Towards the 'jana' and away from the 'janaya'

When Jothipala died somewhere in 1987, people wept. His funeral, like the funeral of Rukmani Devi years earlier, was attended by thousands of fans, who braved the soon-to-erupt JVP-UNP bheeshanaya. If we are to assess the worth of a singer on the basis of how prabuddha (highbrow) he is, then there’s nothing to help us rationalise why so many could weep at this particular singer’s funeral. And yet, many did weep. So many, in fact, that after the funeral no less a person than Sarath Amunugama wrote an article on what he termed as the “janapriya sanskruthiya”, where he implied that Jothipala, despite his pandering to populist sentiments, had emerged as a singer of the nation. Having read this essay, Nalin de Silva, by his own admission an admirer of the “prabuddha sanksruthiya” back then, wrote a reply demeaning Amunugama’s stance and explicitly batting for the culture that was opposed to these populist sentiments. Decades later, having repented and turned around as the definitive face of the Jathika Chinthanaya, de Silva eschewed his fascination with the highbrow culture: “When Jothipala died, thousands of fans flocked to Kanatte and no ‘prabhuddha’ artiste had ever been respected by so many people at his/her funeral.” It took no less a figure than Amaradeva, the de facto symbol of that prabuddha sensibility here, to compel the same outflow of grief at his passing away.

Clement Greenberg’s analysis of art and non art doesn’t hold much water in Sri Lanka because, as with all colonial societies, we never made the transition from art to kitsch through an intermediate stage; we just transited from the one to the other. As such, instead of art and kitsch, we have what we can broadly term as “jana” on the one hand and “janapriya” on the other. Both these cultural sensibilities, as I wrote last week, neglected the folk culture, the culture regenerated by the efforts of Lionel and Sahan Ranwala as well as the likes of Piyasiri Wijeratne and Rohana Baddage. Rationalising this split requires an explication of how, and why, jana and janapriya remain wedded to each other, as strands of one holistic sensibility, and how and why the folk culture, when it evolved into the formal culture, had to waste away half its essence to the dust in a bid to appeal to mass or elite audiences. Was it because of the fact, which holds valid in virtually every society, that once you attempt to preserve folk art forms through a process of refinement, you inevitably contort those same art forms? And if so, does that explain why Jothipala and Amaradeva occupy the same pedestal, though from opposite ends?

The art forms which evolved after 1956 was smeared, necessarily, by the three art movements the Western world brought out in the 20th century: realism and naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism. The novels of Martin Wickramasinghe, the songs of Amaradeva, and the films of Lester James Peries belong squarely to the first and second of these movements. Out of these pioneers only Martin Wickramasinghe tried to go beyond their confines and parameters, and while Bawatharanaya (his last) is considered a lesser work, as a blatant act of depicting the Buddha the same way Nikos Kazantzakis depicted Christ (The Last Temptation was published around the time Wickramasinghe was writing Viragaya), it nevertheless attempted to go beyond the limits of modernism. Inasmuch as these artistes discovered a way through which the folk culture could be communicated to lay audiences, they ended up forming a substantial fan base among the milieu aspiring to become a petty bourgeoisie: as a result of free education and the social mobility it enabled among this milieu, the patrons of the Amaradevas and the Perieses and the Chitrasenas came from a bilingual, half-sophisticated crowd. Preservation of the folk culture, at the hands of this crowd, required Westernisation and Sanskritisation.

In postcolonial societies, particularly one with a dispossessed peasantry on the one hand and an uprooted, apathetic landowning bourgeoisie on the other, it was left largely to the petty bourgeoisie to act as intermediaries between the two. They were more or less cultural ambassadors, who intended to transform if not transubstantiate the art forms they had grown up with in the same villages they left later on, as with the Kaisaruvattes from the Koggala trilogy. This was true of societies in which industrialisation had not already enabled a sizeable population to leave those villages: in other words, the society we had, and the society Britain, France, and Germany (where the abstract concepts of autonomy and sovereignty, as well as the people’s will, came to be respected through the wave of literacy enabled by the Industrial Revolution) did not have. Sri Lanka in that sense lagged behind: we didn’t have a proper industrial revolution of our own, only a half-baked society of imperialists and their lackeys versus their countrymen.

In the early days, it was the offspring of these lackeys who idealised the folk culture, the peasantry, and tried their hand at preserving folk art forms no matter how imperfect their attempts were. Devar Surya Sena, formerly Herbert Charles Jacob Peiris, son of Sir James Peiris (the first non-European to be appointed President of the Cambridge Union), was the first of these offspring. They came from the Anglican elite, and in their efforts at spawning a national consciousness, they found a meaning for their own uprooted lives.

The generation of Amaradeva and Chitrasena came from a more intermediate social milieu, which belonged at once to both the formal and the folk and yet was at home with neither. They were affluent, but not affluent enough to rake up the sort of leisure and privilege essential for the formation of a refined cultural sensibility. The groundwork laid down by the likes of Sena proved to be crucial to them, and what they had discovered, the petty bourgeoisie added to. But what Sena and Rajapakse lacked, as their recordings of songs we mistakenly allude to as Sinhalese and Buddhist today (“Danno Budunge”) indicate, was the requisite Sinhala-ness to strike a chord with popular audiences. The petty bourgeoisie, at once linked to and disdainful of the peasantry, found their icons with a set of artists who could leap over this limitation. They could not go back to the village, nor could they completely turn away from it. This at times contradictory streak is what makes up much of our cultural revolution, from the forties and fifties onwards.

Free education liberated the masses from the necessity of a bilingual education. Until then, bilingualism remained a definitive mark of the petty bourgeoisie and the rural bourgeoisie, who sent their children to English speaking schools. Sinhala Only sought to do away with English altogether, and what resulted was a whole generation of audiences who were, proverbially speaking, never rooted in anything substantive. Once a cultural sphere evolves to this sort of audience, the artists tend to make a distinction between the folk and the formal while attempting to assimilate the former into the latter. Towards the end of the sixties, with the appointment of C. de S. Kulatilake as the head of the Folk Music Research Unit at Radio Ceylon, this process of assimilation began. It was through the attempts of Kulatilake that the likes of T. M. Jayaratne and Neela Wickramasinghe (who were tasked with singing and refining that quaint Sinhala ballad, “Badde Watata”, as part of their first assignment) emerged. These performers, who came after Amaradeva and Khemadasa had unleashed their musical revolutions (sourcing them to India and West, respectively), inadvertently brought about the fusion of one culture with the other.

We can imagine this trinity – jana, janapriya, folk – as variants of the same cultural sensibility. What differentiates the first two from the third is the milieu which pandered to them. Jana and janapriya were cultural forms which cropped up once the petty bourgeoisie were able to separate art from its historic roots. I am not contending that this act of separation was a sacrilege; in fact far from being a sacrilege, it was an inevitability. And by separation, I do not imply that art forms were stripped of their cultural roots. What happened was this: fusing the folk with the formal meant, over the years, refining and redefining the former. That required the opening up of the art we had to the art they had, elsewhere, in the outside world. Largely urbane, secular, and sophisticated, if only half so, the new petty bourgeoisie, equipped with neither their roots nor the language of access, English, secularised the culture they patronised. The mystical, the extraordinary, the other-worldly, they had already separated from the real, the mundane, the this-worldly, in how they followed the faith of the majority, Buddhism. This distinction was reflected in the way they, and the artists they pandered to, sang, wrote, filmed, and performed. Here we can agree with Nalin de Silva’s contention that the artists of 1956 contorted our effort to search for a modernity located in the Sinhala Buddhist locale. And here we can properly examine a contemporary dilemma: while a janapriya sensibility continues to evolve, the jana sanskruthiya has, somehow, and tragically so, stalled. We have many Jothipalas, but we have no Amaradeva to at least cry at when he passes away.

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 24 2018

Sketches from the South: Towards Matara

At first glance, the sights, the sounds, the flavours, and even the people appear like a poor reflection of their counterparts from Galle. First you come across the Star Fort, which resembles a pared down version of the more famous Fort from that other part of the South. Then you come across the beaches, which resemble and remind you of Unawatuna and Koggala. Then you walk around and realise that, yes, while these are sites you have seen elsewhere along the coastal belt, they are not all there is to see here and probably not the main sites to come across, record, and write about. The real Matara, in that sense, lies beyond the beaches, the rest houses, the sights, sounds, and flavours. Less packed in than Galle, and less urbanised than most places leading up to it, it is a veritable tourist hub and destination – if you know which spots to patronise and which people to talk with.

Matara is, I have come to feel, a paradox. While less urbanised than Galle, and by default less packed in, it concentrates its streak of opulence alongside the coast and within the town. Symbols of conspicuous consumption adorn both sides of the road, as you travel along the beaches to the Rest House. A huge cavalcade of Cargills, Perera & Sons, and several big name fashion houses and dress points is what you come across here. It seems as though Matara is a repository of big spending, given these. But then the statistics tell a different story. According to the census data from 2016, the inhabitants of Matara spend less relative to their income (75 percent) compared with the people of Galle (84 percent). However, this apparent spendthrift habit conceals another reality: in terms of bank loans the people of Matara tend to borrow more (around Rs 320,000 per household), and they spend proportionately more on food (36 percent) when compared with Galle (Rs 290,000 and 34 percent respectively). That opulent streak is limited to the town, yes, but the habit of spending, and spending on food at that, runs riot in other parts of this region. This has not come about at the cost of equality, by the way; as the statistics make it quite clear, Matara ranks as one of the least unequal places in the South, with a Gini coefficient of 0.39.

What makes Galle “stand out” in terms of tourist destinations is not really the city, but rather the surrounding hamlets: Unawatuna, Koggala, and even further beyond. That tourist line ends, I rather think, in Weligama and Mirissa, at least in terms of beaches, seafood restaurants, and various other exotic sites. In Matara you are limited for the most when it comes to beaches to Polhena, and if you travel further on, to Hiriketiya and Medawatta. But these are packed in, smaller than Unawatuna, and they predictably attract so many crowds that solace and contemplation, as a traveller that is, is simply not possible. So if you’re in Matara, you might in all good faith have to tear yourself away from those beaches, and though they exude a clear, lucid sheen against the sun, they are secondary to the other sites you can traverse through here. But even those sites – to name a few, the Weherahena temple, Dondra point, the lighthouse at Dondra, and the famous, world renowned Hummanaya – are not enough. They are more than adequate to fill your diary and travel notebooks. That, however, is not all there is to travelling in Matara.

First and foremost, there are the people. As with Ambalangoda, the most distinctive characteristic of the inhabitants of Matara is the way they speak. And it’s not just the dialect or their mode of speech; it’s also their lexicon. In this part of the country you come across one of the most localised variants of Sinhala, and you encounter an entire dictionary of terms denoting things, emotions, and gestures, both tangible and intangible, which you might at times find bizarre. Perhaps because of this bizarreness, people from here, once they choose to leave their hometown and reside at least temporarily in Colombo, drop that mode of talking. At one level, I think this is a sign of how inferior they feel, and at another level, I think it’s also an inevitability, given the development spate and the drive towards eradicating local cultures that we’ve necessitated in the name of progress and efficiency. Sinhala, unlike English (the variants of which evolved out of class hierarchies), retains its diglossia and distinction between the written and the spoken variety owing to the fact that the people of those days, who talked in a particular way, were restricted from visiting other regions. In other words, immobility, not progress, was what preserved these dialects. If this is so, then the only real solution I can see is to stop visiting other neighbourhoods and be where you are.

Piyasena Kahandagamage, in his seminal but somewhat overlooked book Pradeshiya Vivaharaya, has recorded many of those terms which form various regional dialects and variants of the mawbasa. It’s fascinating to see how many of them have entered everyday usage, and from the South and Matara in particular: thunapaha, hapana, hamine, iyum piyum, and that most endearing of all terms tossed between loved ones and spouses, eyi. But then there are those lesser encountered terms, which in one sense sound almost exotic to us: goiya for a person, makkayi for what, bin allanawa for planting a seed, and perhaps the most bizarre of them all, dodanna for talk. As Kahandagamage astutely notes, the speech patterns of the South are more or less spread along Giruwa Pattuwa, Magam Pattuwa, and last but not least, Matara Wellabada and Kandabada Pattuwa. (Beyond these, one must visit Galle: Rathgama, Balapitiya, and Ambalangoda. But with the spate of urbanisation and Westernisation in these areas, those patterns are being wiped out.) The true, authentic Matara, moreover, exists away from the coastline, and is to be found most acutely in Walasmulla, Akuressa, and Dickwella, among various other hamlets.

The unwary tourist, bombarded with brochures and guides telling him or her what to do and what to visit, tends to miss these places because what sells in the tourism industry is what everyone knows about. Near Walasmulla and bordering Hambantota, for instance, there is Mulkirigala, named Adam’s Berg by the Dutch once they conquered this part of the island (they got it confused with Adam’s Peak). Constructed in the third century, Mulkirigala is culturally significant, not least owing to the historical record that one of the 32 Bo saplings brought to Sri Lanka by Sangamitta Thera was planted there. Away from Walasmulla, and closer to the coastline, there is then Dickwella, which houses the sprawling and at times controversial Wewurukannala Raja Maha Viharaya: home to the largest seated Buddha statue in Sri Lanka (at 160 feet). Is it any wonder, I thought to myself as I gazed at this statue, that it is almost as forgotten by outsiders as that other temple in Ambalangoda, the Galagoda Viharaya, which happens to house the largest reclining statue in not just Sri Lanka, but also South Asia? These records have escaped the eye of the unwary traveller, a pity because they needn’t have escaped him at all.

Visiting Matara, or for that matter Galle or Ambalangoda, with the intention of talking with the natives is probably the most Orientalist project you, as a traveller, can commit on this island. No one wants to be seen as a member of his town or village if he or she is seen purely in terms of the parameters of that town and village. At another level, this can almost be seen as condescending, and Sri Lankans, particularly from the South, are too proud (and rightly so) to let the outsider judge them on the yardsticks of hometowns and origins such outsiders create by, and for, themselves. Getting into the roots of a place requires getting into the skins of its inhabitants, but not with the intention of seeing the “natives” for who you or someone else thinks they are. (E. M. Forster, in A Passage to India, depicts this side of Anglo-India, through the imperialists who wish to see the real India. Coming to Sri Lanka to see the real Matara, the real Galle, etc, is no different.)

The inhabitants (I desist from using the more condescending “natives”) of Matara don’t “come out” the way they seem to do in Galle and Ambalangoda, where people like to talk straight, to the point if they so wish, and very often with a sense of outrage. Outrage is something one rarely discerns in this area. Not because such sentiments don’t overflow (they do, they do), but because people from here are not as packed in and are thus more unevenly distributed between the city and the village. No matter how culturally archaic Ambalangoda and Galle may be, they have come to resemble their more commercialised suburbs in Colombo. (Land prices in Galle, particularly near the Fort, are on record as some of the most expensive in the country.) Compare that with the unevenness of the economic development in Matara (the main bus halt near the Fort houses a 3D film hall, of all things, while as you get away from the city you come across dilapidated locales and half-broken houses), and you can understand how the people of this region, and beyond, tend to be uneven in their dealings with the outside world. They do talk straight, but they also talk at cross purposes, leaping from one topic to another, rarely curt or short. In that sense, the inhabitants are far more deserving representatives of this region than the beaches, or even the religious sites.

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 22 2018

Essays on art and non art: Revisiting 'Masscult and Midcult'

Is the conflict between art and non-art, so much a staple of contemporary society, really beyond resolving today? To answer this question is to ask another: who decides on, and thereby sustains, the separation between art and non-art, and what are the yardsticks to be used when deciding on what is the one and what is the other? If one cannot answer the latter question, then it’s reasonable to suppose that one cannot hope to answer the former, simply because they are inextricably related with regard to the theory of aesthetics. One has to take sides; one cannot be a moderate, because taking a moderate stance, however well-intentioned that may be, means being uncommitted to the evolution of art. And the evolution of art really amounts to the evolution of conflicts between critics, between the purveyors of art as refinement and art as entertainment. To this we can add other conflicts, other ideological rifts, extending to specific art forms: formalism in painting, linguistics in literature, montage in the cinema, alienation in the theatre.

The role of the critic is curious, yet contradictory: he is not required to be on par with the art or the artist he is reviewing and appraising, but the standards he creates for that art or artist are entirely his own. In other words, the true critic delves into the objet d’art to find out how much of the artist is embedded therein. He is not supposed to be the artist, only to discover the auteur beneath the individual. But then this mode of criticism belongs to the journalist, who reviews individual objets d’art (movies, plays, books, etc) in return for a stipend. There is a higher mode of criticism that exists on its own right, on which the journalist reviewer depends for a veritable horde of resources. In this mode, the critic, or writer, no longer bothers with specific works of art. He is preoccupied with the function of art, as a whole, regardless of the disparateness and uniqueness of individual artist. On a canvas he attempts to chart, and assess, not a body of work belonging to a particular filmmaker or playwright, but several bodies of work belonging to an entire art form.

Once in a while the distinction between these two modes of criticism gets blurred, often deliberately, since a critic can in the same review discuss a work of art and the history, and theory, of the art form to which that work belongs. Out of necessity perhaps, the first film critics, who were really either novelists or journalists, preferred to examine and at times lambast the art form, ignoring the individuality of the films which were being churned out by those who sought to combine the theatre and the cinema. It was only much later that this mode of criticism was overcome by the individual film reviewer: in order, Manny Farber, James Agee, and the most powerful of them all, Pauline Kael. Agee was probably the only real film critic; both Farber and Kael deigned to examine movies as an art form in essay after essay. Agee’s standards were not academic, nor were they “cinematic”: his reviews were written from the standpoint that the movies being reviewed deserved being examined as autonomous works of art, however new they were.

More often than not, nevertheless, film criticism, the youngest of all modes of criticism, opens its doors to the cultural critic, who seeks to apply standards created elsewhere, in other cultural spheres, to the movies. Among these critics we can mention Susan Sontag and Dwight Macdonald. But the fact that they apply standards created elsewhere does not mean that they automatically disparage movies as being too facile and too novel. Nor does it mean that they do not disparage them based on that crude premise. Sontag, for instance, was a champion of new avenues created by Godard, Resnais, and Cassavates, while Macdonald, described as “America’s browbeater” by Franklin Foer, was suspicious of what he thought was the cinema’s ability to compromise on sophistication through cheap, moneymaking processes. This goes back to the question I outlined at the beginning: in the movies, or for that matter in any art form, who is to decide on what is art and what is non-art? The answer to that, of course, is that we can’t find an answer. The critic vents out his or her personal opinions; he or she is entitled to them. That is all.

In his “Masscult and Midcult”, Dwight Macdonald warns against what he sees as the tendency of American culture to do away with highbrow tastes in favour of a middlebrow and lowbrow culture. He describes masscult as the culture of the masses; like Hannah Arendt, Richard Hofstadter, and C. Wright Mills, he views the masses as a negative force, obliterating specificity in favour of mass consumption and the conveyor belt. Midcult, on the other hand, is a more insidious culture, or even cult: superficially catering to higher tastes, it eventually betrays its own lack of sophistication by pandering to lowbrow tastes, in the guise of commercial art. This distinction was specifically rooted in the United States of the post-Nazi Germany world. The American proletariat, willing to submit to authority for stability, thrived on an ethic of groupthink and uniformity, and this uniformity was to be seen visibly in the American cultural sphere

Macdonald’s exercise in cultural distinctions was not a casual academic game, but a necessity compelled by what he saw as infiltrators who were attempting to evict the pre-Nazi Germany cultural sensibility. Virulently attacking the masses, along with the ability of commerce to market art to those masses through the factory and the conveyor belt, was for him an act of standing up for what he thought the artist stood for. In other words, it is in Macdonald’s controversial thesis that we find a confirmation of the myth of the artist as a loner, who shuts his doors and paints, or makes a film, or composes a song, while drowning out the sound of a nearby factory; in other words of the artist who rebels against commerce. What this necessitated was a distinction, and a sharp, unyielding one, between masscult (potboilers) and midcult (the plays of Thornton Wilder and Tennessee Williams, which depicted urban ennui as the new realism).

For Macdonald, midcult was a falsity, a vicious myth which was perpetuated by the purveyors of lowbrow art, while masscult was the real deal: lowbrow tastes disseminated as lowbrow art. While the essay he wrote on these two modes of culture has been rather discredited (in no small measure) since, and is out of favour in today’s globalised, heavily commercialised world, it nevertheless struck writers and artists at the time. It was felt to be a last gasp for a bygone generation: the generation of the dandies and the bohemians, the latter of whom would give way to the generation of bourgeois bohemians and pop art revolutionaries. A last gasp, because the solution Macdonald thought he found for the conflict between masscult and midcult on the one hand and highbrow culture on the other was simplistic if not naive: simply, that the highbrows must flee to their own place under the sun. No one, not in an era where advertising and Godard were courting each other, would have abided by this solution.

While no one reads Macdonald’s didactic overtures and takes them seriously today (not least because his writings are all but completely out of print now), it would be futile to exclude him from the canon of 20th century criticism altogether. Like F. R. Leavis’s distinction between mass civilisation and minority culture, masscult and midcult and highbrow culture were terms which were used to project the nostalgia of the writer towards a bygone era, and in making aesthetic judgments using those terms, Macdonald admittedly tripped over more than once. (For instance, he exempted the likes of Dickens from his list of indicted artists, forgetting that Dickens, not unlike the writers of potboiler detective fiction which Macdonald would have found almost nauseating, was a popular writer as well, at least in his day.) This was true of Leavis also. (Again we have the example of Dickens: in his early work, Leavis despised him, and wrote against him, but towards the end of his life he did a 360-turnaround on his earlier judgments, praising Dickens to the extent of inflating lesser works like Hard Times and Little Dorrit.)

Far from putting aside Leavis or Macdonald, I would suggest here that the crux of the argument they (in particular, Macdonald) put forward is the question whether art can really be separated from non-art, at least intermittently. The truth is that a work of art “survives” its own evolution by being constantly reconfigured, so what is considered art today would have hardly been art at the time of its conception (as an example, we can point at the Gal Viharaya at Polonnaruwa, which was sculpted back when worship was as essential to the daily routines of citizens and villagers as going to work is today). What binds the likes of Macdonald and Leavis together is their fixation over the distinctions between different aesthetic tastes, or levels thereof. What I can say against this line of thinking is that a work of art passes through three distinct phases: use (at the time of its initial conception), retrieval (at the time of its excavation), and study (at the time it ceases being a practical object and becomes, yes, an aesthetic object). In other words, it’s not the nature of a work of art that makes us differentiate between lowbrow and highbrow, rather the mode of communication used to convey the worth of the object to lay audiences.

Written for: Ceylon Today ECHO, May 20 2018

Vimuth Dewmina: Beyond scores, shields, and meets

In 2012, a boy who would dabble in basketball, volleyball, and badminton, and also get involved with several clubs and societies he hadn’t even dreamt of joining before, at his second school, was asked to come over by a bunch of friends to watch a boxing match. He would have been in Grade Seven at the time. Or Grade Six. In any case, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he accepted the invitation. What matters is that he went. And what matters is that while boxing had remained an alien activity to him until then, this particular match enthralled him: it seemed to promote both aggressiveness and respect, respect on the part of both players for one another.

That match got him to think. So he thought. Two years later, when he finished thinking, he decided on joining his school’s boxing squad. This was in 2014. Two further years later, by which time he had resolved to concentrate on boxing and boxing only, he had undergone training, taken part in various meets, and prepared himself for the ultimate encounter, the Stubbs Shield. But before we get to Stubbs, the medals and tokens he won there, and the sense of fulfilment it compelled in him, we need to look at those two years, and assess the foreword and afterword they bring out. The protagonist of that story, incidentally, has a name. Vimuth Dewmina.

Vimuth’s story begins many, many years ago. He was born at the Wathupitiwala Hospital at Attanagalla. His father (a pastor) hailed from Bowatte, his mother (a housewife) hailed from Negombo, while in his early years he and his family lived in Kirindiwela until they moved to Kuliyapitiya owing to a shift in the parish. “Kuliyapitiya is pretty urbanised now, hardly recognisable in fact. I remember running as a child, very clearly, and running over an edanda and even falling into it once.” While he didn’t do much at his first school, St Joseph’s Boys College, he did take to athletics there. “St Joseph’s wasn’t endowed with proper infrastructure. Nevertheless, I did what I could with what I had.” In the end, having sat for his Grade Five Scholarship in 2010, he passed with a cool 179 marks and left for Royal College.

It was at Royal that he became enthralled by the prospect of going beyond just studies and taking to sports and societies. He began with basketball, shifted to badminton, got into the B team, and trained well enough to be considered a member of the A team, and by the sidelines played volleyball as well. But then he went for that boxing match. Naturally, he got confused. “What was I to do?” he asks me. “For months, I reflected on this issue. And then, in Grade Nine, two years after I watched that match, played with Trinity College, Kandy, I decided to box. By the time I joined the squad, however, selections for tournaments had been finalised. Half the year had gone by, and I had to spend the other half training.”

For the prospective school boxer there are, in Sri Lanka, various meets organised at the regional and national levels, but of them three stand out: in order, the L. V. Jayaweera Meet, the T. B. Jayah Meet, and the Stubbs Shield. In 2015, about eight months after he was selected for the squad at Royal, Vimuth got the chance to fight at the L. V. Jayaweera Meet. “I remember wading through the quarter and the semi finals, until I reached the finals, where I lost 2-1 to a boxer from Peradeniya Central. My weight category there was 46-48 kg. Then I was despatched to the T. B. Jayah Meet, again in the same weight category. There too I lost at the finals, and again with the same score as before. From there we left for the Stubbs Shield. My weight category was 48-50 kg. I managed to procure a Bronze Shield, but couldn’t go beyond the semi finals. I lost to a contender from Horana Vidyarathna. Ironically, the score happened to be 2-1 again.”

In 2015 they had practised at Pannala, which had a climate that was more or less similar to Colombo’s, and in 2016 they would practise, right before that year’s Stubbs Shield Tournament, at the colder and hence less easy to adapt to Diyathalawa. “I obviously couldn’t play at the L. V. Jayaweera again, given that I played before. But the T. B. Jayah and the Stubbs Shield were open to me. With respect to the former, I waded through until the semi finals, where I was taken aback by probably the most competitive contender I’ve encountered until now. He was from Dheerananda College in Kandy and he had a bodyline that was in many respects better than mine, though he was shorter than me. He could play well. I lost to him that day: 2-1. I have encountered him three times since then. That was the only time I lost to him.” According to Vimuth, this defeat proved to be a turning point: it helped him reflect on what he actually wanted to do.

“By this time I had stayed with the squad for over two years. I asked myself, ‘What have I done throughout all these years?’ When we went to Diyathalawa, I therefore resolved on improving myself. When we were sent home to rest afterwards, I watched as many boxing videos as I could, particularly with respect to taller players, to up my game-play. This was right before the Stubbs Shield. I obviously wasn’t going to go for a Bronze Shield. I needed to achieve more, much more. Diyathalawa, with its cold climate and the long walks we used to take every day to the playground and then to the gym, helped considerably there. So did the fact that we were coached that year by a new person, one Mr Anthony, who had a kind word for us no matter how badly we played. I think those factors contributed to my performance at the Shield, where I encountered that player from Dheerananda again, went through three rounds at the semis against him, and emerged as the winner with a score of 3-0, and as the champion in my weight class, 50-52 kg.”

That year, the Stubbs Shield turned 99. The following year, it turned 100. The problem was that Royal had lost for the last 30 years. Vimuth’s evolution as a contender on his own right, clearly, had a say in the squad’s determination to make the 100th Shield their moment. “We won the quarter finals. Of the eight players from our squad, six made it to the semi finals. We won there as well. At the finals, I encountered a player from Horana Vidyarathna. Earlier another team member, Ansaff Ahmed, had won a match we thought was tilted against him. The next fight was mine. That I won 5-0 helped, because it tilted the scales in our favour. If I had lost, not only would it have discouraged the squad, it would have meant that for us to win, we would have to go through three more encounters. We didn’t need to. Our captain became the Best Boxer, the Most Scientific, and just as importantly, we clinched the Shield after 30 long years.”

To my surprise, Vimuth tells me that after all these encounters, he considered himself done. “All I wanted to do was court victory for my school,” he tells me, “After that was over, I was asked to return to my studies, which I willingly obliged.” But the afterword which the Stubbs Shield compelled form him wasn’t done, at least not yet, so over the next six months, Vimuth was selected to represent the country at two foreign meets: one at Germany, last December, the other in Indonesia, in April this year. While he was unanimously selected along with a contingent from his Royal for the former, he had to undergo trials for the latter. “I loved Germany, but couldn’t get used to its cold climate. That’s why I was happy I got a Bronze Shield,” he remembers. As for Indonesia, the Asian Boxing Championship, he had toured with three other contenders.

Vimuth has other stories to relate, which we ought to delve into when they’ve completed their rounds the way his stints at boxing have. Not that those stints have ended. Far from it, I hope. “Over the last six years, I managed to discover myself. And not just in sports. Being part of various societies contributed too. In that sense I need to remember a few names, particularly my coaches, Mr Abdulla Ibunu, Mr Nisthar, and Mr Senarathna, along with our in more ways than one patron, Mr Lakshman Amarasekara. Then there is our Senior Games Master, Mr Riyaz Aluher, who took the trouble of accompanying us in Germany, and of course our Principal, Mr Abeyrathna. I am grateful to them all.”

Vimuth’s life so far has been adorned by scores, shields, trophies, and ranks. Will they blind him or empower him? I sincerely hope that they will empower him. As we all do.

Written for: The Island YOUth, May 20 2018

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

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