Uditha Devapriya | Sooriya Records

Mohideen Baig: The conscience of a collective

April 23, 2022 by shamilka

Some days are special. They celebrate life. They record milestones. They ensure that we do not forget. Not all are special and not all record history, but they tend to be special nevertheless. Sure, we sometimes forget why, but just for once, if we can concentrate on the particularities of a date, we will find that there are more reasons than one why a day, or a set of days for that matter, ought to be celebrated. Especially in Sri Lanka, one can add, given that we boast of a great many days dedicated to the various faiths that adorn our country and make up our identity.

Yesterday was Poya, the day before Mawlad. The former was and is celebrated by Buddhists, the latter by Muslims. Two days, utterly insignificant and mundane. Two days, demarcated by the calendar. Two days, for me a symbol of how diverse we are and which in turn point at better symbols, all of which affirm coexistence and hybridism in more open, expansive ways. Symbols that exist and persist, among a great many other fields, in the realm of the arts.

There is probably no one in this island who has not heard of W. D. Amaradeva. W. D. Amaradeva was born on December 5. There is also probably no one in this island who has not heard of Mohideen Baig. He too was born on December 5. Two men, one date. The former a Christian who became a Buddhist, the latter a Muslim who embraced, with his voice, the Buddhist ethos of this country.

People have written on Amaradeva, by the dozen. Therefore, I will write on Baig.

Mohideen Baig sang of many things. Like love. Or charity. Or the intricacies of a faith adhered to by the majority of this country. His voice opened up so well that we forget the man behind the song. That voice found its way to more than 400 films, most of which are probably known more than anything else for the fact that he was featured as a playback vocalist. He won some awards, though that didn’t ruffle him, and in the end, because he dedicated his life to his art, he neglected his own welfare. Back then artistes didn’t just engage in their work, after all. They wallowed in it.

He was born in 1918 in Salem, Madras to a fairly middle-class family that had aspirations for their children in other more mundane fields. From an early age though, young Baig rebelled against his parents, more specifically his father. At one point his headmaster told the father that he was not studying enough, which naturally earned the ire of his family and which compelled him to run away from home the following day. He eventually became a male vocalist at the Boys Dance Company in Trichy, which admitted him after he sang for them a song of S. D. Burman’s guru, K. C. Dey.

Mohideen Baig (www.dailynews.lk) — Mohideen Baig

Not too long afterwards, he was found by the police and sent back home. But his fate, for him at least, had been sealed. When he encountered his family, he told them bluntly that he would be a vocalist. He wanted to be an Ustad, the highest honorific for a musician in his country. The parents, naturally enough, were stunned. He was not quite 13 at the time.
Baig had a brother who was stationed as a police officer in Colombo. That brother was killed in an accident and his funeral, in keeping with the practice of Muslims, was held at once in Sri Lanka. Young Baig and his parents came to the country to attend the cremation.

Fate works in strange ways and so the ardent artiste, enamoured of a country that wouldn’t remind him of the pain, the toil, and the disagreements he’d run into in his homeland, decided to migrate here. He did just that in 1932, despite the many protests made by his family. He wasted no time and wasn’t undecided: in 1935, he performed his first song, “Karuna Muhude Namu Gileela,” while a little more than a decade later, he sang in the country’s second feature film, Asokamala. In all this, moreover, he had a veritable guru and mentor: Mohamed Ghouse, or Ghouse Master.

6,500 songs are a hefty amount, especially considering that vocalists today try to clinch fame with a fraction of that number, and for Baig, music became his way of life, his way of articulating a message, an emotion, or even a story, no matter how many songs it took. The films he was involved with helped, of course, because after all at a time when the cinema here was in its infancy, the likes of Kele Handa, Sujatha, Daiwayogaya, and Deiyange Rate (the latter of which paired him with G. S. P. Rani in my favourite song of his, “Welle Kiri Welle”) entranced spectators.

The cinema of a country, no matter what commentators will say, is linked to the faith and the worldview of a collective. Even in as puerile an adaptation as that of W. A. Silva’s Deiyange Rate, there are sequences where the aspirations and even founding myths of the Sinhala Buddhist community are affirmed. Because they were based on stories authored by writers who propagated (cultural and political) nationalism, they needed a cohesive affirmation of that same nationalism in nearly every field when transposed to the screen. Among these fields, no doubt, was music.

That is how Mohideen Baig came to us. After Asokamala and a few other films that tried to forge an identity out of an art-form derided as too Western, a series of adaptations of the novels of W. A. Silva and Piyadasa Sirisena, which embraced a way of life that was fast eroding and a collective that was encountering modernity, came and went. They made the rounds at the box-office and more importantly, featured Baig to such an extent that whenever there was a song “about” Buddhism, he was called in.

From the fifties therefore, he gave us his best: “Buddhang Saranang Gachchami” and “Thaniwai Upanne” are just two of his most heartfelt songs, heartfelt not because they affirmed the faith of the majority cosmetically but because they seemed to have been sung by a man who adhered to that faith. And it wasn’t just about Buddhism, of course. He could sing as acutely of love: “Anna Sudo” and “Parama Ramani”, being the evergreen classics they always were, paired him with that foremost exponent of the love song here, Rukmani Devi. A detailed recounting of all his songs, however, would be beside the point in this article.

He was not forgotten in his time. In 1956, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike conferred a Distinguished Citizenship on him. In 1967, he won the Sarasaviya Award for the Best Playback Singer for the film Allapu Gedara. He won the Kalasuri titles twice, in 1983 and in 1987. He got the opportunity to appear at our first Independence Day ceremony and at the 1974 Non-Aligned Summit in Colombo.

He was not, however, so enamoured of these titles to be complacent. And so, until his last day (November 4, 1991), when he died at the age of 71 owing to an infection acquired during a cataract surgery, he went on singing despite the many financial and economic problems he and his family faced (on a TV show, I clearly remember, he vented out his sadness and frustration in front of Premakeerthi de Alwis and Victor Ratnayake on a TV, both of whom listened intently).

Did he become an Ustad? Perhaps. But in keeping with his stance on awards and accolades, it never really mattered.

For the man meant more to this country than he himself realised. Being a Muslim, he would have also understood those little details which go into the celebration of a collective. He wasn’t cut off from his own heritage, moreover: while he sang for Buddhists, he followed his own faith diligently.

That is why we can say that he taught us some lessons. Chief among them, that one didn’t have to come from a particular community to celebrate it. There are things that go into celebration, after all, none of which can be really monopolised by a collective. And in these harsh times, when we are still reaching out to other identities, I suppose that helped and will continue to help.

Mohideen Baig was born the same day as W. D. Amaradeva. None of them were at-birth Buddhists, while the former remained a non-Buddhist his entire life. I believe that tells something. What it is, we should note.

And so, we can ask: Are we better as a nation for these people? Should we continue rekindling their memory? Have we gone back since their passing away? And if we have, is there hope?

To all these, I can only answer: perhaps.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, December 14 2016

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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Stanley Peiris and the music of the middle

April 10, 2022 by shamilka

Stanley Peiris, Uditha Devapriya

Music is, at least after the cinema, the most collaborative of all art-forms. Songs in particular require collaboration, to the extent that authorship is impossible to ascribe. On the other hand, however, this does not and will not deny the individual artiste a personal signature. Talent can’t be collectivised, this much we should know. That is why there are names associated with music and that is why some forms of music, to a considerable extent at least, are gauged on the basis of how their contemporary exponents echo the masters of the past.

I love these masters. They taught me how to live. And to love. Amaradeva never fails to enthral me. Khemadasa enthrals me even more (owing to my admiration for the man’s penchant for Western orchestration). Somadasa Elvitigala and Shelton Premaratne, the former dead and the latter domiciled in Australia, enchant me too, a pity since both were marginalised in their time. Sunil Shantha continues to be sung everywhere, teaching us the beauties of a land that undercut him. H. M. Jayawardena and Gunadasa Kapuge have taught me more about humanity and the resilience of the human spirit than any political tract. These people didn’t just compose tunes. They ensured that whatever they composed added meaning to our lives.

Unfortunately or fortunately, there were other composers. They also imparted meaning to their compositions. The only difference, however, was that they pandered to a different sensibility, nurturing a different audience. Like Clarence Wijewardena. The Moonstones. Los Caballeros. The Gypsies. Marians. Right down to Daddy. They too told (and continue to tell) stories in their songs, stories which deserve more than a cursory perusal. But if we are to compare them with those other names, I’d be inclined to say that they were responsible for simplifying music. With deference to Marx, I’d even be inclined to say that they brought music to the urban petite bourgeoisie here.

Stanley Peiris, who died in 2002 and would have been 75 were he alive, fell into this category. He composed more than 6,000 songs, hefty in a context where musicians today try to score points with a fraction of that amount. He was not an exponent of high music or low music. He was an exponent of popular music. Some of his tunes survive because, like those other composers one can classify him with, he appealed to a cross-section of his society. That cross-section has continued to balloon exponentially in the years following his death. No wonder his work remains popular.

He was born in Kandy and was educated at St Anthony’s College in Katugastota. He studied music at the Kandy MGC Institute and worked for a while at the Sri Lankan Navy, eventually becoming a Signal Officer. During this time, the Moonstones had more or less empowered the pop music industry in the country, a landmark given that pop music had hitherto been limited to calypso bands that came out of nowhere and disappeared. Emboldened by this, no doubt, Stanley decided to strike his own path, forming his own group (Fortunes) and specialising in instrumental music.

The Moonstones would shortly be uplifted by Vijaya Corea, who made the waves in our radio and music industries in the fifties and sixties. In 1969, the band had travelled to Kandy to perform at a dinner dance. Corea was to compere that dance. Stanley and his brother, Rangith, began their gig for the evening and went on, until late that night, with their saxophones. They had enthralled the compere so much that the man, wasting no time, told the duo to come to Colombo and not be limited to Kandy. When he himself went back to Colombo, he contacted the formidable Gerald Wickremesooriya. He asked the latter to accommodate Fortunes and, if possible, make them famous.

Legend has it that Gerald wasn’t too enamoured of Corea’s proposal, but legend also has it that, thanks to Corea’s ability to persuade, he got the duo to come and perform for him. So one morning, at Gerald’s residence in Kollupitiya, Stanley, Rangith, and the rest of the boys in Fortunes went on from one item to another. History doesn’t tell us what Gerald would have thought. History does, however, tell us that he smiled at Corea, looked at Stanley and Rangith, and nodded at them. Fortunes was in, and with it Stanley too. Later, when Stanley partly abandoned his saxophone (which stayed with him, until his last days) and opted for a career in composing, rather than performing, music, he would look back and admit that if it wasn’t for Vijaya Corea, there would probably never have been a Stanley Peiris.

6,000-plus songs, as I mentioned before, is a hefty amount. With them, he got to meet and associate with a great many vocalists and lyricists, each different to the other by a considerable margin. He gave Chandrika Siriwardena her two most memorable songs, “Igillila Yanna Yan” and “Ran Tharawako”. He gave form to Ajantha Ranasinghe’s reminiscences about a nameless woman he’d seen in the city and got Amaradeva to sing “Tharu Arundathi”. He got together with Sunil Ariyaratne and Nanda Malini and got the latter to sing about the true spirit of Christmas with “Jesu Swami Daruwane”. And of course, he gave us a near-perfect fusion of romance and silliness and got Raj Seneviratne to sing “Sili Sili Seethala Alle”. There are a hundred other songs I have grown to love, but now’s not the time to list them all.

Was there something that brought all these together? Probably. Khemadasa’s signature became evident with the violin: he managed to get us hooked with even his lesser work, which he gave us regularly and despairingly so in the eighties, by resorting to that instrument. Stanley resorted likewise to the guitar, which remains treasured by the very same audience he won to his side.

In arguably his most rebellious song, the much vilified but scantily assessed “Seegiri Geeyak” (which got him working with Sunil Ariyaratne again), he conjures up with the guitar the very image of the Seegiri Apsarawo, alive and animated, as they dance to Nirosha Virajini’s fervent wish for her lover to carve a sandakada pahana in her heart. “What is the meaning of that song?” a prominent lyricist once asked me, to which he supplied his own answer: “Meaning is relative. So is music. If we question the meaning that the lyricist and the composer wanted to bring out, we are implying that we know better. We do not.” Aptly put, I’m compelled to concede.

Stanley didn’t go solo, of course. He scored some films: Saranga in 1981, Baisikale in 1982, and Soora Saradiel in 1986. He taught at his own school. Among his students was Rookantha Gunathilake, who with Mahinda Bandara and Keerthi Pasqual would form the band Galaxy under Stanley’s guidance. He guided other vocalists and composers, prime among them Dinesh Subasinghe. Among his later collaborators, who’ve graduated since, one can count Rohana Bogoda, Raju Bandara, and Nelu Adhikari. They all remember him today as self-effacing, kind, gentle, and never self-centred. A veritable portrait of a veritable artiste, I should think.

On October 13, 2002 Stanley Peiris succumbed to cancer. He was helped even in his final days by his students, who organised a musical show at the BMICH to raise funds for him. At the time of his death, the pop music industry in Sri Lanka was fast being inhabited by pretenders and amateurs, those who resorted to the same hackneyed themes in a bid to simplify their art even more. In the end, tragically but inevitably, we fell into a crevice, in which we remain stuck and in which we prefer to remain stuck.

What Stanley did, which the likes of Clarence began before him, was to bring music closer to the urban middle-class Sri Lankan. I think it was the inimitable A. J. Gunawardana who titled his tribute to P. L. A. Sompala as “The music of the middle”. That would have been an apt heading for Stanley’s epitaph and for the kind of music he composed. On the other hand, though, what his descendants did (which they continue to do) was create an artificial common denominator so as to evade the burden and energy entailed in composing, writing, and singing songs which were original and spoke of experiences felt and lived through. We should regret, this I believe.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, January 4 2017

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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On Amarasiri Kalansuriya, or ‘Kalan’ to most

March 27, 2022 by shamilka

Amarasiri Kalansuriya, Uditha Devapriya

The seventies and eighties clearly were tumultuous decades for our cinema. Most commentators, in their rush to inject political relevance to our cultural history, tend to see in them the flowering of a political cinema. True. That does not, however, belittle the other precedents, landmarks, and revolutions which our directors, actors, and scriptwriters wrought. It was in the seventies, for instance, that H. D. Premaratne emerged, and it was in the eighties that, thanks in part to liberalised social and economic policies, an independent cinema here was given birth to. For me, the most significant result of all this was the rise and formation of a different breed of actors: those who not only appealed to the youth, but exemplified it.

Top among these actors, of course, was Vijaya Kumaratunga, whom I wrote on some months ago. Vijaya set a precedent. He was not Gamini Fonseka. He needn’t have been. He had an image and that image, at the end of the day, depended on how many conventional, formulaic films he took part in. Those who decry the man’s unwillingness to act in off-the-beaten-track ventures, therefore, fail to acknowledge the fact that for our cinema to throw up actors who took to our youth, the precedent-setter (if you will) had to participate in films which, though certainly lacking in critical appeal, reaped dividends at the box-office.

Vijaya came to us in Hanthane Kathawa. He acted opposite Tony Ranasinghe, by then an established star in the mould of Montgomery Clift and James Dean, and (I admit with no hesitation) bested him. But Vijaya was not alone there. He had a co-star. Someone who’d go on to symbolise youth in a different, less brash way. His name, Amarasiri Kalansuriya, or Kalan to most.

Before I (try to) examine Kalansuriya’s reputation in the context of our cinema, a brief biographical sketch is called for. He was born in Kandy in September 20, 1940 and was educated at Dharmaraja College. His mother died when he was 17, which compelled him to take care of his three younger brothers. He found menial work as a labourer after leaving school, eventually seeking employment at the Department of Agriculture at Mahiyanganaya, the Air Force (as a lance corporal), and Mallika Studios in his hometown. He left the latter after an argument with his superior, after which (he told me rather candidly when we met) he vowed never to work for anyone again.

This meant, logically enough, that he was his own man. He took to selling clothes. He was able to draw enough profits from these enterprises to set up his own tailor shop, thanks to which he managed to hobnob with several political and cultural figures in his day.

Long before he took to these jobs and before his mother died, though, Kalan had taken to the cinema. Sugathapala Senarath Yapa, on the lookout for aspiring, new actors for his debut, took in the man to act alongside Tony Ranasinghe. Hanthane Kathawa of course is a film that remains as fresh as it would have been back then, a point reinforced by its depiction of campus life. While Kalan had certainly not been to University (at the time he was still in school), he acted with so much sensitivity, wit, and candour that Lester James Peries, again on the lookout for new, aspiring actors, chose him to be Douglas Ranasinghe’s sidekick in Akkara Paha.

Given his mother’s passing away, however, he was forced to move away from films. Remembering this with me, he admitted that he found it difficult to leave behind a tentative career as an actor, but then agreed with me at once when I said that if it wasn’t for all those hard, harsh years, he wouldn’t have injected conviction into his later roles. That second phase in his career, incidentally, began with Dharmasena Pathiraja and Ahas Gawwa, where the director chose the relatively untried and untested Kalan for the role of the protagonist, opposite Wimal Kumar da Costa.

Pathiraja had his repertory of actors: Vijaya, Wimal, Malani Fonseka, Daya Tennakoon, Cyril Wickremage, and Kalan. Malani of course had been an established box-office star long before Ahas Gawwa, but it was with this politically and socially nuanced debut that all those other names really began their careers. The cinema of Dharmasena Pathiraja is noted for its exuberance, its unabashed lack of regard for uniformity (as opposed to say, the films of Lester James Peries). The narrative sometimes refuses to flow from A to B, it swerves and detours, and in the depiction of its characters, privileges spontaneity over reason. Kalansuriya couldn’t have asked for a better comeback.

In my article on Clarence Wijewardena I mentioned that the man couldn’t have made a career out of scoring films if it wasn’t for H. D. Premaratne. Premaratne was accustomed to taking risks and being emboldened by them. He went as far as to cast relative unknowns and in the process, jumpstart their careers (he did this for Bandula Galagedara, the dwarfish aristocrat in his debut Sikuruliya). To break ground and create a middle-path in our cinema, he resorted to actors as opposed to stars. He was not afraid of trying out new blood, which was how and why he invited Kalansuriya to act as the protagonist in his second feature, Apeksha.

If Sikuruliya gives the promise of an instinct-driven director, Apeksha confirms it. The plot’s conventional enough, if not simple: a rich girl falls in love with a man from a low social class, only to be engaged against her will to a man who has his sights on another woman. The predictable unfolds: the other man is exposed for who he is, and the girl’s father, aghast and shocked at his follies, lets the daughter have her way. That final encounter atop a hill, where Kalan (the hero) and his friend (Robin Fernando) fight the antagonist, could have been taken from a standard American flick, and the resolution of the plot’s conflict would have left audiences and critics happy in a way which drew both audiences and accolade. Much of this, no doubt, had to do with Kalansuriya’s acting.

While Sikuruliya and Apeksha conceded ground to the tropes of commercial cinema (with Kalan as the poor hero, Malani as the estranged heiress, and Ranjan Mendis as the rich antagonist), Premaratne’s next film was of a different mould. Parithyagaya, which examined the issue of poverty, class, and the dowry system, paired Kalan with Sriyani Amarasena and Vasanthi Chathurani. His earlier work had a refreshing pop quality to them (no doubt owing to Clarence Wijewardena’s music). Parithyagaya (which got Premaratne working with Premasiri Khemadasa) signifies a break from this trend, the beginning of a new middle cinema in the country. It boosted Kalansuriya’s image as an idealist beset with misfortune in his youth, which he retained throughout the eighties.

Speaking for myself, I don’t think that image ever left him. You see it crop up in every part he took. While the likes of Vijaya Kumaratunga matured, and I daresay hardened, Kalan remained the youthful idealist he would have been in real life. Parithyagaya, to give an example, opens with a sequence of the man riding his bicycle to the city: he rides it, stops it to check its wheels, clutches a moving truck, and daringly takes his hands away from the handlebars for a moment or two.

The opening sequence is crucial, though superficially extraneous, in establishing him as a strongman beset and cut down by social circumstances later on: when he steals money to get his sister the dowry she needs for her lover’s family to agree to her proposal, he is both daring and frail: a composite of opposites signifying the inner turmoil and self-contradictions his characters, in their quest to help others, bred and embodied. He doesn’t particularly do a good job of stealing the money, moreover: in that final scene, after his sister is finally married, when he imagines he’s marrying his fiancée (Chathurani) atop the poruwa and is disturbed by the intrusion of the police, he almost looks relieved in a defeatist kind of way: it’s as though he’s been expecting the police to come all along, as though it were a moment of reckoning for him.

I think this was the Kalan we grew up loving and (to a point) emulating. You never really had much hope for his protagonists (the man was unable to play antagonists, I like to believe), but that didn’t stop you from offering sympathy for them. The earlier Kalan was a sidekick, someone who, at most, offered balm to his co-star (think of Douglas Ranasinghe from Akkara Paha or Tony Ranasinghe from Hanthane Kathawa). The Kalan of the eighties was a different player. Being an instinct-driven actor, he found his niche with instinct-driven directors. He didn’t take part in a great many films (a pity at one level, a blessing at another) but in the few he was in, he brought home the point he wanted to make with his characters.

I met Amarasiri Kalansuriya the other day and I saw someone I’d seen many, many, many years ago. He remains the young idealist he always was. More pertinently, he remains young. Hasn’t really aged. Brash, candid, and honest, he has combined his youthfulness with a sense of humility and humanity that has, I fervently believe, aided him over most of life’s rough terrains. He hasn’t still finished his rounds, I suspect.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, January 11 2017

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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On Somaweera Senanayake and on television

March 12, 2022 by shamilka

Somaweera Senanayake, Uditha Devapriya

Not too many years ago, before I found a job, I was involved with tracking down, calling, and interviewing veterans from various cultural fields who had contributed something substantive to Sri Lanka. I would summarise their lives and work and try to fit those into the (horrendously meagre) space of a 1,500 or 2,500 word article (which would sometimes be in two parts). It was a challenge I had to meet and a challenge I grew to like. So I went on, from filmmaker to actor to lyricist, until somewhere towards the end of 2016 I met Somaweera Senanayake. I had not read him, I had only read (into) his scripts of those many, many TV series I grew up watching and loving here, but with what I knew I did my best and put together a sketch for the papers.

The day after it was published, another to be deceased artist, Premaranjith Tilakaratne (who passed away, after a failed surgery, in 2017) called me. “Everything you’ve written is correct,” he informed me, “But you missed one point: that Somaweera Senanayake is the only scriptwriter of his stature we have who came from the village. He is of the village in ways that no one in his field has ever matched, before or after him.” I was confused, so I asked him about those others in his field. Premaranjith was adamant: “I came from Ratnapura, Tissa Abeysekara came from Maharagama, and Tony Ranasinghe came from Modera. None of us could be called villagers. Yes, we hailed from a rural backdrop. But we were not of it. We belonged to a fairly middle class setting, and what we wrote, even of the village, was conditioned by that specific setting. Somaweera faced no such problem. When he wrote of villagers, he went into their skins.” Perhaps the irony is that he didn’t get into those skins as often as this description of him might have guaranteed, since the truth of the matter is that Senanayake, who passed away last Saturday, seemed to be more concerned with the same middle class lives that Tilakaratne, Abeysekara, and Ranasinghe had known of.

Somaweera Senanayake will be remembered more than anything else as the man who scripted those television series and dramas which helped transform television in Sri Lanka into a family affair. In India, film theatres and halls were springing up by the dozen throughout the eighties, while in Sri Lanka, those theatres and halls were coming down with the entire industry. Television was never conceived of as an alternative to the cinema, but here, it almost was. As with popular movies, therefore, television serials, once they made inroads into our television screens, talked about the prejudices and the emotions of those who lived in a twilight world: between the city and the village. Somaweera had lived in both. He had resided more completely in the former. The values he projected in those series he had a hand in shaping, or writing, therefore, were values which would define the entire medium for years to come.

Part of the reason for this was the time in which all that happened. The eighties was a tumultuous decade for reasons which have already been examined by economists, historians, and writers. It was tumultuous because of the tragedies it entailed as well as the promises of prosperity it held back. Those promises were enough to embolden a new middle class, who while certainly not equipped enough to be masters of their fate the way the bourgeoisie were, nevertheless dreamt big and cashed in on lives governed by a bourgeois ethic. The free market mantra the eighties opened Sri Lanka to brought about an unlikely synthesis here: between an older generation which sent their offspring to the cities, to educate them and to find them jobs, and those offspring who repudiated the traditionalism of the elders to modernise themselves.

This was the era of Michael Jackson, video recorders, and instant noodles. It took decades for the popular culture to nurture a sensibility like this to claim as its own. But while it transpired, it gave rise to a tragic rift: that between the goals and preferred outcomes of the new middle class, and the inevitably high failures of a great many from that middle class to achieve those goals and outcomes. The elders had built up their careers in stable government jobs; they had pushed their children into the private sector, dreaming of more stable and secure and lavish lifestyles for them. But once a great many of them failed to catch up with those lifestyles, they lived a rather pathetic heenamana existence, idealising their present with visions from their supposed future. (Think of that English-speaking fraudster of a father, played by Cyril Wickramage, from Kande Gedara.) It was this paradox which Somaweera revolved many of his stories around. They engendered botched dreams, false promises, and a forever unresolved rift between the face of the middle class and its fragile, delicate reality.

The heroes of Somaweera Senanayake’s world were those who acknowledged this rift and were not afraid of calling out something for what it was. The elder son from Asal Vesiyo, the elder son from Yashorawaya (adapted from Senanayake’s own novel, the first in Sri Lanka to be adopted as a University thesis), and Nilmini Thennakoon’s character from Doo Daruwo, to name just a few, are not idealists by any stretch of the imagination, but their strength lies in the fact that they are somehow able to tower over the dreams, the wishful thinking, and the fantasies of their elders. They were a voice of reason, back when reason had been evicted by avarice. Moreover, as with the movies of Lester James Peries, Somaweera’s scripts are preoccupied with the family, but unlike Lester’s films, it doesn’t always become a unifying factor; more often than not, those families are defined by a conflict between those who dream and those who do. In Asal Vasiyo, the comedy thus comes out not just from Ellen Silvester and her daughters, but also from their tenants: between the pomposity of the father (the perakadoruwa who constantly blurts “I know the law!”) and the younger son Pradeep (the mechanic who parades as an engineer) on the one hand, and the long suffering, but persistent and unyielding humanity of the elder son Jayamangala on the other.

It was a critique of modern society he seems to have offered (though like Martin Wickramasinghe he couldn’t go beyond demarcating it as inevitable), and if it was, then the question arises: what would have been an ideal society for Somaweera? The middle class teetered uncomfortably between one extreme and the other, courting both superstition and rationalism, both tradition and modernity, but without actually linking themselves to the one over the other. This rising petty bourgeoisie, who as I wrote before found solace in petty professions (teaching, repairs, journalism, what not) in the private sector (while their elders had worked as government bureaucrats), either continued to rise or went down with a bang. This could compel censure and empathy, drama and pathos; Somaweera, who turned it into both tragedy and comedy, thus envisioned an ideal society with the sons and daughters who stuck by the way of life their elders had once stuck by. In other words, he seems to have affirmed the past, to have turned those sons and daughters into heroes. The obedient and the good, in his stories, became the strong and the quick-witted.

But this also meant a turning away from the inevitability of modernity, a point which cropped up more and more uneasily with each passing teledrama in the eighties. It is hard, for instance, to watch Yashorawaya today and try to understand the writer’s attitude towards interracial marriage, and it is hard to comprehend why it would have been so difficult to marry into another community (Rathna Lalani Jayakody with a Tamil businessman, Gamini Hettiarachchi with a self-indulgent Burgher girl) back then. But the resultant clashes, the once buoyant hopes, the cruelly dashed dreams here were as inevitable as they were hard to accord with. (Roughly the same argument can be made of the depiction of marriage between different social classes in Vasantha Obeyesekere’s Palagetiyo.) It was not a limited vision, it was an all too real vision, firmly underscored by what middle class Sri Lankans, particularly Sinhala Buddhists (the “Olcott Buddhists” or the “Protestant Buddhists”, as they are sometimes referred to today) felt. Somaweera’s solution may have been that we should all turn away (which wouldn’t have worked). Or perhaps that this middle class was ill suited for what had worked well for other demographics, including interracial marriage. Either way, it was an idealisation of a pre-middle class, pre-urban society, though to consider that this is all that Senanayake could do would be understating his real achievement.

With each passing generation, the past becomes another world. My parents probably know less about the ways of that past, and the lifestyles and the ethics which governed it, than their parents do, and their parents probably knew even less than their own. The past becomes something to be idealised, or thrown away. And once urbanisation becomes a way of life, people try throwing it away. Vasantha Obeyesekere depicted, brutally, the conflicts this exposed us to, in film after film. In a more humane, less savage way, Somaweera Senanayake did the same on television. The beauty of it was that his eyes were open to this clash, inevitable in a majestic, awful manner as it was, while his entire life had been conditioned and fermented in the village. Premaranjith Tilakaratne was right, I am inclined to say. He was of the village, he moved out of the village, and in character after character, he depicted the flaws of an entire generation which had moved out with him, but which was now refusing to look back, as he was.

Written for: Daily Mirror, June 12 2018

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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Vijaya Kumaratunga: The stranger and the intruder

February 27, 2022 by shamilka

Uditha Devapriya, Vijaya Kumaratunga

From 1969, which saw Sugathapala Senarath Yapa’s Hanthane Kathawa, to 1989, which saw Vasantha Obeyesekere’s Kadapathaka Chaya, Vijaya Kumaratunga, the greatest matinee idol to ever grace the screen in this country, averaged about five movies a year. In both these films, undervalued for their time, reassessed more favourably today, he was cast opposite that other great actor, Swarna Mallawarachchi, and yet no two roles could have been more different: in Hanthane Kathawa he was the lover, the swashbuckling epitome of youth, while in Kadapathaka Chaya he was the impulsive rapist, the cold, calculating businessman who meets his end at the hands of his own victim. It took Vijaya all of 20 years to make the shift; perhaps (for I can only speculate here) another 20 years would have seen him diversity his range further.

At their toughest, heroes and superstars are virtually invincible. Supremely confident of their infallibility, their presumptions of their own strengths, they can only glare at those who boost their own presumptions. (Right after G. W. Surendra ends his valedictory for the protagonist in the opening of Welikathara, that protagonist, a newly promoted ASP, smiles rather contemptuously at him; the ASP, played by Gamini Fonseka, let us know then and there that only he had the prerogative to assess and inflate himself.) They don’t opt for cooperation because being cooperative in this society is, when it comes to heroes at least, seen as a sign of weakness, so much so that those who prefer to dream rather than do, to idealise rather than act, turn out to be inadequate versions of themselves (as with many of Tony Ranasinghe’s characters).

Vijaya Kumaratunga was our first onscreen hero who taught us that heroes need not always opt for unilateral action, and that the occasional compromise, the infrequent lapse, was forgivable and, more to the point, expendable. The romantic male stars, from here, weren’t really aggressive, but for the most they teetered between the domineeringness that Fonseka embodied and the fragility, the sense of inferiority, that Ranasinghe embodied. Both Fonseka and Ranasinghe instilled in their characters an intense desire to own the women they hankered after (which is why, when these two were cast together, as with Parasathumal, they tended to fight over the same love interest). But when Ranasinghe was featured opposite Vijaya, the tide turned: it was no longer about a woman, rather about that eternal battle between age and youth. Even when he mellowed, even when he was cast against younger players, Vijaya remained very much young, which meant that he was forever destined to conquer the women he desired so much. Ranasinghe’s characters would have given up (unless, as with Duhulu Malak, the women of their dreams came back on their own accord), and Fonseka’s would have gone ahead, never bothering to try their luck with their fiancées again, but Vijaya was different: he cared, he compromised, and he came back.

He was almost an outsider, the man from a different world, an intruder who dared to creep in at a time when the trinity of our film industry – Gamini, Tony, and Joe Abeywickrama – was firmly established and had virtually monopolised that industry. They each embodied a different zeitgeist – Gamini with heroism unhindered by moral scruples, Tony with fragility underscored by a delicate, almost otherworldly handsomeness, and Joe with a sense of mock seriousness which no chaotic situation could trip – and they commanded the names and the salaries that would have made any newcomer a nonentity. But these three were from a different era. The outsider and stranger who intruded into their universe heralded a new age: an age in which education and employability had become polar opposites, an age in which stability was a hated word (simply because it was impossible to obtain, except through force). The young of those days, who had venerated heroism and fragility and mock seriousness, wanted something more: someone who could compound these qualities and embody them at the same time. They found their pivot with Vijaya.

There are commentators who suggest that Vijaya never really acted, that he was being himself and that he hardly ever bothered to wait for the correct cue or take. Part of the reason for that, of course, was that unlike Fonseka he never selected his scripts meticulously: what he got was what he landed. That was, at one level, crude and almost primeval, but then in a country as small and yet indefinable as Sri Lanka being overly selective could have swept him off at a time when the market he inadvertently targeted – the young and the dispossessed, cut off from their own familial bonds – would have crassly ignored him if he wasn’t that frequently cast. Having averaged about one or two films from 1967 (Manamalayo) to 1969 and 1970 (Hanthane Kathawa), he struck gold at the box office with Neil Rupasinghe’s Hathara Denama Soorayo (in 1971). Three years later, Dharmasena Pathiraja chose him for Ahas Gawwa, and three more years later, he chose him again for Eya Dan Loku Lamayek.

When Gamini and Tony and Joe were cast as villains, they evaded our sympathy and evoked our deepest fears. Gamini began his career with a set of films that had him play around with the duality between love and hate, as with Seethala Wathura; Tony became less likeable as he aged, as Ahasin Polawata and Duhulu Malak showed; and Joe, when he was not ranting like a self-deluded man (like the husband in Adara Hasuna), played around with a variation of the duality that Gamini had, this time between fear and self-mockery (Welikathara). But even at their most dislikeable, these men knew what they were in for: they didn’t fall or trip, and if they did, the script prepared us for them. With Vijaya, on the other hand, those trips and falls were never part of a carefully ordered and ordained narrative. The lover in Wasana has to croon “Oba Langa Inna” to try and get back Malini Fonseka, and in Eya Dan Loku Lamayak, he endures the hatred and contempt of a teenage lover of Malini, played by Wimal Kumar da Costa, to marry her.

Having covertly slept with Helen in Pathiraja’s Bambaru Avith, and having been upbraided by his two friends (Amarasiri Kalansuriya and da Costa), the man still feels confused about what he’s done: “What COULD I have done?” he sternly asks da Costa, the fiery revolutionary, as da Costa warns him about the chaos he’s unleashed on the fishing community they’ve moved to. If Bambaru Avith feels rather operatic today, rather blown out and loud and crude and deliberately cluttered, it’s not because of Premasiri Khemadasa’s innovative music only, but also because of the fact that Vijaya had become a new lover: the antiheroic lover, who falls in love with a peasant girl engaged to another man (Cyril Wickramage). Vijaya trips and falls, but until the end those trips and falls are never explicitly rationalised by the script. Consequently, by being an antiheroic lover, he had become an antiheroic hero: the sort that his audiences had wanted all along, and got, with every other subsequent role of his.

If Vijaya seemed careless in his movies and the scripts did nothing to hold him back, the only consolation we had was the fact that he had no one but himself to fall on. In Vasantha Obeyesekere’s Diyamanthi he throws away his “useless” Bachelor of Arts certificate after he gets evicted by an irate landlady (Ratnawali Kekunuwala) and, in one of the most bizarrely concocted coming-together sequences I’ve ever seen in any film, befriends a pickpocket (da Costa) and a hard-done-by, recently released criminal (Somasiri Dehipitiya), as they venture out and make friends with a carefree heiress (Malini Fonseka). These men have nothing but themselves to turn to: they have no family, no one dependent on them and no one they are dependent on. In one sense this was more Godardian than Hitchcockian (the latter term being used by critics when reviewing Diyamanthi), except that Godard’s characters didn’t just lack families and dependents but were downright repelled by them. That attitude of being repelled and being alienated came out, for Vijaya, in Pathiraja’s greatest film, Para Dige.

In Ahas Gawwa the ending, which to many seemed apt and expedient for the two protagonists (Vijaya and Amarasiri Kalansuriya), also seemed rather contrived: there was nothing to suggest that either of them would have taken part in strikes if they were placed in a different setting. There needed to be an explicit rationale, failing which their act of participating in those strikes looked almost manufactured. Para Dige, for the first time in Vijaya’s and (I think) Pathiraja’s career, did away with a need for such a rationale, if at all because the characters don’t come to us with any back story: neither Chandare, the protagonist, nor his girlfriend (Indira Jonklass) encourages us to find out more about their pasts, barring a section of the narrative in which Chandare returns to his sister (Sunethra Sarachchandra) and his parents (Chitra Vakishta and Joe Abeywickrama); that section, very much unlike the freewheeling style of everything that preceded it, naturally felt detached from the rest of the story.

This evolution – from the in-your-face likeability of the seventies to the cynical ambivalence of the eighties (at the end of Para Dige, Vijaya as Chandare embodies this ambivalence by answering his girlfriend’s questions with a slapdash remark: “I don’t know”) – was obviously one which would have led to a shift in his career, and like Gamini and Tony and Joe he would have made a leap to a new phase. But then there was only one film which indicated this shift, and after it was released in 1989, he was shot down and killed. That film was Obeyesekere’s Kadapathaka Chaya, where for the entirety of the plot he teeters between a superficial charm and a repressed sexual hideousness that spells out his own murder. Kadapathaka Chaya, unlike Dadayama and Palagetiyo, plays out like clockwork: the past and the future are inextricably woven together, and in Vijaya’s characterisation of Danaratne, the mudalali who rapes his own sister-in-law, there is a deterioration, which at times frightens us. Perhaps Kadapathaka Chaya was the only fitting end we could have had to a man we wanted so badly to be: a lover, heroic, antiheroic, or otherwise.

Written for: Daily Mirror, February 8 2018

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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Forgotten flicks: ‘Sagara Jalaya’

February 11, 2022 by shamilka

Sumithra Pieris, Uditha Devapriya

“It must be seen today, by the young of today,” Ranjith Rubasinghe told me over lunch. He was talking about Sagara Jalaya, Sumitra Peries’s fifth film, which I think is one of the three or four most perfectly constructed films ever made here, and which I believe is Sumitra’s masterpiece. Those who watch it today are often overwhelmed by the intermingling of opposites in it – of beauty and pathos, of love and hate, of reconciliation and vengefulness – which explains that sense of unpredictability which never lets go until the last scene. That it could be made with so much precision, back when movies had deteriorated in quality and worse, become debased, tells a lot about the cast and crew. I saw it twice: once when I was 10, once when I was 24. That gap, of almost 15 years, can open you up to facets of the plot you had never discerned before; the beauty of Sagara Jalaya is that even when you ignore those facets, it still seems to have been made for its time, for all time, and for everyone.

Simon Nawagaththegama, who wrote Ohu Mala Giya Pasu, in my opinion the best story from his collection Sagara Jalaya Madi Handuva Oba Sanda (from which the scriptwriter of the film, Lester James Peries, took the title), never reveals his characters, or their flaws, in gushes and torrents. Even in a middle period work as Suddilage Kathawa, published seven years after Sagara Jalaya, there’s never that kind of in-your-face apparentness that you sense in, say, Martin Wickramasinghe’s Koggala Trilogy. Part of the reason for that was that Nawagaththegama, who was of a different literary temperament, sought to transcend the limits of realism that the 20th century had imposed on the Sinhalese novel. But when set against this parameter, Ohu Mala Giya Pasu is an intensely poignant tale, with a kind of clarity of vision that only barely comes out in his other work, even the other stories in Sagara Jalaya.

As with much of his oeuvre, Ohu Mala Giya Pasu takes place in the dry zone: the Wanni region, near Medawachchiya, where people pray and also swear by Aiyanayaka Deviyo and where the harsh sun becomes a reality you have to get used to. In Nawagaththegama’s work the smallest tension, the tiniest ripple on the surface, will charge an otherwise unimportant scene with unbearable tension, and his characters will go on and on, spitting out frenzy, hate, inexplicable madness. Never for one moment are those characters gentle, not because they lack empathy but because that is what their world has compelled them to become. Whoever said that writers operate on universals, and that critics operate on those universals when assessing the work of those writers, was stating only half the story; the truth is that some of the greatest writers went for the milieus they grew up in. Nawagaththegama, in this sense, did through the Wanni area he had known, since childhood, what Martin Wickramasinghe had done through Koggala: depict life as it was lived.

In the original story, which Lester and Sumitra read in translation by Ranjini Obeyesekere, the sexual tensions the adaptation only subtly unearths are there, for all to see, while the child figure, Bindu, doesn’t occupy our attention the way he does onscreen. It’s a cruel world that these characters inhabit, but not as cruel and pathos-ridden as that of Suddilage Kathawa, which many consider to have been a spiritual successor of sorts to Ohu Mala Giya Pasu (those familiar with both would notice the similarities: the woman, left without a husband and without an income, preying on the sexual proclivities of a man she can never have), because of the scriptwriter’s affirmation of humanism. You don’t come across the uncontrollable savagery which Dharmasiri Bandaranayake’s adaptation of Suddilage Kathawa oozes out.

In that sense Sumitra’s film is easier to wade through, no matter how young or old you are; as a 10-year-old, I would not have noticed the relationship between the mudalali (Ravindra Randeniya) and Heen Kella, but that did not take my interest away because I was focusing on the relationship between Heen Kella and Bindu, her son. 15 years later, when our comprehension of marriage matured, cynically, we discerned at once the source of the hatred between Heen Kella and the mudalali’s wife, her cousin, so much so that we can’t pass over it. That’s why I think, it its own way, that it was a film made for all time, and for everyone: not everything in it would have appealed to those who saw it, but the emotional texture, the humanism in it that is never repudiated, is what makes it a movie-for-all-to-see at the end of the day.

But while many people have seen, and appreciated, Suddilage Kathawa, very few people have seen, much less appreciated, Sagara Jalaya. If you peruse Sumitra’s career this can be said of pretty much her other films: they all were received warmly by critics, and to a considerable extent by popular audiences too, but the momentum that they rode on when they were first released fizzed out, owing to certain unfortunate reasons outside the control of the director.

Critics say that Dharmasiri Bandaranayake may be the most misunderstood and underestimated director in Sri Lanka, then and now. But the same can be said of Sumitra too, because the kind of recognition that her films, particularly her best work (Gehenu Lamayi, Sagara Jalaya, Sakman Maluwa), deserved never accrued to them; by contrast, her lesser works (Yahalu Yeheli, Duwata Mawaka Misak) compelled hysterics and a barrage of vitriol from both critics and popular audiences (Yahalu Yeheli, for instance, was indicted for its depiction of an upper class young woman taken up by revolution – as if affluent young women can never be taken up at all! – while Duwata Mawaka Misa, made at a time when her work was considered family-friendly, evinced anger when Thushani gave into her paramour’s advances willingly) that was not compensated for by the sustained sincerity of those other three films.

Because those who have seen and waxed eloquent over Suddilage Kathawa (and those other films which had Swarna as the central tormented figure: Hansa Vilak, Dadayama, Kadapathaka Chaya) have never “seen” Sagara Jalaya, the latter remains inexorably fresh every time it’s telecast on television, which I think is part of its charm. Sumitra was primarily an editor, and a disciplined editor at that, and that comes through Sagara Jalaya almost spotlessly; music and movement are intertwined so effortlessly that I sometimes wonder how the crew and cast managed to parse the production together (“We had to delay shooting by a whole year when the rains came,” she told me when we talked about the film one day) until the very end. It’s beautifully sustained, and owing to that, the turbulence and the oscillations of behaviour which come out, however uncontained they can get, never really rupture the gentleness and innocence at the heart of the story. When Swarna and her cousin (Sunethra Sarachchandra) argue, for instance, we don’t get the hysterics and outbursts that we do in many of Vasantha Obeyesekere’s films; the camera moves away and instead focuses on Bindu’s face, filled as it is with disbelief and helplessness. It’s one of the best edited films I’ve seen from anywhere; that has a lot to do with not just Sumitra and Lester, but also the cameraman, Donald Karunaratne; the editor, the sadly underrated Lal Piyasena; and the cast: Swarna, Sunethra, Ravindra, and the two children.

And in the end, it is those two children who salvage the story from the ambiguities of the plot (with respect to the relationship between Heen Kella and the mudalali). Neither the girl nor the boy had been exposed to the cinema back then; that was a different time, when children were not transformed into superstars. “They lose their childhoods early on,” Sumitra told me, talking about the tendency of the popular culture to overhype the young when they become popular in that culture. What gets lost in this transformation is that rare ability to be yourself: the children are forced by the scriptwriter to be younger and louder than they are. They can’t express themselves without resorting to the loudspeaker. A girl once told me (in jest, of course) that I behave like a 50-year-old who speaks like a 20-year-old who thinks he’s a 30-year-old; roughly the same anachronism exists with respect to our onscreen children: they act below their years, but in reality project the fantasies and idealisations of them that directors throw up.

The greatness of Sagara Jalaya, or Maya, is that the child actors in them never followed up on their performances and carved out careers of their own: the tendency of our film industry to throw up wannabe Shirley Temples is recent, because children always returned to their normal lives, back then, when the production wrapped up. They were never idiotic: they thought beyond their years even though they never showed it. That was true and very much so of the two actors in Sagara Jalaya, Rasika Kumari Wickramasingha (Midiya) and Susith Chaminda de Silva (Bindu). (Where are they today?) Bindu’s voiceover at the end, for instance, is insanely poignant, because Susith brings together the opposites at the heart of the story: pathos and beauty, innocence and ferocity. Most child actors I’ve seen bring about that poignancy without uttering too many words (think of Vasanthi Chathurani at the end of Gehenu Lamayi); Susith does it by spelling out an entire letter to the audience.

Which is why I think what Ranjith Rubasinghe told me still holds valid, after all these years. Sumitra’s film should be seen today, by the young of today, not only because I think it’s a “family picture” (and a good one at that), but also because it takes us back to a time when honesty and sincerity mattered; when the need to entertain, while certainly not the be-all and end-all of a film, was acknowledged and not forcibly repressed in the name of art. Those who believe in life and the affirmation of life in the movies should thus get out of their theories, their academised notions of art, and watch Sagara Jalaya.

Written for: Daily Mirror, February 20 2018

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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Cyril Wickramage: The man from Kohilagedara

January 22, 2022 by shamilka

Cyril Wickramage, Uditha Devapriya

In Ananda Abeynayake’s Kande Gedara (scripted by Somaweera Senanayake) there is a servant to the two protagonists who is casually referred to as “Kalagune” (for what reason, we are never told). The protagonists, an ageing couple (the father, played by Rohana Baddage, is placid and friendly, tolerant of everyone, including his wife, played by Ramya Wanigasekara, who’s more hostile and grasping, more careful with the family fortunes), have three indulgent children, one of whom has a conniving father-in-law who, acting above his station in life, garbles up his Sinhala and English drunkenly and calls this servant Karl. This father-in-law, played by Cyril Wickramage, is a distillation of every tragicomic aspect to the story. A conman who’s almost caught more than once, he gives the impression of being a well-meaning, unapologetic, expert trickster, and he is: more frail than evil, more misguided than misunderstood. Probably no other actor could have depicted him so well back then.

Cyril Wickramage is what one can call an instinctive actor. In performance after performance he makes you think he’s giving less than what he has. But he never does. Just when you think he’ll stop displaying those hysterics and emotional outbursts he’s very much capable of, he instead does something intensely cathartic. It happened in Sath Samudura, one of his first films, and it happened again in Bambaru Avith 10 years later. In both he realises the futility of loving a woman who can never love him back, and in both rants and raves against his fate and then triumphs over life, and the need to seek commiseration for his sorrows, by sailing and diving, literally, to his death. That’s his niche: his outbursts are enough to convince us that he’s distraught or unhappy or (as Kande Gedara showed) crafty, but never to the extent where we believe him to be a stereotypical talker or faker. He is what his instincts have us believe of him.

And to a considerable extent, those instincts came to him from his childhood, one that was spent in the village and away from the metropolis. Born in Kohilagedara in the Kurunegala District on January 26, 1932, he grew up on a diet of Sokari, Nurti, and Nadagam, patronising them as drama troupe after troupe travelled from Negombo to his hometown. “We watched and revelled in them. During Avurudu we’d look forward to Nurti plays. No, we never dreamt of becoming actors, onstage or onscreen, but my friends and I made these outings an integral part of our common experience. We watched them for the fun of watching them, to be honest.” That was the kind of encounters which Joe Abeywickrama, in Ratnapura, would indulge in. Like Abeywickrama, Cyril didn’t get to watch a great many movies: “There was the Imperial Theatre in Kurunegala town. We didn’t see English films, only the Sinhala and Tamil ones.” He was about 15 when the Minerva Players made and released Kadawunu Poronduwa. (Perhaps it was the symbiotic relationship between these and the Nurtis he looked forward to that appealed to him.)

But it wasn’t acting that got to him as a career: it was teaching. Having flirted with the idea of joining the Army (which children his age usually fantasised about), he qualified from the Peradeniya Training College after a two year course. Thereafter he was employed at various institutions, including the Ratmalana Deaf School and Wesley College, Colombo. All in all he would have taught at seven such schools, and all of them got him deep into not just teaching, but also another field that was linked to his childhood encounters onstage: music. “I mastered the violin and later dancing during those years. And of all the schools I taught at, it was Wesley that got me thinking seriously about acting.” The latter school got him into contact with Ananda Samarakoon, who had come to watch a play, had seen Wickramage, and had beckoned him to the theatre.

While he was interested in the theatre at the time, however, it was the cinema which initiated him properly into the performing arts, when in 1965 he was cast opposite Vijitha Mallika in Kingsley Rajapakse’s Handapane. A minor role, it won him praise from those who knew him, including his colleagues, which paid dividends a year later when Siri Gunasinghe cast him opposite Swarna Mallawarachchi, Edmund Wijesinghe, and Somasiri Dehipitiya in Sath Samudura. What I like most about Gunasinghe’s film, apart from its fidelity to a milieu that only documentary makers had explored before in our cinema, was its preference for silence and introspection over wordy conversations. In large part that was exemplified in the sequences with Wickramage’s character Gunadasa, who hankers after a woman who can never have him, fights with a brother and an insensitive sister-in-law (Mallawarachchi in her first outing), and is loved only by the mother (Denawaka Hamine). Wickramage had grown up on the verbal barrages of the Nurti theatre. The film and roles he clinched were worlds away from those barrages.

To this end two people figured in his subsequent career: Dr Linus Dissanayake, the producer of Sath Samudura, and Dharmasena Pathiraja, who cast him in nearly every film of his from Ahas Gawwa. Aboard Sath Samudura as an Assistant Director was Vasantha Obeyesekere, who together with Dissanayake made his first film, Ves Gaththo, in 1970. I have unfortunately not seen Ves Gaththo, but I do know that the theme it tackled – the rift between education and employability – was tackled and realised more vividly in his second film, Valmath Wuwo. Both these featured Wickramage and the latter of them had him perform a Nadagam song, probably a tribute to the plays he had watched as a child. Meanwhile, a second collaboration with Dissanayake resulted in Wickramage’s first directorial venture: Sihina Lowak, a love story that more than anything else is remembered for the Amaradeva-Mahagama Sekara classic, “Ma Mala Pasu.” An even bigger set of collaborations would follow with Dharmasena Pathiraja.

Pathiraja, in Bambaru Avith, cast Wickramage as an almost inverted version of Gunadasa from Sath Samudura: now more assertive, more brutal. Even though the plot doesn’t let us in on why he resents the antihero, Victor (Vijaya Kumaratunga), it is manifestly clear that he seethes with anger and jealousy when Helen (Malini Fonseka) falls in love with him. It may well be that Wickramage’s character (also called Cyril) can’t reciprocate Helen’s love for him the way that Victor can; or it may well be that there’s a political subtext, with Cyril’s milieu militating against Victor’s on the personal plane (sexual politics, after all, is politics). Either way, his love for the woman who rejects him blinds and in the end consumes him (we are not made to see whether he commits suicide, or whether he’s killed off by one of Victor’s goons), and also provokes the final tragic encounter in the film: between Victor and his enemy, the feudalistic Anton aiya (Joe Abeywickrama), killed off (again) by one of the former’s goons (Daya Tennakoon).

With Pathiraja, as one can see from the roles he was chosen for, he was cast in a different mould. Not surprisingly, Wickramage remembers the man with sincere delight. “No other director tried to weed out the false and romantic from his films as he did, I can tell you that. He came from the village, very much like I did, but he was adept at depicting the urban youth. He was in fact fascinated by how the city was being invaded and assailed by the village and how the city in turn tried to assimilate the village to its values. To this end he was faithful in his depictions of both locales. Other directors went for their share of criticism when it came to the settings and backdrops of their movies. Not Pathiraja.”

So when television came to Sri Lanka, and Wickramage was selected to play various secondary characters in our first TV serials, Pathiraja was there with him. I have not seen Wickramage in some of these serials, including La Hiru Dahasak (reputedly Sri Lanka’s second after Dimuthu Muthu), Sasara Sayuren (which won for him a Best Actor Award from Wijeya Newspapers), and even Manik Nadiya Gala Basi (where he’s a gem merchant consumed by idealism first and later greed and envy), but I have seen him in Kande Gedara, Alle Langa Walawwa, and Kadulla, the latter two of which trace the subtle interrelationships between the colonial bourgeoisie and the village peasantry and both of which were directed by Pathiraja. In Alla Langa Walawwa especially, which gives the impression of being made indifferently, in a hurry, he’s the centre that holds the narrative together as the manservant Appu Hamy, despite its various meanderings and confusions that culminate in what I consider to be a less than satisfactory ending.

As he mellowed, Cyril Wickramage let go of his youthful avatar and became the sagacious, empathetic man of few words. While he decries contemporary television shows, for instance, he is nevertheless a character actor in them, usually playing out the role of the friendly, concerned elder. He never speaks more than he has to, and never being wont to emotional outbursts he’s caught our attention as a side player in ways that youth can’t really exude and match. This makes his admiration for Marlon Brando (“Brando was the only real actor in a Shakespearean cast in the 1953 adaptation of Julius Caesar,” he told me frankly) all the more mystifying. He’s certainly no Brando, and he is, as I pointed out to a friend of mine around a year ago, as far away from the cinema of brawn as Gregory Peck was from John Wayne, if we are to take a metaphor and point of comparison from the American cinema of the fifties: the decade in which he bloomed.

Written for: Daily Mirror, December 7 2017

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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Some notes on Udayakantha Warnasuriya

January 9, 2022 by shamilka

Udayakantha Warnasuriya, Uditha Devapriya

In Ran Diya Dahara Udayakantha Warnasuriya alludes to his advertising career: he gets a graphic designer to crop Geetha Kumarasinghe on a photo of Kamal Addaraarachchi and to make it appear as though the two of them were secretly married. Kamal, a crippled soldier, can’t talk, and in the first few sequences of these two together he is as confused as we are. His parents, played by Anula Karunatilake and Henry Jayasinghe (in a rare outing, since neither of them took to the cinema that often after the eighties), are on the other hand convinced of Geetha’s feelings of tenderness and empathy, and they readily accept her for who she passes herself to be. In reality, though, she’s married to a lowlife scumbag (Jackson Anthony) who swears vengeance on her when he discovers her whereabouts; it’s a terse encounter that ends with the soldier revealing his affections for her by chasing the lowlife with his crutches, and this ending, though less than satisfactorily edited, nevertheless embodies the Udayakantha Warnasuriya package: an unashamed, almost spontaneous, tongue-in-cheek combination of art and entertainment.

Udayakantha, in film after film, turns cripples, robbers, and even low-lives into the heroes that we want them to be. Sometimes, as with Le Kiri Kandulu, he turns towards the middle class and declares his sympathies for them, committed as they are to a life of ease, love, and comfort. Le Kiri Kandulu, however, is too short to be the film it tries to be: it ends abruptly, though movingly, and it never takes Nilmini Tennakoon’s anger towards the man who crashes into her car and causes her to give birth to a still born child beyond a few sequences that dwell on a technicality we already know (that the foetus is not considered as a live human being by the law) and a reconciliation between her, her husband, and that elderly man by the beach. But then it pokes fun at the middle class (which is why we are hinted at a possible affair on the part of the man’s son-in-law, played by Sanath Gunatilake), which is another typical Warnasuriya trademark: his ability to be irreverent without the usual blasts of emotions that precede it. While many of his movies leave much to be desired on this count, therefore, I genuinely like them.

Because we aren’t really a big country (we aren’t even a SMALL country: England is, and so is the Maldives; in that sense we are vague and indefinable), the gap between the storytellers and the serious artists remains impossibly hard to bridge, especially in the movies. At one level this means that the entertainers call the shots. At another level this also means that the artist has to do with being part of a small, esoteric circle, so he becomes a minoritarian the same way the entertainer become majoritarians: the one rebels against the conventional wisdom, the latter accepts it for what he thinks it to be. The fact that, decades after Parithyagaya and Deveni Gamana and Visidela, we still insist on terming H. D. Premaratne as a middle-of-the-road director speaks volumes about whether we want to continue with this pathetic rift.

A few of these entertainers have, by extraordinary resolve, tried to reach the ranks of the masters, but they have failed. In the early days, Robin Tampoe tried his hand at the serious and the unfunny with Sudo Sudu. It was a financial flop. K. A. W. Perera’s first few forays into the industry tried to channel serious plotlines (especially with Senasuma Kothenada) before he moved into adaptations of T. B. Ilangaratne (Nadayo) and puerile love stories (Wasana, Lasanda, Duleeka, Janaka Saha Manju) that transformed the unreality of their experiences into the hysterics they compelled from popular audiences (one of my neighbours swears by Janaka Saha Manju even now, and apparently it still makes him and his mother cry). It’s tough placing Udayakantha among these past veterans, as tough as placing him in the mould of H. D. Premaratne, because he fits into neither category. The truth is that Warnasuriya is much more than a comparison with such veterans. He entertains, yes, but neither yields nor defies the artificiality of his stories and characters. He teeters between two worlds. And he succeeds, in part.

When I asked Chandran Rutnam as to what he thought constituted a good film, he gave the following reply: “Three words. A. Good. Story.” Udayakantha’s films don’t lack stories. They don’t even lack plot-lines (at one point I struggled to make sense of the multiple plotlines in Ran Diya Dahara and Ran Kevita and Bahuboothayo). They sometimes, if not often, lack the cohesion that would have kept them together (like in Bahuboothayo, which for the first 20 minutes presents an interesting premise – what if your local temple houses a she-devil? – but then deteriorates to a series of altercations with random bystanders: Srinath Maddumage, the local busybody, and Vijaya Nandasiri, the cowardly god), and this at the end of the day becomes their descent. He tries to make up for what he lacks in this respect with emotional outbursts – which is why, despite my confusion, people laugh at even the most crudely conceived sequences in Ran Kevita and Ran Kevita 2 – but he never properly succeeds, because those outbursts, while appealing to our instincts, are nevertheless edited so jerkily that they stand apart, on their own, outside the narrative. These are the titbits that keep the movie alive to those instincts, but they aren’t as convincing as the storylines and characters we have been following.

Directors love taking chances; those chances make up the sequences that seem almost accidentally conceived to us. But Udayakantha doesn’t quite work like that. His films, and their storylines, even the most arbitrarily inserted and edited ones, are never random affairs: they are always carefully calculated, shot to evoke a specific response from his audience. If the sequence of the two boys in Ran Kevita conjecturing as to whether the kevita they have will bring to life the statue of the Buddha seems rather puerile and primitive, it’s because Udayakantha the filmmaker becomes, for a few seconds, Udayakantha the moralist, daring his audience into believing the unbelievable until the heresies this may compel (try telling children that a kevita can materialise religious figures and then looking at their parents’ shocked faces!) are defied: we never question as to how blasphemous he is. So he’s won it on both counts, entrancing the wonderers in us and the zealots in our elders. The responses he evokes, thus, try to keep everyone happy.

The man is a magician but then magicians are illusionists, and are as careful and efficient as the believers in reason and science. The entertainers in this country thus work from the premise that audiences are gullible enough to believe anything. Some of Sunil Soma Peiris’s films are so hastily put together that I wonder who in their right minds would go watch Tennyson Cooray fighting the digitalised lion from George of the Jungle in Wada Bari Tarzan. (Peiris, like those other entertainers, work with recycled parody, as I pointed out in this newspaper many months ago.) But then there are people who want to escape the banality of tomorrow, and to escape that banality they need to be convinced by directors that artists can convince them of anything. How else would the Tennyson Cooray and Bandu Samarasinghe vehicles rake up rupees at the box office? That’s why Udayakantha is so special: while he seems to work from the same premise of audiences-being-gullible, he trumps his own expectations of them by testing their intelligence. What if Kamal in Ran Diya Dahara really loves Geetha? What if the two boys in Ran Kevita leave their frolicking and listen to Vijaya Nandasiri and recite the multiplication table properly? What if Rodney Warnasuriya in Gindari chooses to marry the she-devil?

How does he succeed with these scenes? The entertainers who give us Wada Bari Tarzan and Doctor Nawariyan confuse visual slapstick for visual diarrhoea in much the same way that art house director confuse visual profundity for visual constipation (that is, the one works with excess and the other with economy). Udayakantha neither sacrifices nor privileges the image this way. Simple to a fault, salty at times, the dialogues and monologues in his films are never the insult to audiences that dialogues and monologues from those other mainstream movies are. They don’t condescend to audiences, despite the manifest failings of their plotlines; they celebrate our act of condescending to them.

In the end that may be Udayakantha’s secret formula. Does it work? Almost always.

Written for: Daily Mirror, February 1 2018

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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uditha-devapriya

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Stanley Peiris and the music of the middle

On Amarasiri Kalansuriya, or ‘Kalan’ to most

On Somaweera Senanayake and on television

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Forgotten flicks: ‘Sagara Jalaya’

Cyril Wickramage: The man from Kohilagedara

Some notes on Udayakantha Warnasuriya

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