I encountered Victor Ratnayake in Nugegoda

I encountered Victor Ratnayake in Nugegoda

November 27, 2017 by admin

Iraj Weeraratne, Nugegoda, uditha, 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

By Uditha Devapriya

Milton Mallawarachchi: The voice of a thousand love letters

March 20, 2017 by admin

Classical, Milton Mallawarachchi, uditha, Uditha Devapriya

Victor Ratnayake’s signature, some contend, come out most potently in his love songs. I am unfortunately not a musicologist, only a listener, but to my untrained ear, those love songs of his stand out powerfully from the sixties to the eighties. And it’s not just his voice or his songs: even in his film scores, you sense at once how powerfully romantic his vision of the world is.

The opening passages in Deno Dahak Atharin, Neela Bingu Kala, and Bambarindu Bambarindu and the music in Rajagedara Parawiyo and Sarungale build up not in gushes, but with a flow, so much so that his melodies moves along gracefully. Unlike Amaradeva, he isn’t constrained by the raghadari tradition. Unlike Khemadasa, he doesn’t let the liberatory thrust of the Western melody take over.

Of his songs, I consider Deno Dahak Atharin and Piyasalana Lihinayaku Se as defining that romantic vision of the world the man imbibed. With these two songs, you can infer how intense that vision was: so intense, in fact, that he has to be subtle about it to reveal his feelings. Deno Dahak Atharin is played out in a sequence from Sunil Ariyaratne’s Vajira, with Nadeeka Gunasekara’s character crying for her lover to return. Piyasalana Lihinayaku Se, on the other hand, is richer because it doesn’t accompany a set of images.

Deno Dahak got Victor working with Nanda Malini. Piyasalana got him working with Milton Mallawarachchi. With the former, he was working with an established voice. With the latter, he was working with an as yet unrecognised star. For Milton, shunned as he was for being unmusical, had to cross some hard yards to get to where he stands today. This week’s star being Milton, this is hence a tribute to the man, his voice, and his life.

He was born on April 7, 1944 and was educated at Ananda Shasthralaya in Kotte. While he hadn’t aspired much for the music industry as a child, after leaving school he wound up with two groups. The first, called the Sakyans, was short-lived, while the second, Les Ceylonians, not only got him to sing two hits (“Daha Duke Vidyahala” and “Mal Ravamal”) but got the attention of Patrick Corea. One thing led to another, Corea got him to sing under the Exvee record label, and in 1969, he recorded his first original hit, “Oruwaka Pawena”, in turn accompanied by three other singles: “Ran Kooduwak Oba Sadu”, “Sansare Sewanalle” and “Mangale Neth Mangale.”

When I met Victor last year, I put to him that given his unmusical voice, Milton would have found it difficult adjusting to the demands of his composers. Victor vehemently disagreed and pointed out that even Jothipala, with his pavement (“bajavu”) voice, was accommodative and could adjust. Victor had the credentials to say what he did there, because when Milton was up and coming, he took him, nurtured him, moulded him, and released him.

Like Kapuge and Jothipala, he probably would have ruffled some feathers with his voice today. But what he lacked in vocal range and texture, he made up for with his articulation. Put simply, he made you understand and know that he was sincere about what he sang. For the rest of his career, that is what sustained him.

What happened after the sixties? He got to work with Patrick Denipitiya (“Ma Nisa Oba”), Clarence Wijewardena (“Mata Men Ohutada”), Khemadasa (“Sakwala Rathwana”), and Melroy Dharmaratne (“Mai Gaha Yata”). He was a film playback singer as well, making his debut with Poojithayo in 1971 and winning a Sarasaviya Award with “Kandan Yannam” (from Athin Athata) in 1984. He got an entire live concert to himself courtesy of the Ceylon Tobacco Company and Mahajana Sampatha. The Super Golden Chimes featured him in their concerts, through an invitation extended by Clarence himself.

In the end, after all those hits, awards, accolades, and packed crowds, he passed away on March 10, 1998. He was 53. Had he lived, he would have 72.

What else can we say? That he continues to be sung everywhere: on bus rides, at Big Matches, at birthday parties, and at get-togethers. He had a voice which was made for the guitar, so for that reason both children and adults celebrate him. He spoke and articulated the wishes, hopes, and dreams of a thousand lovers. He had a life and he had a family, both of which no doubt shaped his dukbara, romantic view of the world.

Added to all these, moreover, he had sincerity. There’s no doubt, after all, that Eda Rae is reminiscent of the best poetry of Thomas Hardy, in how it features the fissure between love and rejection and between embracement and separation that makes up the best love songs. It needed Milton to reinforce that. He did just that.

And what he did for that song, we can hence conclude, he did for every other song. The way he wanted, the way we wanted. Simple as that.

By Uditha Devapriya

Stanley Peiris and the music of the middle

February 24, 2017 by admin

ajantha ranasinghe, clarence wijewardena, Gerald Wickremesooriya, Premasiri Khemadasa, Stanley Peiris, Sunil Shantha, the moonstones, uditha, Uditha Devapriya, Vijaya Corea

Music is the most collaborative of all art-forms, after the cinema. 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 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.

By Uditha Devapriya

Kularatne Ariyawansa and the scent of dew

February 24, 2017 by admin

Kularatne Ariyawansa, uditha, Uditha Devapriya

How and where do lyricists get their ideas? What is it that propels them to cross the thin line between the written word and the verse? What do they have, which we do not, that makes it easy for them to transform the most mundane, everyday experience into potent drops of poetry?

The best lyricists, the way I see it ensure that what they write survive the ravages of time. Their songs, simply put, become timeless and remain as freshly scented as they were on the day they were authored. Because the Sinhala lyric as such has deteriorated today, we feel this most discernibly in the verses of the masters, the veterans of the pasts, for whom writing a song was more than just transforming a hackneyed theme into a series of even more hackneyed words.

Kularatne Ariyawansa belongs to a generation of lyricists that emerged during the seventies, when our music industry got away from the imitativeness it had been steeped in until then. The eighties, as I pointed out in my article on the late Ajantha Ranasinghe, was different in that with the dismantling of the regulatory structures instituted by the Bandaranaike government, artistes were empowered to experiment, though as time went by that deteriorated to the same imitativeness the industry saw before the seventies. Ariyawansa, who witnessed all this firsthand, has ample reason to regret, but does not: he prefers instead to reflect, to remember, and to recount. This is his story.

He was born in the Southern village of Benthara, although his family had been domiciled in Colombo. While he attended the game iskole until his O Levels, he entered Ananda College for his A Levels. Ananda was back then rife with aspiring artistes and poets, and this culture had appealed to young Kularatne. Among those he met and befriended, Premakeerthi de Alwis (who was his senior) and more pertinently A. D. Ranjith Kumara figure in. It would be through the latter that he was initiated into the music industry.

Kularatne had taken to poetry and music from an early age. While at his earlier school, during his O Levels, he had dabbled in poetry. When he shifted to Ananda, he shifted to songs. “Back then our music industry had been invaded by those stopped us from imitating Indian music. Among my influences, I can name Chandraratne Manawasinghe, Madawala Ratnayake, Karunaratne Abeysekera, and Mahagama Sekara. Through Sekara, I heard Amaradeva. Through Amaradeva, I realised how subtle the link between the word and the verse was. That was why, whenever I listened to a song, I made it a habit to write down its lyrics.”

Meanwhile, Ranjith Kumara (who can in one sense be considered his first figure of destiny) managed to hook up young Kularatne with a horde of artistes from that time, firstly through the magazine they edited at Ananda, “Sevana”, then through Arthur Amarasena’s arts tabloid “Visithuru.” Because of the latter especially, he got acquainted with some of the leading writers and poets in his time, which helped him even more when (again, through Kumara) he was invited to take part in several radio programs, including the “Sarasvathi Mandapaya” and “Yowun Samajaya”.

Through all this, the man had managed to meet up with Abeywardena Balasooriya, back then a promising performer who, together with Sarath Dasanayake, teamed up with Kularatne for his first song, “Adarayen Ma Hadavatha.” His second song “Pinibara Malak” proved so popular for Victor Ratnayake that the latter continued to highlight it in his SA prasangaya. “I have written about 10 songs for Victor. Needless to say, all of them have become immensely successful,” he informs me, with a gleam in his eye.

We are as young or old as we work and Kularatne hasn’t been an exception to that rule. Because he, like his contemporaries (including Ajantha Ranasinghe), made love (requited or otherwise) his main subject and theme, that naturally attracted a horde of composers and singers who transformed our deepest impulses into veritable drops of poetry. His third song, which is my personal favourite, got him working with Amaradeva and Khemadasa to give out what I personally consider as the most heartfelt act of collaboration between the latter two: “Sanda Horen Horen”, written for Amaradeva’s 50th birthday in 1978.

That year proved pivotal for him for another reason. The cassette trade, which had already made its mark in other music industries elsewhere, arrived. Kularatne, by then a mere government servant, would figure considerably in the revolution this wrought, when he first joined Tharanga as a lyricist and production coordinator at the invitation of his friend Vijaya Ramanayake and then, in 1980, left government service completely to join Singlanka at the invitation of another acquaintance, Ananda Ganegoda. While Tharanga continues to sell, Singlanka has languished thanks to the internet.

Kularatne tells me here that while cassette companies have all but completely caved into commercialism today, Singlanka was begun to help both veteran and aspiring artistes. As I browse through his lyrics, I realise that it also paired him with Rohana Weerasinghe, the man who would compose pretty much all his work during and after the eighties. I ask him as to how he’d write a song in the first place, and he replies, “Depends. Some of my songs already had their melodies worked out. I only needed to write. Most of them, however, were first sketched out by me before the composer worked on them.”

He has also worked on quite a number of films, 50 to be exact. He began in 1978 with Anupama, directed by that other exponent of the Sinhala lyric, Sunil Ariyaratne. From Anupama, Ariyaratne opted for the man in his next three films, Vajira (where Kularatne got together with Nanda Malini for the first time with “Deno Dahak”), his landmark work Sarungale, and Jeevithayen Jeevithayak. When H. D. Premaratne let go of Clarence Wijewardena (who scored his first two films) and opted for Khemadasa in Parithyagaya, Kularatne was there (“La Hiru Payala”, which opens that remarkable film). He worked with Premaratne again and again, including for Mangala Thagga (“Thurulaka Hurathal”) and Adara Hasuna (“Sudu Muthu Rala Pela”). In all these, he centred on the theme he usually went for, love.

Because we live in a time where if you switch on the radio, you are guaranteed to hear songs revolving around the same, hackneyed theme of unrequited love, it’s a little difficult to appreciate the enormous range of sensitivity Kularatne brought off in his work. Suffice it to say, then, that of the 100+ lyrics he has sketched out, my personal favourites are the ones which delve into the hopes, wishes, triumphs, and pitfalls of aspiring lovers, which probably makes him an equal to that other lyricist who went for that theme, Premakeerthi de Alwis. “Deno Dahak”, for instance, begins on the following note:

දෙනෝ දාහක්
නුවන් අතරේ
කවුරුදෝ මා
තනි කළේ
තනි කළේ
පාසැල් බිමේ

While the lover in that song croons for the boy who left her amidst a thousand others (“නුවන් අතරේ“), alone, the final lines in “Sudu Muthu Rala Pela” bring out another lover: the sort who endures immeasurable shame before pairing up with the man who truly cherishes her:

පවනැල්ලක්සේ නොම හැර
ආවෙමි ඔබ හද සැදෙන තුරා

It’s not just about those overused lines “I love you girl, why don’t you love me?” that adorn pretty much every song on radio, in other words. I put to Kularatne that while times have certainly changed and while the Sinhala lyric has deteriorated on this count, nevertheless there must be some hope. He agrees, with a caveat: there are poets and reckonable anthologies published by talented youngsters. When it comes to lyricists also, there is talent. The problem, however, is with the TV channels that refuse to recognise this talent: “They have caved into a commercialist mindset so much that they refuse to even consider taking the work of these bright youngsters.” Depending on how you see it, this is reason for either hope or despair. In any case, it does not matter.

Last year the man brought out a collection of lyrics. Fittingly titled Pinibara Malak, the verses in it seem as freshly scented as they would have been when they were first sketched out. What of the man behind them? Soft-spoken and refined to a fault, Kularatne has no reason for complaint. Today he lives a rather comfortable life in Mirihana with his two sons, Vindana and Kalpana (whose film Premaya Nam premiered on Friday, February 17 at the Regal Theatre), and his wife Seetha. He was, characteristically I believe, not very enthusiastic about delving into his biography, which has a lot to do with his modesty and how he views himself.

We first heard of Kularatne Ariyawansa many, many years ago. He has since nourished our sensibilities in a way that does justice to the lover in us all. He has not resorted to hackneyed themes, and if he has, he has tried to steer clear of the bland newsreel format most lyricists go for today. We have much to be thankful for, I silently note as I go through Pinibara Malak. And because he admits at the end that he won’t stop writing, we will remain thankful. For a long, long time.

By Uditha Devapriya

The indifferent ones: A mild critique of a big celebration

February 16, 2017 by admin

Lester James Peries, Rekava, Sumitra Peries, Titus Thotawatte, uditha, Uditha Devapriya, Willie Blake

Sumitra Peries once told me a story about Rekava. Lester, her husband, along with Titus Thotawatte and Willie Blake, had gone to Cannes to screen it at the Festival. Because the version they had was too long and contained too many songs, they met Lindsay Anderson. The father of the Free Cinema Movement and the British New Wave, Anderson was as much the parvenu Lester was in his country. Cannes, however, was a different ball-game altogether, and so the two of them discussed as to what songs would stay and what songs would be out.

The Western cinema, when it matured after the coming of sound, deliberately avoided the song-and-dance sequences that ran riot in our films. Lester had hence readied himself to cut down on probably all the songs his debut contained. What happened next, however, surprised him.

Anderson watched the film, thought for a moment, then told the man that whatever song he chose to cut, he should leave “Olu Nelum Neriya Ragala” alone. Because he had spent so many years believing that his country’s cinema ought to escape the semi-operatic form it had wallowed in, Lester was naturally stumped when a leading British filmmaker and film theorist ended up asking him to preserve probably the most melodramatic, operatic song in his debut.

He then took Rekava to Cannes. He competed with the likes of Andrzej Wajda, Bergman, Bresson, and William Wyler, the latter of whom won the Jury Prize for his take on the Quakers, Friendly Persuasion. The jury’s verdict, however, was contested, while several writers and filmmakers walked out against what they felt to be the Festival’s bias towards the Americans. But that’s another story.

The event, incidentally, involved a screening of Rekava, with a digital copy refurbished in India. Predictably, there were some preparatory speeches prior to it. Lionel Fernando, Director-General of the Tower Hall Foundation, weighed in on the arts, while Anura Fonseka (the main organiser) spoke rather feelingly on why icons should be celebrated while alive. The Prime Minister, speaking before him, remembered the first time he watched Rekava (“To see my aunt act in it!” he told us not long ago, referring of course to Irangani Serasinghe, who despite being ill made it that evening) and essentially contended that Lester’s worth has become self-evident.

In the meantime, Lester did his country proud. He didn’t win of course, and Sumitra ended her story by telling me, rather lightly I suppose, that “God only knows what he would have got if Lindsay wasn’t so entranced by ‘Olu Nelum Neriya Ragala’.” I added then and there, “God works in mysterious ways.” Sumitra, a Buddhist from a politically nationalist family, smiled and agreed. Lester didn’t hear us, but if he did, he too would have smiled.

Last Sunday, January 29, the Tower Hall Foundation put together an event at the Regal Theatre to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Rekava. The Chief Guest, in keeping with the Tower Hall hierarchy, was Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, while the other guests included Akila Viraj Kariyawasam (whose Ministry has virtually absorbed the Foundation), Gayantha Karunathilaka, Ranga Kalansooriya, and Nimal Bopage.

The Prime Minister was late by half an hour (he’d come from Sithulpahuva), so the show, which began at 7 pm, ended at about 10.30 pm. I don’t know how many directors elsewhere have been able to watch their debuts 60 years after they were first screened, but I do know that they are few in number and that Lester happily lived to be one of them. He exuded a monkish calm, despite his age and despite how tiring the evening would have been, but towards the end, I couldn’t help but notice a veritable stream of emotion in his eyes. The man has earned this day, I thought to myself, with much of that having to do with the film he helped us claim an identity with.

Lester James Peries is the only reminder we have of 1956 and the cultural revolution that year wrought. He is more than a relic, but a relic nevertheless. Malinda Seneviratne, writing 15 years ago, correctly surmised that compared with the other “signatories” to that revolution (Sarachchandra, Wickramasinghe, and Chitrasena), he was more apolitical. That proved to be an asset in the beginning, but as the decades wore on and as a new generation of filmmakers and critics emerged, he earned the ire of those who saw in his work the signature of a yuppie, Colombo elitist. Two stories stand out in this regard.

The first. When Ahas Gawwa premiered in 1974, a pamphlet titled “Appochchige Cinemawa” was distributed to the audience. Appochchi, incidentally, was Lester. In becoming a father, he had become a virtual pariah. Not unlike what Renoir, Clouzot, and the “Establishment” American directors were to the French. With their campaign of intense vitriol, the new rebel directors here tried to emulate the Nouvelle Vague. They were successful, partly at least, but eventually and as was the case elsewhere, their work deteriorated. In the end, only one person stood out: the man they’d denigrated as their papa.

Lindsay Anderson(fragmenteyes.blogspot.com)

The second. When Yuganthaya premiered in 1983, a group of critics went to town over its (allegedly) immature handling of the political. I remember Bandula Nanayakkarawasam, talking with me about Lester and our cinema in general, pointing out that these critics focused on how Lester had depicted the clash between labour and capital. Bandula didn’t take sides, but a more prominent filmmaker from that era, known for his political stances and for films with a political edge, did. “Even in Yuganthaya, he couldn’t go beyond the family” was what he said.

The point I’m driving here is that despite the nostalgia that flowed that Sunday evening, the man being celebrated had to endure a rough ride. To make matters worse, that rough ride hasn’t ended even now. Just two weeks ago, for instance, he and Sumitra got news that their house, which they had continuously occupied for many, many years, had been sold off to a new tenant.

Whatever the legal technicalities behind the change of ownership may be, isn’t it rather telling that the man who fathered our cinema has to flirt with the threat of eviction? Isn’t it rather telling that people who appreciate him don’t appreciate his worth? Has Lester the man been so cut off from Lester the director that while we cosmetically shout praises for him, we neglect his work? These are questions that went unasked last Sunday. They should have been asked. Whether or not they can be answered.

All these observations are manifestly true and pertinent. Leaving the Regal that forlorn Sunday night, however, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Do we remember that they are?”

Thinking back on the miserly producers who botched his films (in particular, Awaragira, which could have become the Great Family Chronicle it wasn’t), the critics who attacked him arbitrarily, the 30 out of 50 years in his career that he spent idling, the ancestral property he and his wife had to auction off to sustain their lives, and the struggles they have to endure even today (far removed, it must be noted, from those of less well-off filmmakers, who died penniless and bitterly regretting the life they squandered for the sake of the movies), I could only conclude: we celebrate, yes, and we put in great effort to show that we care. But do we appreciate?

I for one think not. Call me a pessimist, but that evening ended rather bitterly. I liked the fact that the Tower Hall Foundation had opted for something other than the conventional anniversary and I appreciate their effort, both as a lover of the cinema and an admirer of the man at the centre of their event. This is not an indictment on the organisers. This is an indictment on those who never cared about Lester James Peries when he was active. An indictment on those of us who never bothered. In other words, an indictment on the indifferent ones

Mohideen Baig: The conscience of a collective

January 5, 2017 by admin

Mohideen Baig, uditha, Uditha Devapriya

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Mohideen Baig [pic by – www.tharu.com/web/artist/113.html]

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. 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.

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, 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.

By Uditha Devapriya

C. T. Fernando: The man and the song

December 9, 2016 by admin

C.T., C.T. Fernando, uditha, Uditha Devapriya

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I know very little about music, whatever the genre. I do know that it was made for the ear, for the imagination, and for imagining. I also know it was made for the eye in that one needs a firm grasp of the performer, melody maker, and lyricist to understand the depth of a song or composition. Not being a musicologist however, I wouldn’t know how to assess any of these things. When it comes to vocalists whose voices entranced us, hence, I can only say this much: they entranced us because they touched us, and when they touched us, what they sang became timeless.

The late Tissa Abeysekara tried valiantly to trace the cultural history of our music. He was fond of our jana gee and hela traditions, for he saw in them the roots which could nourish the artistes in us. That was why, in later years when we embraced the Raghadari tradition and birthed the likes of Amaradeva, he was cautious. For him, the Raghadari Revolution didn’t make sense if through that we let go of some of our finest, most idiosyncratic, and most localised musicians. Through a cruel irony of fate though, that is exactly what happened.

We lost Sunil Shantha. We lost Ananda Samarakoon. We lost Piyasiri Wijeratne. We lost a horde of other singers deemed too out of touch in the kind of music that critics, writers, and everyone who wanted to cast in stone his or her two cents on the subject idealised. Many of these singers were derided as Westernised (I’d like to quote Abyesekara’s comment on this: “Whatever that meant!”). Based on certain recommendations drafted by mandarins from elsewhere, Radio Ceylon came up with an arbitrary criterion on what constituted good, local singers. The guitar was out, the sitar was in. Everything derided as Western was condemned, vilified, and thrown out. Just like that.

C.T. Fernando was not exactly westernised. But he needed western instruments. As Abeysekara frequently noted, his voice could not open up without the heavy brasswork and strong chords. Limited and chucked away to a corner, he almost languished. And yet, despite the work of some of those pundits who considered the likes of him as too out of touch with the revolution they were bringing about, he nevertheless gave us songs that probably are more remembered than half of what they could have come up with. Singers are like that, I suppose. They survive despite the harshest circumstances. This is a tribute (of sorts) to C. T. Fernando.

What was it about the man? His voice? Perhaps. He opened up with honesty, with sincerity. When you listen to him, you get the feeling that he experienced whatever he sang on. He could have been singing of his own child in “Bilinda Nalawa”, or he could have sung of the anguish, the joy, the sorrow of a thousand and one fathers who see and cradle their children for the first time. He could have been a carter when he sang “Bara Bage”, and in fact, long before television and long before the invasion of music videos, he gave the impression of doing what the sang made us think he was doing.

Cyril Tudor Fernando was born on January 28, 1921 in Kadalana, Moratuwa. He was sent for his studies to St Mary’s College in Nawalapitiya. Having been born to a staunch Catholic family in an equally staunch Catholic stronghold, he acquired a love for hymns and sermons and became a choirboy at the parish Church, becoming first in a singing competition there. He followed this up with prizes for oratory, elocution, and drama at St Mary’s, where he honed in on his penchant to speak out and articulate loudly to near-perfection.

Because of this, he was able to move into his career fairly early on in life. He became choir master for the ARP Messenger Service from 1942 to 1965. During the war years, he entertained Allied troops when he joined the Colombo Grand Cabaret. A year after the war ended, Radio Ceylon, to which he more or less aspired (given that aspiring vocalists, composers, and lyricists saw in it their baptism of fire), hired the formidable Professor Ratnajunkar. It was the good professor who, according to Tissa Abeysekara, began privileging oriental musicians, but for the time being he was more sensitive to variety. He auditioned Fernando, he saw the man’s potential, and he hired him.

Fernando sang Pinsindu Wanne (which speaks of the hopes and ideals of two birds who beg some children to not tear their nest down) in the latter part of that same year. Six years later he did his first commercial record with the HMV Gramophone Record label (under Cargills Ceylon), through which he was able to get nine of his songs recorded, including those perennial classics, “Bara Bage”, “Ambili Mame”, and “Lo Ada Ninde.” During those first few years of independence, he also sang and put into verses the government’s vision for the country, in that forever alluded to but never properly read tribute to the land of his birth, “Hela Jathika Abimane.”

It was these songs, I am willing to bet, which got him an audience. They are all plebeian in the strictest sense of that term, and for that reason, they appealed to everyone. The same characteristics that defined his work for the years to come – they were all orchestrated using heavy brassword and chords – continue to enthral us even now. Fernando moreover did not pretend in these songs. In “Ambili Maame”, he was more or less a child asking the titular character as to what he’s doing, and in “Bilinda Nalawa” (as I pointed out earlier) he was a father, older but by no means bereft of a childlike sense of wonderment. He was (if you’d like to put it that way) naive and full of innocence. He couldn’t be C. T. Fernando if he wasn’t.

And when Radio Ceylon began a process of musical spring cleaning and firing those derided as outsiders, he didn’t find it hard to regain his voice. He signed on to the Lewis Brown Company where he recorded another bunch of lovable songs, like that immortal tribute to childhood, “Ma Bala Kale.” He collaborated with Tharanga, Silverline, and Sooriya in later years and through the latter, was able to get into its third popular concert, aptly titled “The CT Sooriya Show.” Through all of this, he made use of his definitive signature: the melody. At a time when people were yet to grow used to heavily orientalised melodies with even more heavily orientalised lyrics, the simple, pop, and by no means hard to grasp tunes that adorned Fernando’s songs won crowds and acclaim.

To a large extent, this had to do with the man’s ability to act out what he sang as well. Between 1947 and 1950 he was featured in a series of public concerts. Once at Anula Vidyalaya in Nugegoda, he sang as a beggar boy. At a show held at Town Hall he sang as a gram seller. At yet another show held at St Joseph’s College Maradana, he received a standing ovation and thunderous applause even before he sang “Bilinda Nalawa.”

But then he didn’t just act out his songs like this. He acted in certain plays as well: in Dick Dias’ production of John de Silva’s Sri Wickrema Rajasinghe and J. D. A. Perera’s production of de Silva’s Siri Sangabo. In the latter he was a villager who meditates on the evils of demons, a part that earned praise from the famous thespian Sir Cedric Hardwick’s wife Joan, who wrote thus to the Times: “A special word of praise goes to the villager who comes to tell of the evils of the demon.”

He led other lives, this man. He set a precedent by becoming the first local artiste to be featured in a terrain inhabited exclusively by Western musicians, when he was featured in the “Little Hut” at the Mount Lavinia Hotel from 1960 to 1966. After returning from a tour in Europe some years later, he was featured again at another such exclusive spot, at the “Coconut Grove” at the Galle Face Hotel. He became the first Ceylonese singer to perform at the Commonwealth Institute in London. He followed all these triumphs with a hugely successful EP record (titled Sigiri Sukumaliye) with Silverline in 1975. Two years later, on October 21, he died of a heart attack.

Musicologists consider the man as a quirk. Perhaps he was. He introduced Western music to the country, though it would take other pioneers to carry on with what he did and help further it. Abeysekara classed him alongside Sunil Shantha, Chitra and P. L. A. Somapala, and B. S. Perera. There’s of course a wide gulf between the hela tradition of the former and the jazzy, folksy tradition of the latter, but between the one and the other there was a similarity that surpassed all other such differences: their penchant for melody, for experimentation, and their love for music as a universal, yet by no means culturally castrated, language.

C.T. Fernando belonged to this crowd. Not only did he sing lovingly. He also composed the melodies for practically every song he sang. So yes, he was not merely a performer, fiddler, or vocalist. He was all these things, and more. Much more.

By Uditha Devapriya

For those who sing and move us

December 9, 2016 by admin

H.R.Jothipala, uditha, Uditha Devapriya

Best Male Singer Sarasavi Awards 1986

When Rukmani Devi died there was an outpouring of grief. People took to the streets, cried, sobbed, lamented. Some didn’t even believe she had gone. Icons are like that I suppose, though that doesn’t mean those who sob and those who lament necessarily cut out those who left for posterity. There must be tributes, of some sort, to ensure that their legacy remains. Words and speeches are good, but without the necessary drive to turn them into reality it’s pointless to celebrate a life lived and lived through. The same, I must say, goes out to all those who helped nurture the arts, not necessarily artistes themselves.

I believe there still are people in this country who are yet to come to terms with the passing away of Amaradeva. That’s natural. Stars are loved, icons are cherished. On the other hand I refuse to believe that his music is the only reason his passing away is lamented. He was, of course, much more than a musician, composer, and lyricist: the truth is that he stood for a country in peril, which underwent its most difficult years when he rose up to the peak of his career. His work cut across to every community, cast, and creed.

My friend Dhanuka Bandara (who writes with such vigour that it’s a pity he doesn’t write anymore) once observed that the disparities between Low Art and High Art could be explained by the lives of individual artistes. He had, if I remember correctly, visited Kala Bhavana and then visited the painters and sculptors outside who made it their life’s work to display what they drew to the general public. It was probably an irony that they had chosen to carry out this enterprise in a road named after Ananda Coomaraswamy, who wrote on the dichotomy between High and Low Art many, many decades ago, but for the time being let’s forget that.

Here’s what Dhanuka said, quoting one such painter he had interviewed: Art Street also brings to crisis arbitrary division between “High Art” and “Low Art”. Arya Kumarasinghe, another artist that I spoke with, described himself as a “peechan” artist. He drew an interesting analogy between the work of H. R. Jothipala and the work at the Art Street. Jothipala’s music is hardly appreciated in the way the music of Khemadasa or Amaradeva is appreciated. However, the popularity of Jothipala’s songs seems to endure. One could hardly find a Sri Lankan who has not heard a Jothipala song. I suppose “Peechan Art” is the best Sinhala term one could think of for “Kitsch Art”—Art that is necessarily a rejection of high art.

Dhanuka was (consciously or otherwise) saying of Art what Pauline Kael, some decades earlier, had said of the cinema: that the gulf between artiness and kitsch in films was so pretentious, so ridiculous, that we were picking on kitsch for unfathomable reasons. Well, I am no fan of kitsch, but the truth of the matter is that in our rush to praise artiness we have let go of the foremost purpose of a work of art: to reach out to as many people and audiences as possible without insulting their intelligence. Going by that, I suspect it would not be wrong to class H. R. Jothipala, whom Dhanuka aptly quoted, among those who were exponents of music for the multitude.

Jothipala had a voice. I am sure not everyone will agree it was a musical voice, but the truth of the matter is that he sang and entranced. He could sing of love and of other emotions so well that no two songs were the same, even if both were on the same theme. The secret to his popularity, as those who know music and those who don’t will tell you, was that he sang of our baser instincts, the instincts that made us the frail beings we were and are. He was probably not as much a national icon as others were, but that wouldn’t have bothered him. Not in the least.

Hettiarachchige Reginald Jothipala was born on February 12, 1936 to a fairly middle-class family in Matara. He was the first child in a family of four girls and two boys (including him). His parents were not musically inclined: his father was a tailor, his mother was a nurse. They eventually moved to Colombo, where young Jothipala was sent to St Lawrence’s College in Maradana and later to St John’s College in Dematagoda. He never studied music. Perhaps he didn’t take to it academically.

Or perhaps he took to music in other ways. He loved to visit tea kiosks and listen to the radio (his family, it must be said, never possessed one). At a time when the Rafis and Haroon Lanthras of this country were making their voices heard, Jothipala would have loved to get into the industry and carve a career for himself. And as with all such budding vocalists, he began that career at the place which baptised most of his contemporaries and successors in the years to come: Radio Ceylon, where he was taken in to sing duets with two of the most sought after playback singers at the time, Wasantha Sandanayake and G. S. P. Rani Perera.

His first shot at a solo was not successful. He tried to get into Sirisena Wimalaweera’s film Podi Putha as a playback vocalist, but for some reason the composer who scored the film didn’t think very highly of his voice. This was in 1956. That same year, Cyril B. Abeyratne’s Surathalee was being made and hence, they needed a voice. The producer of that film, Jabir A. Cader, wanted to assess Jothipala and eventually, he made it.

His next big break came with Lester James Peries’ Sandeshaya, where he sang (along with other vocalists) that most beloved of tributes to the conqueror, “Pruthugeesi Karaya.” I remember Lester once telling me that that particular song was so popular that copies were made (of it as well as the film) and eventually exhausted. From then on, Jothi became a household name, more often than not the darling of directors who wanted him to perform for all the leading actors and actresses that danced, crooned, ran around bushes, and fought. It would of course be futile of me to try and list his credits in their entirety, so I will desist from such an enterprise.

I will, however, comment. Some of those songs he performed were derided as imitative. They were pale replicas of Hindi and Indian songs (among them, “Chandra Me Ra Paya Awa” and “Adare Hithana Dakkama”). Bandula Nanayakkarawasam once told me that the opening lines to that evergreen classic, “Jeevithe Kanthare” (“jeevithaye kanthare / thurunu wiyali walle / uthura gala yayi adare), puzzled composers and writers in his day so much that articles and diatribes aimed at their syntactic and grammatical flaws were published by the day. I have no doubt that some of these diatribes would have been aimed against Jothipala as well, for he was what he sang (it was probably for that reason that, as the years went by, he was called a “pavement singer”).

There are several Jothipala stories one comes across. Here’s one of them. Amaradeva, it is said, once asked the man to sing a song for a film he was scoring. Jothi hadn’t been approached by him before. Not knowing his methods and his way with other musicians perhaps, Jothi had simply replied: “Give me a day, I’ll come over, I’ll record once, and I’ll go.”

Amaradeva had got angry, apparently. I don’t know exactly what transpired between the two of them there, but from what I’ve heard he never spoke nor came across Jothi until about 10 years later. Again, there was a film he was scoring, and someone had suggested his name. Giving him one more chance (we can assume), he had made his request again. The eager young man, predictably, gave the same reply. Amaradeva didn’t get angry this time.

He instead decided to try out this man’s claim (for in his experience, I am willing to bet, he hadn’t come across a vocalist who could record a song perfectly in one go). So he gave him a date and time for the recording.

What happened next surprised Amaradeva. True to his word this singer came over, recorded once, and left. The recording was perfect and moreover perfectly in tune with the sequence of the film. I don’t know what Amaradeva would have thought then but I am sure he reflected on his previous encounter with the singer with some humility. After all, I am willing to bet, he couldn’t have come across a vocalist like this before. In the meantime the song, “Kanden Kandata”, became popular, and so did the film, Tharanga.

That was Jothipala. Didn’t pretend. Didn’t need to. He spoke his mind and he gave away what he had.

By Uditha Devapriya

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