gena igenaganna’ (go to Anuradhapura during the holidays, visit Ruwanweliseya and Mirisawetiya, come back and learn about them in school). There was a third that he mentioned: ‘nivaaduwata yanna gamata, gihin aththa aththamma balanna’ (go to your ancestral village during the holidays; see how your grandparents are doing).

These are things anyone can say but these are not things our leaders have said very often and certainly not in ways that make us believe the words were heart-born and not rhetorical devices. Politicians come and go. Some turn into statesmen, some do not. They are admired for certain achievements and despised for their failures. Time does not move in predicted ways. Today’s victory is often followed by tomorrow’s debilitating defeat. It is prudent therefore to remember always that the most important thing is to preserve the integrity of civilizational cores, the foundation of who we are as a people.

If our ‘entire civilization’ has a microchip and this contains archaeological artifact, it must include the Ruwanweliseya, the Abayagiriya Complex, Sigiriya, the magnificent irrigation system, the Kala Wewa, the Yoda Ela, the Galvihara Complex etc. It must contain grandmothers and grandfathers, the relay of value and narrative from generation to generation. It must contain an umbilical tie to motherland, to earth and creature, plant and flower, tree-line and wave-remnant. It must contain the Dutugemunu-Elara post-war moment of humanity as clearly as the principle of equality that Elara affirmed at the cost of a son in that tradition-defying historiography where winner loser was not painted as brute. And it must contain the story of Velivita Sri Saranankara Sangharaja Thero who did not counter Bull with Bull or bullishness with like bullishness, but simply walked a path of timeless worth prescribed by our Budun Wahanse, Siddhartha Gauthama.

I don’t know how Mahinda Rajapaksa will be remembered by history. What is important to remember though is what he does not want us to forget for these are things that will outlast him, his government and the memory of achievement and failure.

by Malinda Seneviratne

You did not forsake us there where the Yoda Ela bends

April 6, 2018 by admin

Amarasiri Peiris, Gunadasa Kapuge, Malinda Seneviratne, Malini Jayaratne, Ranbanda Seneviratne, Sarachchandra, Sinhabahu, T. M. Jayaratne

Remembering Ranbanda Seneviratne

There is a song written by Malini Jayaratne which her husband, T. M. Jayaratne sings. It makes the poignant statement that not enough songs have been written about the love a father has for his child: piya senehasata kav gee liya una madi (there’s a conspicuous absence of songs dedicated to fathers’ love). True. There are countless mau guna gee (songs in praise of mother and motherhood) in Sinhala where the virtues of motherhood and the particularly sacred love of a mother are celebrated. Little of the father, even though Sarachchandra in a postscript to the father-son denouement in Sinhabahu, says it better than most.

Malini Jayaratne’s song ends like this: amma varun pamanada mathu budu vanne (is it that only mothers are marked for Buddhahood?). Among the countless songs about the mother there are a few which stand out for capturing in a recognisable idiom that which most of us know intimately, the first truths we become cognisant of: the warm refuge and unconditional love of a mother. To me Ranbanda Seneviratne’s davasak pela nethi hene (sung by Gunadasa Kapuge) stands among the finest tributes to a mother’s love.

He claims that even as his wife’s love wafted away (birindakage senehe giya yoda ele nemme), he felt again and again the fragrance of his mother’s tenderness (obe senehasa suwanda didee denuna mata amme). And he asks (well knowing the answer) if she will be by the gate would he were to flee the stormy insults raging in the city, abandoning his crown as he runs to her.

Like most people, I have known Ranbanda Seneviratne only through his lyrics. He was not a prolific lyricist but whatever he wrote had the rare quality of clinging on, decorating our sensibilities as they mature over time. He would be the first to admit, I am sure, that the composition and the voice are as important as the words and their arrangement. Still, there is something about the man, as discovered through his lyrics, that touched, a quality which made a deep indent in the normal course of diurnal pursuits on December 5th, when I heard that he had passed away.

He was by profession a lawyer and by all accounts one with a racy turn of speech. He appeared for famed skyjacker Sepala Ekanayake and defended those accused in the forged ration book case in the early eighties. I am sure he would have won many friends and admirers during the course of performing his professional duties, but again it was through his “stage presence” over visual and audio media that he became our friend.

Apart from the song alluded to above (which by the way helped propel Gunadasa Kapuge to stardom), there are three others which mark him as a song-writer who drew deep from our soil, a task which only those who have not slashed away their roots can accomplish: ula leno, sumano (both sung by Kapuge) and veedi sarana landune (by Amarasiri Peiris). The haunting melody in ula leno certainly enhances the theme of solitude, but it is from the lyrical genius of the poet that the song soars and settles deep in our hearts. Sumano speaks about personal loss, the death of the girl Sumana. Ranbanda draws a melancholic brush over the entire landscape he describes and invites us to reflect as though the loss is ours not his.

Mala hiru eliyen kokku giyado

Mihintala gala peththe

Piruvata enda pettiyaka thiyala

Pan dekaka eli medde

Madatiya veteddi handa kelathena ela

Edande ismatte

Sumano…. numba ey neththe

(Did the storks take wing over Mihintale in the twilight?

Draped in white cradeled between the light of two lamps in a coffin you lie

Below the edanda the moon wavers as madatiya seeds fall upon the ela,

Sumano…why are you not here?)

Ranbanda hails from Mihintale. There are probably many instances and incidents which stand witness to the fact that he never lost touch with his village and everything the word gama entails. To me, the idiomatic usage of language says all. I have met others from similar backgrounds who not only turned their backs on their history and heritage but went as far as attacking these things virulently, sometimes taking cover behind academic “imperatives”.

For most people, cultural roots comprise a thorny crown which has to be done away with as soon as possible. Ranbanda lived differently. He thought differently. Today, no one wants to be called Banda, they would go instead for Bandara, the former having been bestowed with all kinds of derogatory meanings over the years. Few Bandas carry their names with pride, M. D. Banda being a rare exception.

Ranbanda Seneviratne went further. He called himself a bayya from Mihintale and did so with a great sense of pride. This bayya unlike most who are ashamed of their bayya past, was well read and familiar with the cultural and literary traditions from all corners of the world. I believe he was able to absorb their richness so well only because he was comfortable with who he was. And this is also why he, even in his limited output, could emerge as a poet who had a personal lyrical signature, evident both in these songs as well as his one collection, “dukata kiyana kavi“.

Veedi Sarana Landune, as the title suggests is a meditation about a prostitute and the double standards applied by society in general to castigate them. In the following lines Ranbanda unequivocally makes clear his political position with respect to such women: “Lema pamanak lovata penena, laya nopenena landune; kuhumbuvekuta varadak nethi, varadakara landune” (Girl, whose breasts are naked to the world but whose heart remains unseen; girl, who wouldn’t hurt an ant, but is always at fault”!).

My colleague Prabath Sahabandu likened Ranbanda to a handloom cloth, “its beauty and character lies in its coarseness” and of course in the cultural idiom woven into it. He was clearly a man who felt deeply about social injustice. Remarking on the changes that have occurred in our society, he had once said, “There was a time when a dog lying dead on the road would attract a crowd of around 50 people; Today if fifty people lay dead on the road, not a dog would come by to take a look”.

Our people have had akala maha vehi (off-season thunderstorms) raining on them for far too long. We have not been blessed with many who could shelter us from these downpours until the rain ceased. Ranbanda has done his best. He wanted his last rites to be performed in Anuradhapura as one would expect. If his “remains” stir the discontent in our hearts and unsettle us enough to agitate for our own personal Mihintales, he would live long and his spirit would find rest once more.

Ratna Sri Wijesinghe in a glowing tribute to the man, refers to a poem titled kageda me le pellama(Whose are these blood stains?), quoting the following:

Whose are these blood stains,

A man’s? a beast’s?

Whose is this shirt, torn and riddled with holes?

Was there a scream, sobs, pleading not to kill?

Who knows, dear god,

Whoever it was, was it not a man

Who lay there bleeding?

That man is still bleeding. That man comes from a village, is conscious and proud of his heritage, recognises his father and mother and is recognisable from the hordes who are valiantly divesting themselves of their identity. Ranbanda Seneviratne identified the worth of this man. It is the generational task of our times to stop the bleeding.

by Malinda Seneviratne

Kavi Alexander: a poet of sound

April 3, 2018 by admin

Grammy Award, Kavichandran Alexander, Malinda Seneviratne, Sooriya Music Village, Sooriya Village, Water Lily Acoustics

“The alchemy of the masters moving molecules of air,
we capture by moving particles of iron,
so that the poetry of the ancients will echo into the future.”

I’ve seen Kavi Alexander seated under the coccolaba tree at Sooriya Village, apparently one of the only two such trees in Sri Lanka, the other being at Peradeniya. With long hair and a longer beard, greying, Kavi looked quite ascetic. Except he’s wearing a t-shirt and shorts.

Sooriya Village attracts a lot of people who either in appearance or life are sadhu-like, so seeing Kavi seated there did not pique my curiosity, not even when he would stand up to greet people with hands clasped in the form of worship.

Udena Wickramasooriya had told me about him months before. I couldn’t remember what he told me. That’s because I am not into music the way Udena is. However, when Udena says ‘you must meet this guy’ about anyone, I make a mental note of it.

So Kavi Alexander was there. He had been there for more than a week. He even had a press conference which I was not too keen to attend. There are auspicious times for certain things and they can’t be forced, I firmly believe.

One auspicious morning, I said ‘hello’ to Kavi. He duly stood up and greeted me. And then we talked for what seemed like hours.

Kavi Alexander was born in 1949 and spent his early years in Ratmalana, Mt. Lavinia and Batticaloa. He attended St Thomas’ College, Mt Lavinia. Perhaps it was all there already in his genes for his mother played the Karnatic violin, but apart from that first memory Kavi distinctly remembers going to church with her and listening to the radio: ‘I was glued to Radio Ceylon; I wanted to put up antennas all over to improve reception.’

Improving reception or rather obtaining the best reproduction of sound turned out to be his lifelong passion, but he didn’t know it back then.

Kavi left Sri Lanka in 1968 and went to Paris. He was a hippie, he says. In Paris, he realized that his life would be in the arts. Perhaps in poetry or in sculpture or something else, he wasn’t quite sure.

‘I got an opportunity to play in the cast of the “Hair” production in Paris. As it turned out I was the only one who didn’t take the clothes off. I was very Asian in that way. I wore a traditional white Indian outfit. Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to France at the time, Tissa Wijeratne, came for one of the performances with his wife and complimented me on this. He said “Kavi, you are the only one who has not lost it!”’

‘Hair’ had been running for a year by the time he joined the cast. All the dressing rooms had been taken by that time but two musicians, one French and one American, had invited Kavi to share their dressing room.

Wherever he went he made friends, apparently. He moved again, this time to Brussels. Maybe he was restless but in all likelihood, he followed his heart. That’s what took him to ‘Mudra’ an experimental school run by the French choreographer Maurice Béjart. Béjart, the son of a French philosopher has spent some time in India where he had encountered Yoga and had been, in Kavi’s words, ‘flipped out by Bharata Natyam’ which had later inspired him to produce the ballet ‘Bhakthi’.

The six months he spent at Mudra was a life-changer for Kavi. He had turned up in jeans and believes that Béjart had probably felt that Kavi was passionate and deserved to be given a chance.

‘It was an amazing experience. This is where I learned that if one wants to succeed one has to have an iron will and be incredibly disciplined. The idea behind Mudra was that it was not just dance but everything associated with dance; lighting, make-up, carpentry, everything. The first lesson actually was yoga! Anyway, I found my purpose there. I wanted to start a record company. I wanted to record the music I love. And I decided that it had to be in the USA and no Europe.’

Interestingly, Kavi, while still a schoolboy had written to John F Kennedy, volunteering to be an astronaut.

‘The story got distorted of course. There are friends from that time who still tell me “you are the bugger who wrote to Kennedy and got a reply!” That’s not true. Kennedy never replied.’

Kavi set up his record company, Water Lily Acoustics, in 1984. Not surprisingly it was an uphill battle.

‘I was scraping by. The company was always undercapitalized. Maybe the turning point was when I went to Ustad Ali Akbar Khan in California. I went to his school and said I wanted to record his concert. He looked me up and down. He agreed. So the next day I went, set things up, and recorded. He wanted me to put it out. That was the first record. It was a gift, in fact. Now I could say ‘I recorded Ali Akbar Khan!’

Today Water Lily Acoustics is a Grammy Award winning record label and has recorded the great masters of both the West and East. Kavi is a purist, a perfectionist. He wanted and succeeded in capturing the music he loved in its purest form, especially the music of the Eastern world.

‘I realized that the great Eastern musicians had seldom been recorded properly, with care and attention on sound quality. The recordings that existed were of poor quality.

Kavi has to date recorded Indian greats such as Padmavibushan Ustad Dr. Ali Akbar Khan, Padmabushan Professor V.G. Jog, Padmavibushan Pandit Jesraj, Padmabushan Dr. N. Ramani, Ustad Imrat Khan, Ustad Zia Fariddudin Dagar, Padmashri Dr. L Subramaniam, Padmashri V. M. Bhatt, Padmashri Kadri Gopalnath, Padmashri Ustad Rashid Khan, Chitravina N. Ravikiran, Swapan Chaudhuri, Guruvayur Dorai and T. H. Subashchandran. He’s also recorded the younger artists, for example Dr. V. Balaji, Pandit Ronu Majumdar, Sukhvinder Singh Namdari, Abhijit Banerjee, Druba Ghosh, J.G.R. Krishnan, Thiagarajan Ramani, Shweta Jhaveri, Viji Krishnan and Sangeetha Shankar.

He has also recorded South American, Asian and African musicians, symphony orchestras including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, the Saint Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, and the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra, in addition to prominent North American and European musicians, many of whom are multiple Grammy Award winners.

Music from recordings released by Water Lily Acoustics have been featured in the sound tracks of six major Hollywood films: Dead Man Walking, Two Days in the Valley, Primary Colors, Angel Eyes, One Hour Photo and Meet the Fockers, and also the Bon Jovi documentary ‘The Circle.’

He has also paired musicians from diverse cultures, and the very first to pair and record Indian musicians of both the Karnatic and Hindustani schools with their Persian, Arab and Chinese counterparts, a trend copied by others much later.

Kavi, for all his success, has pretty much the persona one is likely to assume when seeing him for the first time, seated under a tree, minding his own business, but quick to get on his feet and greet with hands clasped to whoever says ‘hello’ to him.

‘I live a hermit’s life. I live in the USA but I didn’t know about 9/11 until two weeks later.’

He’s been away for decades but he’s still very much rooted in Sri Lanka.

‘I eat red rice imported from Sri Lanka, so I get all the minerals from my country.’

And yet, there’s one dream that remains unfulfilled, he says. Kavi has for years wanted to record pirith.

‘Manik Sandrasagara came up with the idea around 2005. This was during the war. We corresponded. Manik told me that it was all insane. He felt that as a Tamil and the first Sri Lankan to win a Grammy, if I recorded the Buddhist chants it would have some impact. I had already recorded Quranic recitations and wanted to go to Ethiopia to record the Coptic liturgical chants. I found sense in what Manik said. I knew about the different Nikayas, but wanted to bring them together in some way, record them all, put the records together in a single box with four compartments. Something like that. CD’s, booklets.’

It never happened. Official sanction was hard to get. Kavi realized that it was a minefield and that one needed to be a politician to get things done. Manik died. Kavi gave up.

Kavi has been in Sri Lanka for almost a month now. He stays at Sooriya Village, upon Udena’s invitation. He conducts workshops, talks about music and recording, traveling once to Batticaloa which is due to circumstances his ‘ancestral place.’

My parents were from Jaffna. They came to Trincomalee by sailboat. It had taken them three weeks. Then they took a bullock cart to Batticaloa. Unfortunately they both died in the cyclone of 1978. Batticaloa is beautiful. I love the place. I visited my parents’ grave.’

He’s happy being here, this hermit who travels the world looking for great music which he can record for posterity, this sound-man who ironically is as much about silence as he is about music, this archivist of musical alchemy. He’s all about love, a different kind of love one might say.

Water Lily Acoustics has a website and the home page has a verse from Rumi which says a lot about the idea, the work and the man. It’s an appropriate ‘end point’ to this piece about this timeless man.

Love is that which never sleeps,
nor even rests, nor stays
for long with those that do.
Love is language
that cannot be said,
or heard.

by Malinda Seneviratne

Amaradeva: a name for everything that is our little island

November 7, 2017 by admin

Classical, Malinda Seneviratne, W. D. Amaradeva

There are rain clouds, not too dark and not threatening. It might rain later. There was rain last night. Tomorrow, there will be other clouds of similar shade. Non-threatening for a while. There might be rain. The city pulsated in rhythms acquired over the years. In some village in the Dry Zone, there are children at play. The potter is at his wheel. Someone, somewhere is listening to music. The country called Sri Lanka in determination and resilience, hope and foreboding, meanders through the hills and vales of joy and sorrow at a pace that suits her people. Sounds of yesterday are heard now and will be heard tomorrow. And through it all a silence that is strangely also a song. A sad song. Amaradeva is no more

Pundit W.D. Amaradeva, known in an earlier avatar as Wannakuwatta Waduge Don Albert Perera, born in Moratuwa on the fifth day of December in the year 1927. Don Girinoris Perera and Maggie Veslina Mendis may never have imagined that their sixth and youngest child would, almost 89 years later, make music so silent and so poignant that it matched and in many ways surpassed everything he did with voice. Amaradeva breathed his last a few hours ago. The nation skipped a heartbeat. Breaths drawn were held for a moment longer than usual and then released as a collective sigh.

How can one speak of an incomparable voice that will not sing again? What do we say of a man who left us speechless with his songs? Those who want appropriate words to articulate their respective sorrows, their gratitude and sense of loss can of course delve into the lyrics. Song titles alone would yield enough lines to pick from. But that’s not him. That’s his friends, as gifted with word as he was with voice: Mahagama Sekera, Madawala S Ratnayake, Dalton Alwis, Chandraratne Manawasinghe, Ajantha Ranasinghe, Arisen Ahubudu, K.D.K. Dharmawardena, all of whom have passed on as has Prof Nandadasa Kodagoda (one of several one-lyric contributors), and among the living the highly accomplished but most infrequently recognized Sunil Sarath Perera, not forgetting Ratna Sri Wijesinghe and the more ‘present’ Prof Sunil Ariyaratne.

He will no doubt be remembered for offering his amazing voice to equally amazing lyrics, but what singles him out will always be the voice. And as he often said, the music was only carried by the voice — it was born and nurtured in heart and mind. Every word, every syllable and the spaces between were heart-made and mind-nurtured and that what sets him apart. His heart and mind were made of this nation in all its glory, all its inadequacies, and it held everyone cutting across every conceivable distinction. Amaradeva cleared the high noted of our multiple histories and held the integrity of the deep foundations of our cultural ethos. That’s how he became and for a long time will remain the voice of our nation.

Time will pass and his name will pass into the many names among the forgotten in the birth-decay-death of our common human condition, but there will be days, now and for a long time to come, when Amaradeva will be present and ready for renewal and rediscovery, endowed with history and heritage giving us in his own indescribable ways the forgotten yesterdays and inhabitable tomorrows.

There can be no short tribute. And no long tribute will be long enough. It is tempting to draw from one of the hundreds of songs that many of us grew up with, many of us were consoled by in times of grief, many of us were lifted by for countless reasons, but that would be disservice to both singer and lyricist.

For this reason, I choose the words scripted for a TV show on Amaradeva. They were written by Bandula Nanayakkarawasam who, interestingly, had just one ‘Amaradeva Song’ to his credit, never recorded but sung by the maestro on May 18, 1989 when Amaradeva’s classic book ‘Nada Sittam’ was launched.

This is what Bandula wrote:

ගම අමතක වීද ඔහුගෙන් විමසන්න

නගරය මග හැරුනිද ඔහු සොයා යන්න

රට අමතක වීද ඔහු ඇති බව අදහන්න

ගහ-කොළ, ඉර-හඳ, ඇළ-දොළ, සමුදුර, කුරුළු-ගී

ඈ නෙක දියදම් අරුම නොපෙනී නොඇසී ගියේද

ඔහු ඇසි දිසි මානයේ රැඳෙන්න

මේ පුංචි කොදෙව්වේ, මව් දෙරණේ

මේ සියල්ල ඔහුය

‘If you’ve forgotten the village, ask him

If you are lost in a city, go find him

If you forgot the nation, believe that he lives

The trees, the sun and moon, the ocean, bird song…

These and other enchanting things……..

should you not see them, should you not hear

Go stand before him, stay within the circle of his gaze.

In this tiny island, in our motherland

He alone is all these things.”

My friend Nishad Handunpathirana who knows much more about music than those who make knowing-claims and therefore, perhaps, says little, said a few words: ‘He was our Tagore’. Perhaps that’s one way of putting it. Another way is possible, Bandula has shown. He was Amaradeva. Ours.

There is silence amid the clutter of sound. It’s the silence of a singular passing. The voice of the nation has gone silent. And strangely, in this world made of transience, it would probably linger. More tenderly. Yes, softer still.

This article was first published in the ‘Daily Mirror’ (November 4, 2016).

Saundarie and Kishani: classically of the heart

November 18, 2016 by admin

Kishani Jayasinghe, Malinda Seneviratne, Soundarie David

Around three years worth of violin lessons from Eileen Prins and an equal number of years learning the piano from Mrs Niles meant a considerable number of hours ‘with music’ down School Lane, Bambalapitiya. I didn’t learn much. Aunty Eileen was exasperated and suggested that I try the piano. Mrs Niles, very gently, told me to concentrate on my studies. I like ‘theory’ because it was, to me, like mathematics and even someone who didn’t have melody and rhythm could ace it. Unlike number, however, I’ve forgotten all the theory they taught me.

All I remember and know of classical music are some names and this has nothing to do with what my teachers taught me. What stuck in my mind were short accounts of great composers in Ladybird books my mother bought for us. Pretty pictures, I remember. Interesting stories. The names stuck: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Handel. That’s it.

But last night I did learn a few things. I attended the third edition of the ‘Royally Classical Recital Series’ presented by the Colombo Opera Company, courtesy a complimentary ticket. Kishani Jayasinghe, Soprano, and Soudarie David Rodrigo of the piano offered an hour of edutainment (speaking strictly for myself) at the Russian Cultural Centre. The event was called ‘Classically Italian’. This recital, I learned, followed two others, ‘Classically French’ and ‘Classically German’ featuring the music associated with those countries.

French, German and Italian and not languages I know or have even heard. Western classical music was another unknown language. I was in the dark. Kishani, thankfully, was gracious enough to acknowledge the presence of philistines like me and introduced each of the pieces. Briefly. The names didn’t mean a thing to me, but the emotions she promised they would deliver were useful, I thought at first. Then I learned that it didn’t matter. And that’s when I remembered something that the late Pundit Amaradeva told me about ten years ago: ‘music is not born in the melody or the voice but in the heart and mind.’

Sure, I was impressed by the artists. Music, I have heard, is a universal language and it did speak to me. I remembered something that my mother wrote in the exercise book I had to take with me to Aunty Eileen’s class: The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. “Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice,” she had written down the source as well. And of course, another line from Shakespeare, If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it; that surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die. Twelfth Night. Less about music-music (as we say in the Sinhalized English) than about the melody of words. I remembered though.

There were pieces from Puccini, Mozart, Handel and other composers whose names just didn’t stick in my mind. The themes of course were ones that cut across time and space. Love, after all, makes for a full range of emotions, from limitless joy to mindless sorrow. Kishani and Saundarie captured them all. And delivered.

So yes, I was impressed. I got something of the nuance which Kishani promised Saundarie would deliver. And Kishani’s prowess was certainly unmistakeable even for someone who does not think of Sinhala jana gee is a genre of lesser order.

But that’s not what mattered. It’s the heart or rather the heart-birthed nature of what was presented by these two amazingly accomplished artists. What Pundit Amaradeva said returned with even greater force because he had just passed away and also because I know no Italian. What’s born in the heart is eminently accessible at some level despite not knowing the language of rendition. Of course, Kishani’s facial expressions and her presence helped, but I could not help thinking that had I listened with my eyes closed I would still have gathered something of the essence of the feelings and emotions depicted. I am sure I ‘missed’ a whole lot that would not have been missed by others in the audience. If educating the uninitiated was even a small part of this programme, then I think it recorded a minor success.

Yes, last night I did learn a few things. And I remembered something which that eminent man of words, Simon Navagaththegama had said a long time ago.

He talked about the first radio in his village. Everyone had come to listen. One day it had broken. No one knew how to fix it. So they tapped and slapped it around and suddenly, it had started working again. In the process of ‘fixing’ it, the tuner had ‘stopped’ at a station which played Western classical music. No one dared touch the radio again fearing that it would be wrecked beyond repair. And so the villagers could listen only to classical music. And that, Simon said, was how he began to listen, appreciate and understand. He added, ‘sometimes you have to listen to something a lot before you can begin to comprehend.’

For me, this was a start. I learned that there’s so much more to learn. That was an invaluable lesson to have picked up over the course of a single hour.

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