Uditha Devapriya | Sooriya Records

Reflections on some wonderful friends

July 26, 2020 by admin

Mahagama Sekara, Uditha Devapriya, Victor Ratnayake, W. D. Amaradeva

My friend Hiruna, who is studying for his A Levels, yet somehow finds the time to write the most beautiful Sinhala poetry I have ever read from someone his age, is something of a rarity. Not because he writes poetry (don’t we all, at some point?) but because his preferred cultural icons are so far removed from the Sanukas and the Santhushes of this era that he has become virtually isolated. He has written essays and essays on everything from the era he panders to – the sixties, seventies, and eighties – ranging from Hansa Vilak to T. M. Jayaratne to Amaradeva to Sekara. Because of my inability to read between the lines when it comes to poetry, sivpada or nisadas, I have come to appreciate the critic in him rather acutely. He has read much more on the subjects he tends to than anyone his age.

And yet, he is not alone. There are others. Perhaps not as “into” what he likes as he is, but nevertheless with a sensibility which has been honed to past objets d’art that the young today are rubbishing day in and out. It’s hard to tell whether this is a miniscule minority or whether it has the potential to grow up and mature. In that sense there’s a lot to be expected from the families and friends of these youngsters, because with the correct guidance, they can and will become the wielders of the arts tomorrow.

The most common excuse dished out by those who are fascinated by the icons of the present is that “the past is dead, live with it!” It’s a flimsy excuse, though one I’ve come across from youngster after youngster wherever I go and am. Perhaps it’s to do with how the media has suppressed the old in the programs they broadcast. Either way, an entire generation is growing up not even having heard of the usual icons – Amaradeva, Victor Ratnayake, even Clarence – and this despite the fact that these names are hardly ones we can pass over. Someone once said somewhere (I can’t remember the name or the time, though it was way, way back, a long time ago) that if Sri Lanka chose to send something that demarcated “ape kama” to the moon, it would send the songs of Amaradeva. Laudable, but consider that we have children, and students at that who are studying in GOVERNMENT schools, who have not even heard of his name, much less his songs. So yes, people like Hiruna are rather rare.

There are reasons. For one thing, schools have rarely produced artists the way they produce and are structured to produce engineers, lawyers, doctors, and accountants. Parents have set notions about what they want their children to become and this impedes on the ability of individual societies to do with the arts to nurture up and coming artists. If you are studying science for your A Levels, chances are that no matter how suitable for chairing and leading literary, drama, and debating societies you may be, you will be compelled to exit them abruptly to concentrate on passing that Z score and entering university. And this isn’t resolved by handing these societies over to those who study arts. As Ayath, whom I interviewed last year over how Sinhala drama is taught and sustained at schools in and around Colombo, argued, there is a discrepancy between those who take to the arts and those who debate, do drama, or write poetry for competitions. More often than not, it’s those other streams – Science and Commerce – which produce the bulk of the members who want to do something. More often than not, also, those who choose arts opt for it because they have nothing else to offer. “They just aren’t interested” was what Ayath told me.

That’s one reason. Not the only reason. It’s easy to go on lambasting structures and institutions. Looking inward, at the fault in ourselves, however, is much, much more difficult. The truth is that many of us from this generation and generations after us are rabidly averse to the past, or anything that is too old to be venerated in hagiographic terms. When Amaradeva passed away, for instance, there were howls of protest over one particular young vocalist who contended that there were much better voices than the maestro’s among his (the vocalist’s) colleagues. Whether or not this was true (such judgments, subjective though they are, can be assessed), the timing of the statement was hardly apt. And yet, this is but just one part of a broader phenomenon. Young people I talk to take to the guitar and the microphone as though God has willed it. The richness of technology, in other words, is drowning the richness of imagination, and imagination, a key prerequisite to the production of art, is lacking among them. Sure, they know how to please the ear. It’s just that they don’t know how to please the mind.

Poetry, the most potent and literary of all cultural forms (the novel and the short story, by comparison, are newer, more recent), is a veritable yardstick when it comes to other cultural spheres, in particular music. “The young don’t have the time to read, and even if they do, they just aren’t interested” was what Ajantha Ranasinghe told me during our interview. He has a point. As a people, we aren’t reading enough. Literacy rates, premised as they are on the ability to read and write on a rudimentary level, are hardly adequate by way of assessing whether we should be reading and writing more.

How can the culture of a country thrive if its poetry languishes? As Garett Field notes in his book “Modernising Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in 20th Century Sri Lanka”, the cultural revival we saw in the preceding century was supported by a plethora of lyricists who were able to preserve the literariness of their work while contributing to the country’s musical sphere. It was for this reason, Field observes, that Chandrarathna Manawasinghe was able to come up with a new poetic meter for his masterpiece, “Wali Thala Athare”, and that his “student” Mahagama Sekara contended in a 1966 lecture that “a test of a good song was to take away the music and see whether the lyric could stand on its own as a piece of literature.” (This quirk, which we are used to in Sri Lanka, confounds Field so much that he admits the inadequacies of Western ethnomusicology when it comes to the Sinhala lyric.)

Ultimately, in a country and a region which has historically privileged the fusion of words and rhythms (regardless of how sophisticated or not our ancestors were, they were able to musicalise what they read in ways which baffle scholars today), the first step towards the flourishing of a cultural sphere is the dissemination of our poetry, and lyrics, among our students. This is not an easy task, but it is a task which we must engage in. After all, we’re talking about generation after generation who grow up indifferent to history (which, during the social studies experiment of the Sirimavo Bandaranaike regime and even the dates-driven approach of the curriculum prior to it, was taught rather well). We’re talking about an entire generation neglecting the need for the lyric, in favour of technology. The allure of the guitar and the boy band is too strong to be overcome. If ever they venerate the bands of the past – the Moonstones, the Super Golden Chimes, right down to the Gypsies and Marians and the Jayasri Brothers – we forget that these groups, superficially appealing to juvenile, adolescent tastes, nevertheless had members who did not neglect the lyric. Such a generation, growing up in indifference, can only be salvaged by our generation.

And it doesn’t end with poetry, by the way. We all write poetry, especially Sinhala and Tamil poetry, when we are young. It’s when we grow up that our tastes “part ways” and compel us to follow one path at the cost of all other paths. It’s the same story when it comes to other cultural spheres, be it drama or literature or painting. Many of those teenagers I talk to who like drama, for instance, tend to be interested in the movies. Hardly remarkable, until you consider that the film industry in Sri Lanka has almost always depended on the theatre for its reserves of not only actors, but also scriptwriters. (If ever there was an actor here, a proper one, who did not hail from the theatre, I am yet to hear of him or her.) And of course, until you consider that acting today has been confined to models and dilettantes who lack the seriousness, the controlled grace, of the actors I admire: from the very recent past, Uddika Premaratne, Saranga Disasekara, and the newest face of them all, Thumindu Dodantanne.

Hiruna isn’t alone, as I mentioned before. There are others. Many others. All of whom profess an interest in various other spheres, the movies included, with an interest in being active participants in those spheres. Hiruna, by nature introspective, prefers the path of the poet. Those others prefer the path of the director, the scriptwriter, and the discerning actor. To be all these things, it is necessary to be a discerning human being. Are our institutions, of learning and power, enough to channel their innate sensibilities and respond positively to what they want to become? I certainly hope so. Until that transpires, though, I can only hope and continue being friends and talking with them.

Malinda Seneviratne: Three poems and a life

July 13, 2020 by shamilka

Malinda Seneviratne, Uditha Devapriya

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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I encountered Victor Ratnayake in Nugegoda

June 28, 2020 by shamilka

Uditha Devapriya, Victor Ratnayake

For Iraj and for Victor. For you and for me.

Three years ago, when I was happily unemployed, I was a joyful drifter, aimlessly wandering here and there. I had some money of my own (freelancing does pay, though it doesn’t pay much), enough for me to roam around and look for ways of earning some more. I remember the month. December. I remember the day. Tuesday. And I remember the appointment. A conversation with Malinda Seneviratne, at his office in Maradana. I was late, though: I needed to get a gift for someone who was to celebrate his birthday soon. Leaving Malinda, I got on the 176 bus to Nugegoda, left Maradana, and waited for my ride to end. It was about 10 in the morning.

The 176, like the 155, is one of those bus routes in this country which seem longer than they actually are. It’s also one of those buses in which the act of sitting, curiously enough, is as taxing as the act of standing. (The Rajagiriya flyover bridge, then as now, was not complete, so the strenuous and demanding ride was made even strenuous and demanding.) One journey is enough; two journeys are too much; and three, if one is to make through them, are so terrible that the only refreshing fact about the end of the third is the hope that one never wades through a fourth. This was the first time, in a long time, I had been on the 176. When I got down near the Nugegoda Station, I was hit with so much silence that I wondered where I was.

We happy unemployed drifters have a prerogative you unhappy workaholics do not: that of experiencing and encountering a neighbourhood, a community, even an entire city when it’s least busy outside, when the yuppies are at their offices and the only people walking on the road are drifters, children, housewives, and beggars. Station Lane, which is where the 176 I was in stopped, opened to one such city. Apart from a few shops and a few lottery ticket booths, the entire area from the lane to the station was empty. The perfect getaway for the happy drifter, I thought to myself.

And then, as I was revelling in the fact that I was unemployed and still studying for my law degree, the fact that being alive meant being free of any responsibility towards seniors and co-workers, the loudspeakers along Station Lane blared. At that time of day my ears are accustomed to hearing Sangeeth Wijesuriya (because drifters like me love Sangeeth: he has a voice which reminds you of greasy garages and sweaty palms in the hottest afternoons and the most humid evenings, a voice which has gone by unrecognised, even by those who enjoy it). This time around, however, it was a different vocalist. Victor Ratnayake. And a different song. “Paawe Wala”. When that different song and that different vocalist blared out of those loudspeakers, the ticket-booth owners and the drifters and the women, in a scene that would have made Robert Wise proud (perhaps I’m being too optimistic here, but still) sang along.

Victor Ratnayake has that supreme ability of enflaming you, no matter where you are, with his voice. He is the opposite of Amaradeva in that sense, because Amaradeva is didactic even in his most light-hearted songs, while Victor is only didactic off the air, when he’s speaking to people like you and me; on air, he’s a romantic. “Paawe Wala”, however, was not written for him; it was written for Mervyn Perera, whose voice was closer to Victor’s than anyone else’s. The last SA Prasangaya, which I attended two years before despite a fit of depressive anger, unveiled with him remembering the man who graciously conceded that song. “I am a Buddhist, he was a Christian. I wish that he attains the supreme bliss of Nibbana,” he told us after he performed it. If I can’t think of another vocalist who can inspire so much in us that we forget our worries and sing about love in the middle of the road and during the middle of the day without realising how self-consciously young we become, it’s because there isn’t one.

Even at this stage in his life and career, the man reminds you of how young you once were. This has as much to do with his voice as it does with the two lyricists he has resorted to the most frequently: Premakeerthi de Alwis and Sunil Ariyaratne, both of whom wrote copiously on love. He doesn’t really care what “styles” he goes for: jana gee or Karnatic, slow or fast paced, his compositions reverberate with the kind of liveliness which his performances do. “He made me dance through ‘Kundumani’,” Malinda wrote of Premakeerthi. That sense of immediacy comes through the composition, that honest-to-ethnic-origin melody, as well. What Victor’s work leaves behind, for you to savour, is neither aggressive nor didactic, but it isn’t completely romantic either. It’s a different form of romanticism: rather conservative, never completely free. Almost as though he’s afraid of reminding us of our youth. As though we’ll go mad, and depressed, if we are reminded of it in the first place.

Some of his best songs transcend that conservative streak and yield to our deepest impulses. That’s where Victor is at his loveliest, I’d like to think. “Sanda Hiru Tharu” has him sing about the collective, secular, extraordinary joy of samsaric living; “Sara Sonduru” has him and Nanda Malini explore the poignancy of winning and then losing a first love; “Mihiren Ma Dinu” has him reflect on the first impressions of passing beauty, faintly registered, never rationalised. The latter two, incidentally, were composed by Premasiri Khemadasa; Victor never sang Khemadasa’s compositions in the SA Prasangaya, nor did he record them again. He has his reasons, but listening to them today makes one wish that he revisited them. They are some of the most innocently lovely works I have come across in our sarala gee tradition. And not for no reason: if a lesser vocalist had sung them, they would have lost that delicate welter of innocence and set off lewd speculations about who was singing about whom.

It has been said of Elvis and Hendrix that young women wanted to love them and young men wanted to be like them. If I sound blasphemous there, rest assured I didn’t say it: Professor Carlo Fonseka did, five years ago around the time of the last SA. Now Professor Fonseka has a habit of comparing the artist to the most primitive sample of our species. He did that with Malini Fonseka, he did that with Victor Ratnayake. To him, the singer and the actor is first and foremost a man or a woman.

“It is reasonable to suppose that a tribe strongly bonded together by music will have the edge in the struggle for existence over a less musical tribe,” he wrote. Had I written it, with my deplorable understanding of both music and biology, I would have been put down as a heretic. Such heretical thoughts belong to those who have specialised in the fields which produce them. In that sense the Professor is right. Victor Ratnayake is (almost) everything that Elvis and Hendrix were. But that’s not his real achievement. His real achievement has been his ability to be an Elvis, a Hendrix, a Robert Plant, within the confines of our closely knit, repressive, and traditionalist society. Perhaps that’s why he’s so rousingly didactic outside, and so rousingly romantic inside. We all operate on such a dichotomy, after all.

And perhaps that’s why we love him so much, yet still feel uneasy about loving and giving into what we think he stands for (which, incidentally, happens to be what he DOES stand for). We are afraid of expressing our love, forgetting all the while that what we misconceive as love wasn’t what most of our ancestors thought it to be. The at times wildly divergent reactions the man gleaned from us, his single biggest audience, last year and this year, indicates that he is what he sings, and not what he says. Outside he can rabble about the importance of staying true to the past while the contemporary singer bemoans it, but the truth is that he makes us fall in love with our younger selves in far greater ways than that contemporary singer. So when that singer tries to get even with the man in the most imaginative way he THINKS is possible, he is both at the peak of his popularity and at the receiving end of the most intense vitriol he can inspire. He has defiled the deified. Done what he should not have done.

Cary Grant, the most romantic of all romantic screen personalities the world ever knew, once said that even he wanted to be Cary Grant. It took a great many decades for him to become himself. Men were afraid of him and wanted to emulate him; they could never be him. Victor Ratnayake has always been like that. He inspires both infatuation and confusion, on our part and on his own terms. He speaks for what went by, yet sings of what is. He is caught in the past, yet transfixed on the present. It’s tough to come up with another vocalist, another artiste, who thrives and flourishes on such a strange, oxymoronic combination of reverence and daring. People can go on hoping that they are less like him when it comes to being young, being themselves. At the end of the day, however, when they discover that he is, in fact, more of what they want to be, and much more of what they will never be, they will parody him using all sorts of ways: the media, the blogosphere, YouTube. They will fail, not because they haven’t tried, but because in emulating and parodying him, they are emulating and parodying that strange mixture of nostalgia and youth he lives on. The truth is that he’s both nostalgia and youth. The truth is that no parodist is going to change that.

Written for: Daily Mirror, October 24 2017

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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A melody for a milieu: From Hubert to Clarence

June 14, 2020 by shamilka

Uditha Devapriya

As an art form, as a means of self-expression and articulation, music is largely self-referential. It has nothing outside itself: the standards and the yardsticks created for it, by various exogenous factors, are subsumed, sometimes eventually, almost always at once. This is why of all the art forms we are acquainted with now, music is the least easy, and the most difficult, to propagandise. The moving image and the live theatre thrive on the mediation of two levels of consciousness: that of the performer and that of the spectator. As such it’s easy and despicably so to elevate those levels of consciousness by resorting to a message, whether that act of elevation debases rather than elevates the art itself being a topic for another debate. Music, in any case, is purely a product of its milieu, the milieu that manufactures and then consumes it. The act of consumption, in other words, is no different to the act of production: there can be no mediation between the two, only a levelling down of any and every barrier.

Part of the reason for this, of course, is the comparatively frugal economic base that can sustain a song or for that matter an orchestral performance. The movies will always remain the most industrial of all art forms, reliant on technology in ways that no other art form can hope to match, but the advent of digitalisation and web helped liberate music from the opera house and the concert hall in much the same way that the blogosphere and YouTube helped disseminate criticism and the moving image. And yet, even before this advent of digitalisation, the frugality entailed in enjoying a song was very much apparent, because the act of consumption does not involve an explicit cost (especially if you are listening to a song with the rest of the country, over the radio) and because it reaches its audiences quickly. This is the same with respect to operas and symphonies, which have frequently been played over the radio as well. The dichotomy between production and consumption that you come across in the cinema, television, and of course literature is simply not there in the realm of music.

And because such a dichotomy does not exist, the milieu to which the producer – the vocalist, the lyricist, and the composer – belongs is roughly also the milieu to which the audience, despite any personal quirks individual members may have, belongs as well. The 20th and 21st centuries, with its differentiation between production houses and opera houses, with its democratisation of an entire art, helped sharpen this unique quality, which is how in Sri Lanka you can trace the evolution from the high-flown, high-strung rhetoric of the old composers – who derived their inspiration from the Parsee theatre and a mishmash of Hela Sinhala and several Indian languages, in their songs and musical pieces – to the Pop quality, low key to some, of Neville Fernando, Clarence Wijewardena, and closer to our time, Bathiya and Santhush and Sanuka Wickramasinghe. It is this latter pop sensibility that I wish to explore in some detail here, because in their milieu we see an interesting phenomenon being played out.

The transformation of our cultural sphere, from a largely esoteric affair reserved for the colonial elite to the more plebeian catalogue of art forms (cinema, theatre, literature, etc) after 1956, and the revolution it wrought, went hand in hand with an explicit need to liberate those art forms from the straitjacket of verbal and visual profundities (which were really, at the end of the day, shallow and hollow) indulged by, inter alia, the plays of John de Silva and Sirisena Wimalaweera, the novels of Piyadasa Sirisena and W. A. de Silva, and the cinema of the Minerva Players. Kadawunu Poronduwa begins with a tableau which culminates with the death of the main character Ranjani’s (Rukmani Devi) father: this tableau, in which the individual characters are identified with reference to their race and social position, reflected the verbosities that our filmmakers, playwrights, and writers in general liked to go for. It is with W. D. Amaradeva that we see a much needed toning down of those verbosities, with his attempts at linking the literary with the romantic through his sarala gee canon.

In a retrospective review of Rekava and Maname, written for the Lanka Guardian in 1982, Regi Siriwardena, our foremost critic writing in English, contended that contrary to the belief held at the time, Sarachchandra’s plays (especially Maname) initially appealed, not to the poor, but to a class that had been left out (absented) by every government until then: the middle class Sinhala speaking bourgeoisie. This was not really a bourgeoisie, rather a petit bourgeoisie aspiring to be the bourgeoisie, who would patronise the moral exhortations, at times chauvinistic, at times explicitly archaic, echoed in not just Sarachchandra’s early plays but also the work of the Colombo Poets and the moralistic yet romantic films of L. S. Ramachandran (Deiyange Rate, Kurulubedda, Sikuru Tharuwa). Eventually this petit bourgeoisie, alluded to as a distinct social subset by Ajith Samaranayake in a tribute to Camillus Perera, congealed into a class who called the shots in our cultural spheres. Amaradeva was their icon, their manifest destiny.

Amaradeva was the peak and the grand culmination of a trend that began with Devar Surya Sena, whose attempts at compounding our traditional sivpada and pal kavi with the grandiosity of the opera and the Church service were criticised as imitative by Sarachchandra and warmly reflected on by Tissa Abeysekara (indicating the manifest differences of opinion Sena’s work compelled and continues to compel today). Those who laid the groundwork for the later masters – including Hubert Rajapakse, whose eloquent recitation of Danno Budunge, misconceived as a Buddhist song by our nationalists, would find its pivot decades later with Kishani Jayasinghe (only this time provoking, not infatuation, but hatred) – were not fully aware of what they were doing. They were enthralled by the cosmetics of the culture they had shirked during their childhoods – listen to Rajapakse and Sena today, their peculiar accents, their carefully calculated inflections, and discern how far away from the pal kavi they were – but what they lacked they made up for by their fervent devotion to that same culture.

From these two masters we come to Ananda Samarakoon and Sunil Shantha. Rajapakse and Sena were scions of the Anglican elite, who reflected a sensibility different to the more vernacular community from which the latter two hailed. Shantha in particular, who extensively resorted to the piano and organ (a staple of the Catholic Church) in his work (including his tribute to Munidasa, “Kumarathungunge”), did not have a polished voice that could reckon with the past masters, and neither did Samarakoon, but they were truly, deeply connected with the Buddhist ethos which they went to in some form or the other (Samarakoon converted to Buddhism, while Shantha, a fervent Catholic, in his later phase pared down his melodies to invoke the unmusical intonations of the Buddhist faith, particularly with “Po Da Daham Sihile”). The shift from the Anglican elite to the Catholic poor was essential at this juncture because it opened up a crevice that would be filled, after 1956, by the baila and the calypso singer: from Neville Fernando (“Gayana Gayum”) to Paul Fernando (“Golu Hadawatha Vivara Karanna”). Amaradeva was a product of all these.

At the heart of the baila and calypso that preceded Amaradeva was a contradiction, particularly with the two foremost second generation singers, M. S. Fernando and Anton Jones. Their lyrics, which are for the most devoted to their own workings and rhythms and nonsensical shades of meaning, articulate a dichotomy between a life of luxury and ease and enjoyment and the lack of any money or financial security which was needed to maintain such a life. In many of these second generation baila songs – “Manike Mama Aye Gedara Enawa” and “Mama Enne Dubai Rate Indala” by M. S., “Mini Gavuma” and “Kanthoruwa” by Anton – this self-contradiction is very much pervasive, and it accounted for their tepid reception by the public, particularly the middle class (who didn’t want to reminded, as Fernando and Jones did, that the lives they hankered after were cut off from their economic realities). The transition from them to Clarence Wijewardena was, hence, significant and to an extent inevitable.

Clarence pandered to the milieu which, while shirking the proletarian (if one can use that term) and self-indulgent ethic of the second generation baila vocalists, enthralled the milieu which produced them (the petit bourgeoisie, the middle class, the thuppahi) by bringing about a fusion between their low key sensibilities and the sensibility that thrived on a more literary, witty, and meaningful conception of music. For it to work, and for it to ensnare the consumerist, hedonistic middle class (Buddhist or Catholic, located predominantly in the metropolis), however, the songs that Clarence put out had to subsist on a class rift between the householder and the servant. It is this rift, which you come across in “Mango Kalu Nande” and “Mame Ape Kalu Mame”, which earned Clarence, the Moonstones, and the Super Golden Chimes their place in the sun. They were poking fun at a way of life they had got out of, a way of life Anton Jones celebrated, a way of life they attributed to their helpers, their maids, their aayas.

In the end, therefore, by parodying them, he parodied the men and women we wanted to be. This curious paradox – between our affections for and repudiation of them – became its own standard, its own yardstick. And our own standard, our own yardstick.

Written for: Daily Mirror, December 28 2017

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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Some notes on the popular (music) culture

May 24, 2020 by shamilka

Nadeemal Perera, Ridma Weerawardena, Sanuka Wickramasinghe, Uditha Devapriya

The young of today are caught up, I think, in a curious contradiction. They want to rebel, to let the world know they are not satisfied, but they also want to hide behind a certain welter of security. Their heroes are the singers and the actors who adorn the recent popular culture: heroes shirked as outsiders, who indulge in the cosmetics of rebellion with the privilege of returning to a more secure life once their rebelliousness is done away with. The urban youth, in particular, are transfixed by this fusion of opposites – security and rebellion – and they shape their preferences in the arts based on their preference for that fusion. (They want to have the cake and eat it too, in other words.) A long way from home, but still near that home, the young are confused. Not that they need a guide. But they seem to be lost. And they seem to revel in the fact that they are.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the art form that appeals to these youngsters and teenagers the most is music, because music, with or without accompanying visuals, is the one art form that depends for its endurance on the doing away of a barrier between the artist and his or her audience. The tastes of the latter are at the outset the tastes of the former; there’s no effort made at mediating the consciousness of either group to equalise it to that of the other. For that reason, the milieu that the artist – in real life or in his work – belongs to happens to be the same milieu that his or her fan base comes from, and moreover revels in. Those who vouch for, and adore, Sanuka Wickramasinghe and Nadeemal Perera and Ridma Weerawardena don’t take to Chamara Weerasinghe, for instance, because Chamara isn’t “sophisticated” enough for their elegant, urbane tastes.

Sanuka and Nadeemal and, to a certain extent, Ridma are exponents of a specific variety of Sinhala music. It’s the sort that thrives on youth and sophistication: the careful inflections, the precise accents, necessitate a balancing act between the urbaneness of their fan base and the Sri Lankan-ness of their other listeners. Largely secular, cosmopolitan, and cut off from the wellsprings of our traditional art forms, their most ardent fans affirm a musical idiom that is closer to the city. And because the city flourishes through a contrapuntal mixture of rebellion and conformity, these three vocalists appeal, not to adolescent dreams, but to the rift between those dreams and the lives that the adolescents in the city have to put up with. One night stands, romances that never take off, first romances: these experiences can be articulated only by those who have the luxury of an alternative life, and this life Sanuka and Nadeemal celebrate.

For some reason, beat bands are, in Sri Lanka, considered populist. With a few exceptions, such bands have been associated with cheap, easy music, having very little instrumentation and virtually no acoustics. Even the vocalists who opt to sing with these bands are judged harshly and put down. Such an attitude, of judging them on how sophisticated their voices are, betrays a set of insidious class prejudices: you don’t like Chamara because he isn’t “cool” enough, because he isn’t equipped with the symbols of chic sophistication (the slick, combed hair; the alienating, imposing sunglasses; the casual, reluctant smile) that Bathiya, Santhush, and Sanuka project. With his idiosyncratic and sun-baked face, Chamara is a hero to the downtrodden and the dispossessed, who listen to him while travelling in the bus and who don’t have the money to repair their own broken radios (and lives) back home. Musically, those who dote on Sanuka et al are sophisticated, or at least THINK they’re sophisticated (when they are not).

The same can be said of Saman Lenin, whose popularity is, however, different to Chamara’s just as Chamara’s popularity is different to Sanuka’s. The music that Lenin affirms is the music of the past, which comes up from the wellsprings of the Sinhala language, i.e. the rural and spoken variant. Chamara Weerasinghe is not a purist like this: he is willing and he has made compromises over the years to win at least a section of the pop audience that Sanuka has monopolised, even those who don’t usually take to beat bands that easily. Lenin doesn’t really make compromises like that. He has been singing of the village and he returns to the village in song after song; music videos are at best expendable to him, and if he will resort to it, it will be the type of video we see every day on television (which focuses on the vocalist, and spares little time for the unfolding of a narrative).

Broadly, there are two types of people who don’t take to Chamara and Lenin: One, the sophisticated, or as I prefer to call them, the “chichi” crowd (who believe they’re “posh” or if not have girlfriends and boyfriends who want them to be “posh”), and two, those who appreciate music in general but have been conditioned to prefer individual vocalists to beat bands. In this conflict, we come across a segmentation of the popular culture, a segmentation that has always been there and has itself helped segment art forms which were thought to belong to a specific group. Perhaps a recounting of the evolution of baila might help us.

Baila began with the Kaffirs, i.e. their dialects and dances. It found its 20th century indigenous proponent with Wally Bastian, right before we attained independence (in the forties). From Bastian and his successor, Desmond Kelly, we come to M. S. Fernando and Anton Jones, both of whom appealed to a different milieu: more vernacular, more home-grown, they were despised by the upper and middle classes, who shirked them and pandered to the likes of Clarence and The Moonstones and Calypso. From Fernando and Jones, we come to Dalreen and Desmond Fernando and Mariazelle Goonetilake, who more or less returned to the classist exuberance that Bastian and Kelly had revelled in. Like Clarence, they thrived on a separation of the householder from the servant (a separation which M. S. and Anton refused to make or continue, since they sang almost completely about the hard done by petty bourgeoisie, along with the urban proletariat), and from them, we come to Paul Fernando, Christopher Paul, and Punsiri Soyza, all three of whom hailed from Moratuwa and all three of whom took baila to the milieu that M. S. and Anton had celebrated before.

My point here is that, while there can be no divorce between a musical form and a milieu, such forms have tended over the decades to be segmented, sometimes even within the same genre, between different milieus. There’s always a state of flux, in other words, a given since no art form can remain static and impervious to change from the outside for long. This can, I believe, be applied to what’s unfolding in today’s popular culture, as an extension of what we’ve seen in the last few decades as well as a new, fresh sort of segmentation between certain compartmentalised class bound sensibilities, this time between the urbane and sophisticated on the one hand and the ruralised and rooted on the other.

Perhaps it’s pertinent to note that even a vocalist like the late (and forever unequalled) W. D. Amaradeva evoked different responses from different audiences. Amaradeva’s early period, as some have observed, comprised of compositions and songs which tried to keep up with the experiments that Sunil Shantha was conducting. His second period, after his return from Bhathkande and before he fused the raghadari tradition with the Sinhala quatrain, saw him dabble in calypso and baila: these songs (“Atha Gaw Ganan Durin” and “Pipi Pipi” being two of them, the former written by Mahagama Sekara) are the songs we have that remind us that the man came from a coastal environment, which reacted, not to the profundity of Sinhala poetry, but the saltiness of a genre that brought their community together, in dance and drink.

In abandoning this phase for the phase in which he gave out “Kumariyaka Pa Salamba Saluna” and “Ma Mala Pasu” and so on, Amaradeva, I think, was inadvertently appealing to the same milieu which had helped prop up the cultural revolution of 1956: not the peasantry, who reacted with mixed feelings to the (supposedly) Sinhalised movies of Lester James Peries and ballets of Chitrasena, but the petty bourgeoisie. The children of this petty bourgeoisie grew up listening to Amaradeva on the one hand and Clarence on the other; it was a bifurcation of tastes within the same milieu which ignored if not marginalised the efforts of Lionel Ranwala, and Piyasiri Wijeratne (if you search for “Badde Pura” on YouTube, almost all the search results will make you think that it was sung by Amitha Wedisinghe only; Piyasiri is forgotten today because he was forgotten in his time), to take our music beyond the raag and Western melody.

Going by this, the grandchildren, of the children who were responsible for 1956, have evolved to appreciate Sanuka and Nadeemal and Ridma over Chamara and Saman Lenin because their tastes are somewhat genetic, conditioned at the outset by the environment they are in and the families they are born to. In one sense, I think such a separation, mostly hereditary, is to be welcomed, because it helps us understand the complex array of sensibilities which goes into the shaping of vocalists and musical forms. On the other hand, if we continue to make this an excuse for ignoring the musical Other, we will only be poorer. The true aesthete, I’ve always felt, sheds class-bound sensibilities. The tragedy is that we are not a nation of aesthetes. We are a nation of human beings. And we are flawed.

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 8 2018

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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For the love of today, or why the young take to Sanuka

May 9, 2020 by shamilka

Sanuka Wickramasinghe, Uditha Devapriya

When you listen to “Saragaye”, and watch the video online, you get enveloped in complete happiness. In some vague, indefinable, almost magical way, Sanuka Wickramasinghe has given a form to our collective experience of one night stands and crushes and unrequited romances. And yet the elders don’t like him: they lambast him over every little detail. Even the choice of title, for these puritans, is a gross misdemeanour (“Saragaye”, in case you were wondering, is the apotheosis of ragaya, or passion and lust) which may lead the young astray (as if the elders weren’t doing a despicably good job of that already!). I can’t understand how one music video, and a 24 year old vocalist with around three or four minor hits to his name, could bring about this heightening of an already terse conflict between the elders and their offspring, but there you have it: the former criticise him because he appeals so ineffably and directly to the latter.

Many of those I’ve met with, and interviewed or chatted with at length at some point, who are not elderly, see in “Saragaye” a facile novelty that barely transcends its limitations (more on those later) because of the vocalist himself, and the electronic percussive rhythms that we’ve not heard for quite some time. While the elders see in it the kind of music that can corrupt our youth, these people see in it a perpetuation of a form of music that does not thrive on words or a literary sensibility. Even the young, armed with their Sinhala Honours Degrees, offer an excuse for their mixed feelings towards the man: that despite the percussive rhythms and the daring monochrome visuals, “Saragaye” offers nothing by way of summing up the human condition through poetry.

This attitude of rabid scepticism, while not excusable, isn’t entirely without reason. As I pointed out in my article on Bathiya and Santhush some months back, and last year in my article on Ajantha Ranasinghe, in the Sinhala sarala gee a balance was always kept between the personal and the aesthetic. The narrator became, in the early days of the Amaradevas and Victor Ratnayakes, the embodiment of a collective experience, because that poetic tradition provided a multitude of metaphors and rhetorical devices through which that experience could be refined, formalised, aesthetised, and turned into a popular tune. This was true of Ranasinghe’s work, and even truer of, on the one hand, K. D. K. Dharmawardhana (whose best lyrics are laden with so much poetry that they are difficult to take in, in one go) and, on the other, Premakeerthi de Alwis (whose rich vocabulary he discarded in favour of a simple, almost verbal form of poetry). As the years went by, however, we missed out on the word, and substituted for it the glosses of technology.

Because technology, no matter how alluring it is, usually isn’t very interesting or enriching, the older generation fell out. There had been production houses in the seventies and eighties, but they had all been primitive in the way they were operated: if you got your recording wrong, you had to repeat, again and again. That sense of meticulousness gets lost in the blur of money-making processes, and the new production houses, owned by second generation artists and the offspring of the first generation artists – Ranga Dassanayake, Raj Seneviratne, Bathiya and Santhush – unleashed a New Wave. But that New Wave operated on a fatal rift, between technology on the one hand and the profit motive on the other. (Can they ever coexist?) They entranced the millennials, from my generation, and predictably alienated the old.

The only kind of novelty that attracted this generation, as the years went by, was the kind that thrived on technology, and technology, once it became intertwined with the melody in ways that had not been seen before, became a byword for peotry. Youngsters who respond to a song like “Saragaye”, the elders I know keep on telling me, aren’t responding to the words or even the meaning that those words evoke, but instead reflect on and allow themselves to be carried away by what lies on the surface. These elders point at Iraj, and even Bathiya and Santhush, and claim that they began this trend, forgetting that while technology clearly cannot, should not, and will not be a substitute for lyricism, we can’t avoid resorting to it either. The millennials went for this technology-induced music; they were what Pauline Kael referred to decades ago as “brutalists”, who were tired of the “sanctity” of the songs they were being forced to listen to.

After Bathiya and Santhush and Iraj, all three of whom spawned a generation of imitators who never transcended their imitativeness despite the superficiality and the facileness of their work, we come to Sanuka Wickramasinghe. Sanuka represents a different kind of facile novelty, not just in terms of the electronic percussiveness and the rhythms of his music, but the themes he goes for in song after song. When you read (into) the answers he has given to those questions asked by interviewers in those countless gossip websites, you are enthralled by the simplicity and naiveté of the way he sees the world. (He’s still a schoolboy, even in the way he croons.) If his songs – and there haven’t been many of them since he started out in 2011 – reflect a vibrant youthfulness, it’s because he’s young and very much so. (One year my senior, to be specific.) Sanuka has gone beyond those earlier imitators before him in taking the young beyond technology, but if he has failed at least a little in this venture, it’s because the old, having responded to this endeavour of his warmly, are instantly repelled by what he thematises in his works: in the case of “Saragaye”, a one night stand and the temporariness of uncommitted love.

About a year after he released “Saragaye”, Sanuka released “Perawadanak”, which was manifestly different, especially in terms of the themes it tackled. If “Saragaye” belonged to a young demographic that hailed from an urbane, chic, and school-going milieu, “Perawadanak”, with its vignette of an unfulfilled love, appealed to a considerably elderly population. A schoolboy I know once asked Sanuka why, and his reply was that this shift in the targeted audience was an effort to get his songs beyond the youth; it was an attempt at pleasing the elders who shirked him. (“Saragaye” was about giving into passion; “Perawadanak was about the catharsis of a broken romance.) Did it work? I should think so: many of the elders I know, and talk with, while disdainful of “Saragaye”, reacted less coldly to “Perawadanak.” That Sanuka has not done a song since then speaks volumes, I believe, about the fact that he released it just a year after his first big hit just so to get out his themes to a wider public, since in Sri Lanka, the young, while comprising 25% of the total population, are just not enough for someone of his calibre to reach stardom.

These two songs, I think, reflect the kind of songs we’ve been missing out for almost a decade. They are not perfect in any conceivable sense – which begs the question, why should we demand perfection in any art form? – and they do leave the purists, the elders, and those who look for “profound poetry” in the dark. But the indictment that there is no meaning in “Saragaye”, that the lyrics lack the requisite complexity for us to elevate it to the status of ART, are, I firmly believe, lopsided at best and wildly inaccurate at worst. “Saragaye”, for instance, opens with these mystical, almost otherworldly, and deliberately fragmented lines:

නිය රටා
මවනවා
අපතරේ වූ කතා
රැය පුරා
උණුහුමේ
මල් පෙති තලා

It’s fragmentary for the simple reason that the love story being described here has no proper structure, or for that matter order: unlike those conventional music videos you see everywhere here, there are no walls to be surmounted or for that matter no lovers bemoaning failed romances. The narrator of “Saragaye” has no standalone voice either, because Sanuka is not the protagonist of his video; he’s observing from the sidelines, reflecting on what he perceives. The fragmented lyrics add depth to this already lopsided romance, and in the end, we don’t really understand what the hero or protagonist sees in the woman.

Those who argue that contemporary music has become a mishmash are, while not wrong, aren’t entirely correct either. The most common excuse dished out is that the young don’t look out for complexity in the lyrics, that they are entranced by the allure of the surface – in other words, technology – so much that they don’t bother reading into the work. Nothing could be further from the truth. In deceiving themselves about the young this way, the elders, or at least those who aren’t willing to compromise or give their offspring the benefit of the doubt, are forgetting that we are seeing a revival of sorts in our musical sphere. It’s the kind of pop revival Europe underwent in the seventies, with the rise of ABBA and Brotherhood of Man and Lulu, all three of whom won at the Eurovision Song Contest for tunes we remember and treasure and hum for their innocence and simplicity, despite the fact that, yes, the elders of that time derided them.

The elders have spoken. So have the young. We can choose a side, or we can enjoy what’s on the radio. Perhaps we’d better switch on the radio. That’s what I’d do, since that’s the only real option we have.

Written for: Daily Mirror, April 12 2018

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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From art to kitsch, and between jana and janapriya

May 2, 2020 by shamilka

clarence wijewardena, Uditha Devapriya

In his landmark essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, Clement Greenberg discusses the evolution of art in terms of its separation into two broad cultures: the highbrow and the popular. The progression or regression (depending on how you see it) from the one to the other was facilitated by the transition from feudalism, with its repressive structures enabling a separation of art from the masses, to industrial capitalism, through which universal literacy was achieved to such an extent that those masses, until then deprived of participation in a society’s cultural sphere, became the shapers and makers of art forms (in particular, literature and music). Greenberg, who was a painter and an art critic himself, contends that this transition occurs owing to the tendency of a society to unravel itself once the religious, cultural, and various other morals and absolutes on which it is based begin to be questioned rather critically. By this, “one and the same civilisation produces simultaneously two such different things” – the high and the low.

While the essay has been discredited since, and scholars have pointed out certain inconsistencies therein, I am interested in some of Greenberg’s ideas because they pinpoint the bifurcation of aesthetics which we, in Sri Lanka, have been witnessing. The evolution of art, for Greenberg that is, follows two broad routes: from art (the academic, scholarly, upper class type, based on refined, sophisticated tastes) to avant-garde (the bohemian type, which separates art from the necessity of patrons and financiers) to its rear-guard, referred to as “kitsch” (a German word connoting the seamless fusion of commerce and art in modern, urban, industrial societies). Art and kitsch, highbrow and lowbrow, refined and vulgar: these are the terms we use to differentiate between these two aesthetic sensibilities, to an extent in Sri Lanka too. How can we apply Greenberg’s contentions, minus their flaws, to what transpired in this country, then? By considering the way the transition from the highbrow to the popular corresponded to the evolution of the kind of audience which, in here or elsewhere, pandered to these cultural forms.

Perhaps what needs to be borne in mind before examining the applicability of this cultural phenomenon to Sri Lanka is that in Sri Lanka, there was, historically, no real bohemian culture. Bohemians were wanderers, vagrants, uncommitted rebels, who simultaneously distanced themselves from and attached themselves to the bourgeois lifestyles they vowed to get away from. In here though, the separation was between the coloniser and his subjects, namely, the vast majority of the countrymen. For the latter, art was neither highbrow nor kitsch; it was purely a means of communicating within themselves. Even the Gal Viharaya at Polonnaruwa, as Regi Siriwardena pointed out, was built with a utilitarian objective, since worship was as vital to the people of those days as going to a job is to us today. While art did exist, very little of it was consumed as objects of refinement to be studied from afar; there was, in other words, no proper extrinsic value to the artefacts we hold up and admire in museums today, only an intrinsic plasticity. With the advent of archaeology and restoration, traditional art forms became something to preserve. The champions of this mode of thinking were the born-again natives from the Anglican elite, like Devar Surya Sena.

Greenberg traces the aesthetic route from art to avant-garde, and at the hands of the bohemians, avant-garde reaches its peak. It follows that if there was no real bohemian culture in Sri Lanka, there was no intermediate stage between art and kitsch, or between the highbrow and the popular. In the Bengali Renaissance, particularly the novels of Bankim Chatterjee, we see the fusion of the West and East, which unearths a culture that can be at least vaguely referred to as avant-garde. Greenberg’s thesis is that such a culture thrives on a self-referential sensibility. According to him, the avant-garde artists “derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in”, which means that what is central to the work of, say, a Chatterjee novel or a Picasso painting is its preoccupation with its forms and techniques: it returns to its own workings and externalises those workings in every line and contour. If these indeed were the hallmarks of the bohemian sensibility, we cannot claim that we reached that intermediate stage.

The transition from art to avant-garde is really the transition of one order to another. But the transition from avant-garde to kitsch is a reflection of changing landscapes and industrialisation. Colonial societies did not escape this wave of industrialisation, though they were asked to pay the price for European progress by handing over their resources at dirt cheap prices. Sarlis, the painter who depicted moments and excerpts from the lives of the Buddhas, was Sri Lanka’s equivalent of Ravi Varma: the painters of spirituality on carpets and temple walls and tapestries, through whom the faith of the majority became intertwined with the walls of their houses. This is the fusion at the heart of kitsch, and in such a fusion we come across (as Tissa Abeysekara noted in an essay) a pseudo-renaissance. But for the kitsch culture in Sri Lanka to unfold itself properly, it had to wait until three distinct epochs had passed: 1931, 1948, and 1956.

Art and avant-garde turn to kitsch the moment the masses, the majority, are empowered to be the shapers and makers of the culture of their society. Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution, even in societies which experience that revolution second hand and (as with us) have never gone beyond the landowning aristocracy that the coloniser selected, tutored, and in effect bred. Emancipation, in a metaphoric sense, was what the masses demanded, from the shackles of colonialism or at least the culture of illiteracy colonialism necessitated in their societies. In the West, industrialisation was followed by the establishment of what was called universal literacy. In Sri Lanka and India, literacy, though hardly obtainable (as Will Durrant has written, the British India Government spent eight cents per head per year on education at a time when they were spending 83 on the army), congealed into demands for the franchise, which we got in 1931. If literacy was the prerequisite for kitsch in the West, it was the prerequisite for freedom in our societies. But the franchise in itself was not enough: what was needed was independence (in 1948) and a complete if not partial moving away from the policies of the British Government (in 1956).

The majority needed to be assimilated to the societies had been estranged from, but the minute they aspired to be the shapers of their collective destinies, a fatal rupture resulted between two forms of culture: the formal and the folk. This process was necessitated more or less by the rural-urban exodus which the franchise, independence, and the historical eventuality compelled by 1956, free education, resulted in. As Greenberg notes, “the peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency.” But the formal culture they aspired to reach required tremendous reserves of leisure and privilege. The peasants simply could not afford that kind of leisure. Having been assimilated to the city, they could not return to the village either, because they had forsaken on their earlier way of life. As such, the “new urban masses” set up a pressure on the societies they were moved to, to provide them with a catalogue of art forms which they could enjoy. Subsequently it was this petty bourgeoisie which enabled the opening up of our art forms to outside (mainly Indian and Western) influences. On one hand, they enjoyed Sunil Shantha, Amaradeva, and Victor Ratnayake. On the other hand, they enjoyed baila, Rukmani Devi, and Clarence Wijewardena.

The fatal rupture – between folk and formal – caused by this social phenomenon was an inevitable consequence of the social mobility resulting from universal literacy (in the form of free education). Moreover, between Amaradeva and Clarence there was and is, to a certain extent, a separation, which while not unbridgeable remains, by default, distinct from one another. If we are to follow Greenberg and impute terms to these two streams of one sensibility, then we have to demarcate them as “jana” (highbrow) and “janapriya” (lowbrow). In both instances what was wiped out, or belittled, was the indigenous culture; the same culture which survives today, though barely, through the joint efforts of Sahan Ranwala and the Ranwala Balakaya as well as its followers and students (some of whom, like Chanuka Moragoda, have graduated to the janapriya sensibility through YouTube and other channels in social media). Obviously, one essay isn’t enough to dwell on the problems that this particular rupture has caused within our cultural firmament. Examining a problem presupposes a succinct explication of that problem. Before examining it, therefore, I will lay it down as follows. The fact is that while the janapriya culture has evolved, and continues to evolve today, from baila on your radio to Sanuka Wickramasinghe on YouTube, the jana culture, which includes among its vast canon Amaradeva and Premasiri Khemadasa, has stalled somewhere. Now that I’ve laid down the problem, I’ll examine it next week. For now however, I’m done.

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 17 2018

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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The story of a song, an uncle, and a niece

April 29, 2020 by shamilka

Nirasha Perera, Uditha Devapriya, Victor Silva

There are songs that remain etched in our minds long after we listen to them and long, long after we forget the first time we came across them. They bring to mind certain experiences that we like to forget but for some inscrutable reason don’t want to forget. Like schooldays. First crushes. Unfulfilled romances. Friendships that sour into enmities. And so on. Either way, for better or worse, the words we hum and the tunes we strum stay with us for the simple reason that such songs, the best of them at least, were meant to be retained in the repository of our collective imagination. In other words, they were initially conceived to be as unprofessional and simple as possible. They lend flavour to experience and help us associate a particular memory, bitter or jovial, with a certain time and place.

Just as there are stories behind the first times we hear such tunes, however, there are also stories behind the how, when, and wherefore of those tunes, those who ideated and came up with the melody, those who wrote down the lyrics, and those who lent their voices. Out of 100-odd songs, I’m willing to wager that not even 30 can boast of such worthy prefaces. But those 30 sadly tend to be overlooked, because we aren’t really bothered about their foreword. Who’d have thought, for instance, that Ajantha Ranasinghe wrote “Tharu Arundathi” after coming across a girl across the street that he never dared to introduce himself to?

This is the story of one such song. Before I get to it, though, I need to get to the names of those involved in it. Two names. Victor Silva and Nirasha Perera.

Few would know of Victor and Nirasha and fewer would know that they were the two vocalists behind the song they ended up singing, right before it was appropriated, unjustly I should think, by other more established vocalists. Indeed, outside their immediate circle not many would believe that they were destined to become professionals in the field, right before the professions they’d carved for themselves through their education got them out of that field.

Let’s start with Victor. Victor had a passion for singing. From an early age. But there was a problem. His father didn’t want him to sing. He wanted him to become a Chartered Accountant, back then (as of now) a lucrative career. So during his early schoolboy days at Holy Cross College, Kalutara (his hometown), he didn’t pursue music despite the fact that he could perform quite well. Things changed, however, when he shifted to St Aloysius’ College in Galle and became a boarder. The priest in charge of the boarders was Father Debura, straight from Italy. He was also in charge of the Choir. Naturally, the Father tried the boarders out with their voices. Having heard Victor, he selected him then and there.

Victor obviously had a problem with his father and this he confided to the Reverend Father. The Reverend Father, thankfully, understood him well. “Don’t worry, tell him to see me,” he confidently told the young man, and the next time the parents of the boarders came to meet the priests and the rectors who ran the school, Victor readily took his mother and father to meet Father Debura. The Father had only one question to ask: “Mr Silva, would you like your son to use his voice to sing the praises of God?” The question, craftily crafted, won Victor’s father over: “No Father. Let him sing!” Remembering this conversation decades later, for me, Victor had one thing to say: “By the grace of God, and also Father Debura, I didn’t let my voice waste away!” Subsequently, he was taken in.

In 1965, St Aloysius’ took in Anton Weerasinghe, a layman practising and learning to become a priest (what one called a Scholast). Weerasinghe was versatile, with an ability to play the tabla and guitar and also to compose. Victor, who took part in various dramas and sang for them as well, soon came under his tutelage, when Weerasinghe got him and a friend of his, Eric Gunaratne, to come up with an original song. Having hankered after a tune and a set of lyrics to fit that tune, the boys finally hit upon an original they could be happy with: “Suran Menika”. Weerasinghe heard it, smiled, and polished it in his own special way.

Time passed by rather quickly. Victor left school and moved to Colombo in 1967, having passed his exams well enough to contemplate on his higher education: as usual, in accountancy. Just as it was as looked up to as it is today, however, it was as tough as it is today, so he had to stay at a hostel to get his mind on his education. The hostel he stayed at, situated near Ananda Rajakaruna Mawatha in Borella (back then called Campbell Place), housed several students engaged in various subjects, from medicine to law to engineering to accountancy. Given that they were all boys, they indulged in the usual bajaw session with the guitar (which Victor had by then mastered, to a certain extent). Among those friends he encountered, there was Duleep de Silva, member of the then phenomenally popular Los Flamencos (remember “Bolanda Katha” and “Kalu Kelle”?) and like Victor an article clerk at a company. “What happened was this: one fine day, Duleep asked me to come up with a song. He wanted to get it recorded.”

Neither Duleep nor Victor could versify. But they had another friend, a medical student called Nihal de Silva. Whenever Victor strummed a tune, he would rush to Nihal and the two of them would brainstorm a set of lyrics to suit that tune. So having brainstormed over and over again with respect to the tune that came up at Duleep’s request, the two of them hit on an original. They titled it “Bale Bale”, a mock, tongue-in-cheek reference to the bales of used cloth material that were imported during the Sirimavo Bandaranaike regime (owing to the fact that imports were restricted on all fronts). To crown what they’d done, they then came up with two more songs: “Pasal Kaale”, a ditty on the evolution of schoolboys from students to lovers, and “Suneetha”, composed by Anton Weerasinghe, by now domiciled in Manila. Having heard all three with “Suran Menika”, Duleepa took Victor and Nihal to meet Gerald Wickremesooriya.

Gerald, who had started the Sooriya label, was thrilled. He got them to come to his residence, in Colpetty. Having gotten hold of another popular performer, Chandima de Alwis (band member of The Spitfires, a beat group), apparently now domiciled in Australia, they all went and met Gerald and ultimately persuaded him to record all four songs. The recording, Victor remembers, was done by Patrick Denipitiya, an Old Boy of St Aloysius’, and was completed by the end of 1970. The following year, at the height of the insurrection, the four of them would record four more songs at the Dalugama Studios, polishing up the recording from 6 pm to 6 am. “Back then, if you got one tune or word wrong, you had to start from scratch all over again!”

Several stints at the SLBC English Commercial Service aboard the Sooriya Show (hosted by Vijaya Corea, who introduced him as a “rising star”) later, Victor found himself returning to the career he’d left behind, in Accountancy, when (“by the grace of God”) he managed to pass his exams quite well. “My father was extremely happy. I had proved to him that I could sing and balance the books.” By 1972, he was working comfortably (“to my heart’s content”) at the Ceylon Tobacco Company. But before he abandoned singing, at least for a short while, he’d meet one person who’d figure in his life a few years later: Nimal Mendis.

This is where Nirasha comes in. Victor married Nirasha’s mother’s younger sister in 1973. When the two of them would meet at family parties, they’d almost always be selected to perform middle class baila and pop tunes like “Koheda Yanne Rukmani?”, which was first performed and popularised at Nirasha’s school (Holy Family Convent, Bambalapitiya) and was a rehashed version of the nursery rhyme “Where Are You Going My Pretty Maid?” Uncle and niece would meet each other for a more serious song, however, when in 1978 Nimal Mendis, composing the music for Sumitra Peries’s film Ganga Addara, requested him to perform a theme song. There was a catch though: he had to perform it with a small girl. “Obviously, Nirasha fitted the bill!” Victor heartily chortles.

Ganga Addara, as those who’ve seen the film and the later, rather crassly made television remake would know, popularised Vijaya Kumaratunga through the titular song (performed, though never with the same intensity and sense of conviction, by other young vocalists). But there’s another tune, slotted in at the beginning of the film while the opening credits are rolling on. Sumitra Peries and the film’s producers, the Sumathipala family (Milina Sumathipala), had taken in Maurice Dahanayake’s son, Channa, and one of the Sumathipala daughters, Shalini, to act as the juvenile versions of the two protagonists and lovers in the story, played as adults by Vasanthi Chathurani and Sanath Gunathilake. The opening credits sequence really has no bearing on the larger narrative, but was used as a means of portraying the young innocence of the love that turns our heroine, Nirmala (Vasanthi) insane and in the end forces her to commit suicide.

This opening tune was, as with Nimal Mendis’s other works, written in English, and while it didn’t make sense, it was not intended to be an overtly serious song either. The chorus, Victor and Nirasha remembers for me, ran on like this:

Tralalalala you…
Tralalalala me….
Tralalalala sing together…
Tralalalala we…

As for the second verse:

Swim like a fish…
Fly like a bird…
Be happy, little boy, little girl…
No time to feel sad…
My lass, my lad…
Love is a wonderful thing….

(Victor and Nirasha argue over the last line: the latter informs me that it was actually “Love is a magical word…” In any case, it doesn’t really matter.)

Nimal Mendis, as I mentioned before, wrote in English. To translate it into Sinhala, he got a Tamil gentleman from Panadura: Augustus Vinayagaratnam, who had already worked with Nimal for “Ganga Addara” (the titular song) and, earlier, “Upul Nuwan” (featured in Lester James Peries’s Ahasin Polawata, which also featured Vijaya and Vasanthi and which also was produced by the Sumathipalas). In the end, Augustus, rising up to the occasion, met the primary challenge this entailed: keep to the spirit of the original while communicating it to the vernacular audience. If “Tralalalala You” was meant to be so innocent, so jovial, that it was born (in one sense) to be sung as a carefree interlude, then Augustus delivered on the brief he was given. Nimal, obviously, was happy.

On the 31st of March, 1978, Nirasha and Victor went off to a studio near the Archbishop’s House (the Joe-Neth Studio) in Borella. They had met about twice or thrice, before, at Mendis’s residence, an annexe off Jawatta Road. At the time Nirasha would have been 12, Victor about 30. “Mind you, we hadn’t recorded a song like this before. Not even Uncle Victor!” Nirasha remembers, with a gleam in her eye.

And to top it all, the song they were recording had to be recorded with some schoolchildren from Sangamitta Balika Vidyalaya in Borella. “They would have all been primary schoolgirls, from Grade Four or Six. I was taken to one studio with Uncle Victor, and I put on an earphone. The other girls didn’t. What they sang, they had to sing with all the gusto they could bring out. It was really and truly a raw, unfiltered, unprofessional, and yes, innocent song. ‘Cherubic’ in the best sense of that word. In fact I don’t think it was meant to be recorded as a serious tune. None of us had voices which had been polished or refined. Nimal wanted that kind of tune, that kind of recording. But there was a problem. No matter how hard we tried, the girls couldn’t muster up the gusto he needed.”

At the studio there had been Mendis as the composer, Augustus as the lyricist, and Sarath Fernando as the orchestrator. All three of them tried to uplift the girls’ spirits, to no avail. “I remember Uncle Sarath making faces at them, trying to keep them amused. We obviously needed to make them feel the song they sang. So Nimal hit on a solution. He asked me to sing the first line of the first verse, and when it was sung again by the girls, to take a step back from the microphone and sing it with the rest of the girls. That way my voice would blend in with theirs and at the same time I wouldn’t stand out from them. I remember him telling Uncle Victor also to step away from the mike. It was a risk we all had to take. And at the end of the day, it was a risk that paid off. Handsomely.”

If took all of five or six takes for Nimal Mendis to get what he wanted, and the end result was to his liking. It was, as Nirasha so aptly puts it to me, a very unprofessional song, one that ran along and flowed along succinctly to the tenor of a group of children who probably weren’t aware of what they were doing. Incidentally Augustus’s lyrics reflected this, so well that they retain the rawness of Nimal’s composition. As for the song, well, here are some of the lyrics:

දෑතේ බැදිලා ඈතට දුවලා
නොපෙනී යනවද සුදු නංගී
ඉනිමං බැදලා ලස්සන හොයලා
ගමනක් යනවද සුදු මල්ලී

The name of the tune? “Ran Tikiri Sina.”

The story of “Ran Tikiri Sina” doesn’t end here though. The afterword it compels can be, in Nirasha’s and Victor’s own words, be summed up as follows: despite the producers and the composer, it was sadly and ultimately hijacked and, if I may use that term, appropriated by more established players who, ironically, missed out on one quality of the tune that the two original vocalists had not: the sense of innocence that no polished voice could convey or do justice to. “In hindsight I think it was erroneous on the part of these vocalists to choose ‘Ran Tikiri Sina.’ Not because we sang it originally, but because it wasn’t meant to be sung in a professional, suave way. It needed to retain a welter of joviality. That’s what Nimal Mendis got with the original recording, that’s what was never replicated elsewhere. Moreover, we had a saving grace in the form of the children who performed it with us. We had one reply to give audiences: ‘If the recording you hear doesn’t have a children’s ensemble, then it isn’t ours!’”

There was another saving grace. Hudson Samarasinghe, then at the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC), got hold of the story behind “Ran Tikiri Sina”. He thought for some days, paid a visit to the Sumathipalas, procured an original spool of the tune, returned to the SLBC, and got it recorded there. “As long as I’m in this division, I won’t let another version of this song be broadcast,” he is reported to have told Victor, who recounts this to me this rather happily. “Hudson saved us. We would have wasted away, particularly since we gave up our musical careers afterwards, if not for him.” More was to come, happily.

20 years after Ganga Addara was released, that is in 1999, the Sumathipalas held a felicitation ceremony involving everyone who had been a part of the film, from Sumitra Peries to Tissa Abeysekara (the scriptwriter) to Donald Karunaratne (the cameraman) to of course Nirasha and Victor. When the awards were duly handed over, to the two of them, and the acknowledgement read out in public, the journalists and media men and women present at the occasion were rather astonished. “For over a decade they had associated ‘Ran Tikiri Sina’ with another set of vocalists. They were astounded to realise that we were the original performers. Not long afterwards, we got requests for interviews, and we were thenceforth featured in several newspapers which carried such telling headlines as ‘Ran Tikiri Sina smiles again.” To top it all, Chandimal Fernando, who too had performed the tune, though not for commercial purposes, called the two of them to sing it with him onstage: “The first time we sang it onstage, to be honest.”

I met Victor Silva and Nirasha Perera at their residence in Rosmead Place the other day and I was happy, relieved almost, that 40 years have passed. 40 years, that is, since the recording of the song this article is about, specifically 40 years to March 31. A lot has happened. Some of it needn’t be recounted, others have been recounted. By me and by everyone else. In the meantime, all we can say, looking at these two gentle people and perusing the lyrics of the tune they hummed, is what someone once said of music in general: “It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything.”

I first heard “Ran Tikiri Sina” on air from the lips of other established singers. Watching Ganga Addara made me realise that such songs are appropriated by those who piggybank on the successes they encounter, whether at the hands of critics or of popular audiences. Victor and Nirasha have much to be happy about in that respect, I think. For now and forever. So thank you. For now and forever.

Written for: Daily Mirror, March 27 and 29 2018

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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