The Ernest Poruthota story

I am by nature an agnostic, though that doesn’t prevent me from indulging in nostalgia, the past, and the cultural histories of whatever work of art I delve into.

Once in a while, moreover, I love to meet priests and members of the clergy, whatever the denomination and in particular if they went beyond the pulpit and contributed to our cultural, social, and political firmament. Few, it must be said, did that, but while they are rare their contribution is so vast that words can’t sum it up.

Given the history of the Catholic Church in this country, it’s natural that it left behind a cultural legacy. Not many have recorded or archived that legacy, or for that matter added to it, but the few who have were censured by (for the lack of a better term) the Establishment. They spent the better part of their lives undergoing punishment for various petty intransigencies, which I assume is more or less a given if they privilege their individuality over the social and religious institutions they are supposed to declare fealty to.

I once called Father Ernest Poruthota a rebel in a cassock. I suspect I was not very far behind the truth there. No one who has studied the history and nature of religious institutions, after all, will deny that those who house them are compelled to privilege them first and only then look at other paths and vocations. Father Poruthota, on the other hand, always yearned to give something back to the land of his birth, in both the political and cultural spheres. I am no fan of the political, so I will pass by that. The cultural aspect to Poruthota’s life, on the other hand, should compel comment.

He was born Raymond Ernest Alexander Poruthota in the village of Marawila in the Puttalam district. His father had taught for some time at the Government Teachers’ College in Maggona before being transferred to Marawila. Young Ernest had studied at the Marawila Boys School, and later at St Xavier’s College. “I was not quite 12 when my parents, who came to believe that my vocation lay in the Church, decided to send me to the seminary in Borella,” he tells me. I ask whether he himself wanted to enter the priesthood, and with an emphatic “Yes!” he allays my doubts. “That doesn’t mean I cut myself from the secular world, of course,” he adds by way of inserting a caveat, “Especially since I was enthralled by the arts.”

It was around 1942 that he joined the seminary, where he spent the next few years witnessing the end of the war and the clamour for independence. Apparently he and his colleagues had been taken on compulsory walks every Thursday. In 1948, they had gone on one such walk to Torrington Square, where they had come across the unveiling of the National Flag at the independence ceremony. Poruthota had been awed by the whole event: “More than the historical significance of it all, what really appealed to me were the decorations, the colour, and the liveliness. I was so awed by them that when we returned, I set about replicating the decorations using crepe paper.” I ask him as to whether this was on account of the artiste in him. “Maybe,” he smiles.

Those who know the man and those who have heard of him would contend that he forayed intensely into the cinema. They are correct. On the other hand, I’ve always wondered how it was that a man of the cloth, with all the restrictions that religious institutions usually place on their members, was allowed to indulge in such a plebeian and secular art form. I asked this from the man himself, and he was ready to explain. “Films were, of course, forbidden at the seminary. By an irony of fate however, the Church did sanction us going into the theatres, provided that what we watched were Christian religious epics.”

I put to him that given the preponderance of such epics in the American cinema, he and his colleagues would have imbibed the work of Cecil B. DeMille, William Wyler, and a horde of other such filmmakers. He agrees. “We revelled in such films as The Song of Bernadette, Quo Vadis, The Ten Commandments, and of course Ben Hur.” In later years, he would of course graduate to other directors, although his love for religious themes never evaded him. That probably explains his love for Bergman, Dreyer, and Bresson, three of the most spiritual artistes the cinema ever bred.

His contribution to our cinema in later years, one can hardly deny, was immense. He called for an indigenous cinema. He wrote. He critiqued. He had his champions and he had his critics. Some argued that a man of the Church should not engage with the secular world. In the end, however, he was vindicated. Not only was a book of his, Chitrapati Gana (translated as An Aesthetic Evaluation of the Cinema), published and read widely, his campaign for a national film awards ceremony overseen by the Catholic Church was affirmed when he was appointed as the first National Director of the OCIC (which later morphed into SIGNIS).

What of his other achievements? He was a founding member of the Film Critics and Journalists Association of Sri Lanka, formed in 1968. Before he became its National Director, he was also the founder of the Sri Lankan branch of the OCIC. There probably are a great many other such laurels he can claim, but I leave the task of explicating on them to the biographer.

I am more interested in his views on the arts. I ask him as to whether he agrees with the thesis (forwarded by critics like Harold Bloom and, closer to home, my friend Dhanuka Bandara) that a work of art should be judged purely in terms of its inherent aesthetic merit, and not content. He disagrees. “First and foremost, a play, a film, or even a book must spiritually elevate its ‘rasikaya’. In fact that is the main criterion we have at SIGNIS.” I put to him here that even secular works of art, authored by atheists and humanists, have merit which can hardly be attributed to spirituality. Being the mild-tempered man he is, he agrees, with a caveat: “If an artiste is not religiously inclined, his work must at least have a human element.”

From here I move on to a theme that has arguably engaged him the most over the years: censorship. Given his lifelong and austere stand on the matter, I am not surprised by his views, which even brought him into conflict with the Church. The man clearly practices what he preaches, as seen in how he went to watch films as a seminarian: “We were neither allowed nor forbidden to watch films. I went to see them unsure of whether they were allowed for a would-be priest. This was true especially in the 1960s, when we had many European directors revolutionising the cinema as we knew it then thanks to the so-called ‘New Wave.’ Morals and conventions of any sort were being defied and that became more or less the norm. Clearly, they were hardly congruent with what the Church deemed as ‘good films’. Nevertheless, I saw them.”

He has certainly defied authority over the years, thanks to his lifelong belief in freedom for the artiste, a point he succinctly brings up when he argues, “There should be no censorship. Not by the government, not by the Church.” An argument I can happily accord with, certainly, though that does not absolve the deterioration the arts have been subjected to by those who compromise on content for the sake of a castrated, contorted form and in turn for the sake of scooping up awards from every nook and corner with overused themes and controversy. I was not, sadly, able to put to him this latter point, though I am sure he would disagree with me vehemently.

Father Poruthota the archivist, compiler, writer, and appreciator, for me personally, is easier to sketch out than Father Poruthota the priest. An appreciator, however, deserves appreciation, which is what we as a nation are yet to pay him unconditionally. Sure, he has won tokens and has been coveted. But is it enough, we should ask ourselves. He has crisscrossed the entirety of this country, seen its people, absorbed from them, and given back tremendously. We are not ungrateful. We shouldn’t be.

Photo by Upul Devapriya

Written for: The Island LIFESTYLE, November 13 2016

International schools: issues, problems, myths, and drivel

Patali Champika Ranawaka, at a convention held last week, spoke on private education and the Kannangara reforms. He spoke on international schools and argued that they should either be closed down or be integrated with the country. That is pertinent but certainly does raise some hairs.

He then implied that while we shouldn’t go on a rampage and shut down such schools in a hurry, nevertheless their proliferation must not be at the cost of (culturally and socially) castrating our children. That too is pertinent and that too raises some hairs.

This is not the first time this year that Ranawaka has expressed such sentiments on the subject. At a ceremony held at the BMICH last July, he spoke along the same lines, arguing that the need of the hour in Sri Lanka was a localised education system in English. He was concerned about the rapid and unchecked proliferation of international schools in the country and said as much, adding that such schools did not always provide the qualitatively superior education we as a nation should promote. Again, pertinent.

The most frequent allegation levelled against private education is that it hides inequalities and disparities between students under a fiction of equality. That is true. Merit is not the leveller, profit is. Ranawaka spoke on the SAITM crisis as well, and cautioned against the recent rise of private medical colleges, but for the time being his remarks on international schools merit scrutiny for the simple reason that while one doesn’t have to throw the baby with the bathwater when it comes to English medium education in this country, at times it’s difficult to distinguish between the baby and the bathwater when it comes to international schools.

There currently are two perspectives when it comes to these schools. The first is that they are not regulated properly and hence, tend to compromise on quality. That’s the administrative argument. The second, echoed by rabble-rousing nationalists, is that they uproot our children and more often than not impart an English education in an elitist atmosphere. That’s the cultural argument. The latter tends to privilege rhetoric over reason, while the former presents its own solution at once: regulate and subject such schools to the control of an administrative body.

I think it’s safe to say that the Board of Investment (BOI) is more concerned about profit-making entities than about the potential of such institutions to provide quality education. The simple fact of the matter is, it’s difficult to keep a tab on them: they are everywhere and they can be set up anywhere. It takes more time to set up a school under the Ministry of Education, after all, than it does to set up a company or business organisation.

In the end, naturally enough, when it comes to recruitment, selection, and pedagogy, teachers are very often behind their expected skills level and therefore, leave much to be desired. I am, of course, not talking about established international schools, which have (as Professor Rajiva Wijesingha once aptly put it) set up their own administrative systems and checks and balances that actually surpass their counterparts in the public sector by a considerable margin.

Does this absolve the public sector? I don’t think so. Ranawaka spoke for an education system in which economic, caste, and gender disparities were done away with. He forgot to mention ethnic and religious disparities (he should have), but that’s another story. He also argued for a system whereby the government and the private sector would hold hands (which is another way of saying that the government should personally step in and create a market for education). On the other hand, I don’t believe that this should be taken to whitewash our public schools.

And it’s not hard to see why. Administratively they are centralised and their authority is vested in the government. One need only flip through the archives to see how the likes of Professor Wijesingha faced difficulties when reintroducing the English medium to our schools. To the argument that we were doing our children a disservice by depriving them of access to the language, administrators (with probably the most intelligent of responses they could come up with) retorted that the elite managed to learn English while studying in the vernacular! In a context where bureaucracy was privileged and innovation (at best) was marginalised, hence, I think it’s safe to say that what ails our local education system is precisely what thrives in the private sector: flexibility.

Yes, quality shouldn’t dip. But is quality the preserve of the public sector? Not by a long shot. I mentioned Professor Wijesingha’s attempt at reintroducing the English medium here. I think the best example for how and why inefficiencies remain in the system is the way English is taught here. I argued in a previous column, or rather implied, that as a subject that language is probably the easiest to get through in the local curriculum. And yet, year after year, the fail rate for it never goes below 50 percent. The pass rate barely goes above 45 percent. Why?

Forget maladministration. I don’t think bad administrators necessarily compromise on good teachers. Good teachers, however, are hard to get. Time and time again, I have come across testimonies from students, of how teachers fudge it at their job, how they differentiate between those who can learn quickly and those who can’t, and how, in this process, the latter get marginalised. In a context where classrooms sometimes pack up to 50 students I personally don’t think one can expect miracles from teachers, but despite this I wonder: why is a language that’s taught “Our Way” so hard to pass?

The truth, not surprisingly, is unpalatable: either teachers are not adequately compensated or worse, they don’t care. Those who rubbish international schools tend to ignore the harsh truths rampant in the public sphere: unmotivated staff, desensitised children, and all those other realities which don’t exactly seem as paradisiacal as defenders of the sector tout them as. We’ve lost the “free” in free education, but instead of trying to regain it we are content in vilifying the private sector. Nothing could be more fallacious. Despite its varying quality standards, in terms of procurement of textbooks, administration, and efficiency the non-governmental education sector (or to be more precise, industry) are, I can say honestly, ahead.

Let’s not forget, after all, that international schools cater not to the elite (and I will come to this presently) but to those who a) are generally affluent (all in all, from the middle class, subject of course to preferences framed by social background) and b) are not able to get their children into local schools. It’s about demand and meeting that demand. It’s about business as well, but in this vast, interminable, and globalised world of ours I doubt one can generalise by saying that such schools should be banned. And as for the argument that quality dips: of course it does, but I don’t see the kind of rampant corruption, nepotism, and rush to get one’s offspring admitted by hook or crook that I see elsewhere.

Now take the cultural argument. In a context where anything with the “international” label tagged on tends to cast aside the “national”, it makes sense to surmise that international schools follow a curriculum far removed from that of our country. However, going by the logic of those who love to hate these institutions, what is it exactly about them that their critics take to task?

On one level I think it’s the language. More often than not, these critics echo their visceral distrust of English (in general) in their even more visceral distrust of international schools. On another level, it’s history: the latter are decidedly more recent and hence, less endowed by a history to make them immune to attack. About 10 years ago, for instance, a newspaper could see it fit to editorialise the issue by claiming superiority for established schools, in effect implying that the so-called cream of the crop in the country’s social, economic, and political spheres were and continue to be produced by them. In other words, international schools are culturally uprooted because they lack a tradition of their own, not (as it should be) because their more established counterparts elsewhere inculcate local values in their students.

So it’s not even a question of history, it’s a question of tradition! If it’s about inculcating traditional values, these critics should be fixated and more concerned about the lack of facilities in the Madya Maha Vidyalayas and the deplorable deficits in academic achievement between Colombo and (among other districts) Moneragala (the latter of which consistently ranks low in several economic and social indicators). They are not.

The truth is that they are captivated by tradition, not history stricto sensu, and in their irrational phobia of international schools on the basis of culture (or the lack thereof) they forget one key point: that these institutions provide an opt-out point for those with cash who couldn’t enter the local stream, as much as the outstation local school provided an opt-out point for those without cash. Same problem, different solutions.

Forget all that. I still don’t buy this cultural argument. What is there about the “cream of the crop” that makes them nationalists? What is it about the cream that warrants praise? A perusal of history will convince anyone that (and I say this at the cost of simplifying an already simplified argument) culture was not the product of the “cream” but the “outsider”, the vilified villager trashed as unrefined and uneducated by the same elite who came from (supposedly) superior institutions. No, I am not ranting, because perceptions tend to explain those who subscribe to them and the elite (real and imagined), going by this, are (almost) as uprooted as those they love to deride as, yes, culturally uprooted.

The only reason why the second argument would make sense is that international schools don’t teach history and the vernacular languages. In other words, they promote the kind of snobbery that established schools used to in those dark, colonial days. That is true. The solution, however, isn’t to insist on their removal (we are sadly not the frogs in the well we used to be, and because of this accursed reality called “globalisation” we have to have the cake and suffer it when it comes to English) but to regulate. At any rate, the international schools rampantly growing in every nook and corner of the country don’t operate on Cambridge and Edexcel but rather operate on the local curriculum, so (as I implied before) those trashing such institutions forget that they don’t always teach the Englishman’s syllabus but in fact teach the same subjects that state schools do.

There’s a person who teaches English at a school in Kurunegala. His name is Wilbert Ranasinghe and he starts his class at five in the morning. He is so thorough with his subject that all his students, and by all I mean ALL, speak, write, and read the language almost perfectly. No, they don’t speak with an accent and no, they don’t consider the language as the exclusive possession of a few for a few, but they use it as they would a kitchen utensil: for the moment, for its use, and not for the privileges it (apparently) brings.

Meanwhile, their more established counterparts in Colombo and the metropolis (by which I include those in international schools) struggle with a language they are taught from their infanthood, and along the way fail probably the easiest paper in the entire local syllabus. An irony of fate, I believe. No, not because the one lags behind the other, but because the latter, despite their inability to wield English, consider themselves to be the elite, those who have a say in the cultural discourse and take it as their monopoly.

I think we are focusing on the wrong issue(s). We’ve confused tradition for history. We think we know which institutions breed and perpetuate culture when we don’t. We are so entranced by tradition that we don’t (or rather, can’t) know who will breed that culture: not the elite (the new or the old) but the outsider.

Yes, I am raising some hairs. But the sooner we turn away from the dichotomy between the state and the private sector in education (and this goes for private universities as well), the sooner we’ll be able to concentrate on disparities in the former. The quickest way to bring that about, common sense should dictate, is heeding what the likes of Ranawaka have been telling us all along: not to close such institutions in the private sector, but to bring them closer to “our way of life.” That, ladies and gentlemen, is less about complete erasure than about regulation. And regulation, while we’re at it, needs reason. Not rhetoric.

Uditha Devapriya is a freelance writer who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com

For those who sing and move us

When Rukmani Devi died, there was an outpouring of grief. People took to the streets, cried, sobbed, and 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 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 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. His work cut across to every community, caste, and creed. This is not a tribute to Amaradeva, though.

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 visited Kala Bavana and then visited the street painters outside who made it their mission to display what they drew to the general public. It was probably an irony that they’d chosen to display them 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 fact is that in our rush to praise artiness we’ve 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 don’t think everyone will agree that it was a musical voice, but the truth of the matter is that it entranced us nevertheless. 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 one other boy. His parents were not musically inclined: his father was a tailor, his mother 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 owned 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 for years to come: Radio Ceylon, where he was taken in to sing duets with two of the most demanded playback singers at the time, Wasantha Sandanayake and G. S. B. 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. Eventually, he made it.

His next big break came with Lester James Peries’ Sandeshaya, where he sang 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, fell in love, and fought. It would of course be futile to try and list all his credits here, 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 Indian songs (among them, “Chandra Me Ra Paya Awa” and “Adare Hithanawa 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 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 at 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. Amaradeva is said to have 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 to 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, Jothi came over, recorded once, and left. The recording was perfect and, moreover, 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 man with some humility. After all, he couldn’t have come across a vocalist like this before. In the meantime the song, “Kanden Kandata”, became popular, as did the film, Tharanga.

That was Jothipala. Didn’t pretend. Didn’t need to. He came and did what was asked. Just like that.

He sang for other composers too, among them Khemadasa (who purposely, in song after song, toned down his voice, the same thing he did with that other sought after vocalist, M. S. Fernando). He sang for other lyricists as well, prime among them Ajantha Ranasinghe and Karunaratne Abeysekara. He had his encounters and he faced them with an undying sense of humility. Time and time again, I have come across stories of how he would give away those gifts he was bestowed with by the public, how he wouldn’t refrain from helping a friend. Yes, that was a time when such things happened. That time, we will probably never see again.

In the meantime, he went on. His work proved so popular that he organised his own concert, "Jothi Rathriya", in the eighties. He was so much in demand that he’d sing far in excess of what he was paid for, in concert after concert. Naturally, people drew to him.

He received the Sarasavi Award for Best Playback Singer in 1982 and in 1985 and when Ranasinghe Premadasa launched his flagship project, “Gam Udawa”, he sang for that as well. It was at one "Gam Udawa" concert that he collapsed. On the 8th of July, 1987, at the rather premature age of 51, he left us.

His funeral, needless to say, was huge. People came and wept. Some proclaimed, “You are immortal!” They were correct. They still are. For the thing with Jothipala was that he blended in with whatever actor and whatever lyricist he sang for. In the end, those songs became his.

And when that happened, they became ours as well.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, November 9 2016

Sanchitha Wickremesooriya: Harvesting and reaping rhythm

I was not musical as a child. My only encounter with the subject was through Miss Helen, the prim, proper, no-nonsense music teacher who tried to get me into the choir at my school, Lyceum. She couldn’t (or to be more accurate, I didn’t let her). Music wasn’t my forte then and it’s safe to say that after all these years, I am (almost) as tone-deaf as I was as a child. That probably explains why I tend to look up to musicians, especially the more prodigious among them and especially as I realise that they are more endowed than I am with the ability to harvest the most universal art-form the world has ever known.

And when those musicians and music lovers happen to be young, I tend to look up to them even more.

Just the other day I met Sanchitha Wickremesooriya. He’s young, he bristles with energy, and he’s fired with a sort of enthusiasm I haven’t come across others his age. He needs no introduction, no real CV. He prefers to stay out of the limelight while courting fame, the kind of music lover who’s quietly harvesting what he’s done. For that reason, I “notice” him even more, and as I go through his life and the anecdotes that colour it, I can’t help but think, “Here’s someone to reckon with!”

Sanchitha has a background and comes from a family that contributed to the music industry of this country, but right at the beginning of the interview he brushes off all that as he recounts his story. He was, as I expected, musically inclined as a child. “My parents tell me that long before I learnt to talk and read and write, I’d go to a corner behind the cupboard and, well, sing and draw,” he chortles, “I started going for classes at the Mary Anne School of Vocal Music when I was four-and-a-half years old.”

He later joined the choir at his school (Royal College), which had not been your typical school choir. “We even indulged in pop music,” he remembers, adding that almost every teacher had encouraged his passion for the subject. “When you have so many teachers who inspired your later career, it’s hard to point at one name in particular.”

After he completed his A Levels (in Commerce), he was on tenterhooks, deciding eventually to join his family business and in possible, be a vocalist himself. His parents, however, had been adamant that he pursue his interests academically. “They didn’t push me to conventional subjects like Engineering or Medicine. However, they insisted that I should combine all what I’d done academically. In that sense their advice was sound, particularly when I left for the United States and landed at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.”

Berklee had been an eye-opener. “It was more or less a different world. The culture-shock was a little hard to adapt to. Not that I can’t adapt, but I’m not a big fan of changing myself to suit another way of life. That’s why the first three months there were challenging. Moreover, Berklee attracted the best and got the best: not every Tom, Dick, and Harry could enter it. I had to contend with that as well. Yes, I guess it was all existential, but soon enough I decided to fast-track my Degree and after completing it, return home.” Not that he dislikes the country: “I love the United States and its people, but I don’t think I’d want to live there.”

What of the Degree itself? “I originally wanted to be a performer. In fact for some time I did perform at Berklee, when I got together with some friends of mine and formed a band called ‘The Indian Ensemble.’ But when I realised the sacrifices that vocalists had to make, not in terms of money or capital but in terms of the moral and physical investment, I changed my mind. That’s why I went for a Degree which combined commerce and music: Music Business and Entrepreneurship.”

I ask him about what went into the Degree. “Well, it’s essentially what I learnt for A Level Commerce, only this time from the perspective of the music industry. So you’d study Economics and Accountancy in terms of, say, a record store. It was quite interesting, especially since I learnt how commerce and music could cohabit. I mean, think of it this way: there are factors that go into the music industry of a given country, not just demographics but ethnicity and religious bent as well. In the end, those factors help explain the success or failure of a single or album or performer.”

I confess that it’s difficult to unveil his perspectives on our music industry. For starters, Sanchitha argues that we can’t really claim an “industry” of our own. “The market here is dominated by a few powerful players. It’s monopolistic. Whoever goes up stays up and tries his level best to degrade newcomers. I am not saying that it was perfect world before my time, but back then things were more amenable to young blood. Everything’s cutthroat and competitive now.”

I put to him that these problems may all be economic, but he disagrees. “It’s futile to blame economics on every form of deterioration. There are other factors. For instance, why do aspiring vocalists want to make it big in the West? What does ‘make it big in the West’ mean anyway? Does it mean making the cut in the USA, in which case you are ignoring tons of other musical forms from Europe, or does it mean imitating what little you know from that part of the world?”

Not that he finds fault with those who harbour such ambitions. “In music as with life, there’s no one correct answer or solution. There’s nothing wrong in trying to hit it big in the West. The problem is one of motivation. Why would you want to do this? Can you or should you do that? More often than not, these up-and-coming artistes see the world in terms of the West, and have no desire to create something of their own in Sri Lanka. The most they would have heard from the US, for instance, would have been an Ariana Grande song, in which case they’ve merely scratched the surface.”

And in a way, that reflects the kind of songs one comes across here. According to Sanchitha there broadly are two trends musicians here go for today: stereotypical love songs that rip off the West and the more plebeian bus tunes. Again, he sees no reason for lament: “It’s all basically a choice. For me, a song’s primary aim is to put out there what’s in you. As long as you’ve achieved that, it doesn’t matter what you put out.”

He then goes on to add that in music, as with other art-forms, there’s little possibility of enforcing tastes on audiences. I tell him here that this truism of his can’t hold when it comes to propaganda.

He disagrees. “Propaganda is a strong word. For me, songs can only be forced on listeners if someone is holding a gun to their heads. Otherwise, they can always choose to shut them out even if they’re broadcast everywhere.” He also disagrees with those who differentiate between the aesthetic and the political in music. “I am opposed to those who say that songs should make you happy. Why must music appeal to only happiness? Aren’t we endowed with other emotions, which a song can provoke?”

All this offers much for reflection. I suspect Sanchitha wants to compel just that in us. He’s noticeably cheerful as we near the end of our interview. “I come from quite a quirky, unconventional family. We don’t look for monetary recompense with what we do and we certainly haven’t made money a primary motive. Sure, my grandfather Gerald, who founded the Sooriya record label, had a business acumen not many can claim. He brought music and commerce together in ways which entranced the ‘commoners’ and astounded the ‘elite’. That however doesn’t mean he compromised on artistry. We have much to learn from him, to be honest.”

He concludes with some rather prophetic words. “The States, regardless of whether one likes to live there or not, is amenable to those who experiment in music. I saw this for myself. Here you see someone experiment and think, ‘If we can’t do what he does, he is inferior to us.’ I suppose that’s as close-minded as you can get, but the sad truth is that that’s the kind of mentality you come across everywhere. We’ve conditioned ourselves to react prudishly to pop music and fusion and for that reason, it takes time for innovation to get rooted here.”

It’s all about passion and freeing oneself from the shackles of conformity, one can therefore infer. All about discovering self, going forward, and creating a precedent. Maybe it’s impossible to jot all that down in words, or for that matter one article. Maybe it’s time to stop reading and go for it. Just like that.

Written for: The Island YOUth, November 6 2016

Amaradeva: the Voice of the Nation for the Nation

His songs roll off the tongue easily, as though their lyrics were stuck in our throats and needed his melodies to be unleashed. They are addressed to us, the collective “we”, the entire country, in ways few singers have or ever will.

There must be a secret to this, and I don’t deny that, but the truth of the matter is that he has tapped into the collective unconscious of the nation remarkably well. Wherever he has been and whatever he has contributed has been etched across our minds forever. He is immortal, in whatever he has sung and whatever he has written.

He is Amaradeva.

I remember arguing once with a music lover over the “ultimate” aim of a song. He put to me that music (and indeed art) will be vindicated only when it runs parallel with the “truth”.

I asked him to elaborate on this. He obliged. Truth, he contended, was political and hence defied the “saundarya” (aesthetic) quality music is filled with. He argued that songs would “dig” into us only as long as they drifted away from what he called the “indifference of the aesthete.”

I begged to differ, needless to say. I told him that as long as songs made us reflect, and as long as songs which talked about political realities were aesthetically crafted, they would gain popular appeal. Otherwise, they would be so specific to the time and place they were made in that they would lose popularity as time passed. I brought up some singers. He brought up some singers. We argued, and heavily so.

Then we got to Amaradeva. The man quietened down rather quickly, and stopped arguing. I tried to bring him back to the debate, but he hemmed and hawed and left. No, I didn’t even have to go on to prove what I was saying. And yet, just like that, I won that day. How?

I wish I knew.

There are some songs which remain alive in our memory no matter what. There’s a reason for this, obviously. Perhaps they dig deep into the reserves of our minds in a way no political song ever can. And so, those who criticise them as being too indifferent, too aesthetically crafted, are not telling the whole story. They are partial. What they say and think, hence, cannot last. Not for long.

Amaradeva’s songs cut across any divide, real or imagined. They at once beckon what we secretly nurture in ourselves. “Sasara Wasana Thuru”, for example, reflects our collective wish to be born in this country, frail and fragile though it is, over and over again. It is our “pathuma”, our wish, that we are brought up on this soil and return to it even when our remains disappear. Yes, it’s a collective wish. The same kind of wish Amaradeva sings about in countless other songs, penned by him or by other illustrious lyricists, prime among them Mahagama Sekara.

It’s not just songs of course. The true worth of the man, I feel, is to be seen in how he has imbibed different styles and idioms to present a truly “Sri Lankan” music.

Take those films he has scored, for instance. I remember the first theme of his I listened to. It was from Gamperaliya. I remember the opening sequence of that film, the music tuned perfectly to a potter ambling his way along the Koggala coast. There came a point in that film when its theme took on a life of its own and exemplified a nostalgic attitude to the way of life it was portraying, something the critic Philip Cooray noted when he wrote just how dirge-like the score was.

There were other films, other scores. There was Delovak Athara, a world away from Gamperaliya in terms of mood, scored completely by a Western orchestra. Amaradeva’s theme for that film was unique and for its time, unsurpassable. In its orchestration, its mood and texture, I realised at once how eclectic, how flexible, the man was in his ability to weave together different musical traditions. This and nothing more accounted for my love for his music. And songs.

He didn’t do it all alone, by the way. There were songwriters, as I pointed out before. There were also filmmakers, whose vision he would perhaps absorb when scoring their works. I haven’t come across very many Sinhala films to identify what would constitute the best musical score, but Thunman Handiya came very close to it. There was that same nostalgia, that same bittersweet dirge, which went in line with the film’s story. I wasn’t surprised by the fact that Mahagama Sekara had directed it. Yes, Sekara. The “gee potha” (“book of verse”) to Amaradeva’s “mee vitha” (“glass of wine”).

I haven’t met him personally, however. Still, I have come to terms with the fact that one does not need to meet him to savour him. His attitude to music is at once recognisable in any of his songs. To him, and I’m pretty sure of this, music cannot be defined. It cannot be put down in words, as a novel or poem can, and it cannot be replaced by textbooks or academic treatises. He has written of how he has made communicating his innermost feelings through music his “jeevana pranidhana” (life mission). Nothing could be truer. I have heard the man more than I have read him. He is music exemplified. He doesn’t need a biographer. His voice and melodies are his life.

This isn’t all. At a time when trends change and change fast, his is the voice of sanity that prevails. I’ve talked with friends of all races, of all religions, be they Muslim, Tamil, or Burgher. They all love him. They have made it a point to sing one of his songs whenever chance permits, the most popular being “Ratna Deepa Janma Bhumi” (for some reason). They have all committed his lyrics to memory, probably more so than those of any other artist dead or alive. I can’t think of any other singer who has inspired my countrymen this much. Maybe Sunil Shantha, or even C. T. Fernando. I don’t know.

Each of his songs pithily embodies a human condition. “Nim Him Sewwa” speaks to the lover in us, hoping that one day she who is sought will return to us, forever. “Ran Dahadiya” is about the sweat and toil, the dignity, of the goviya who sustains us in a way we will never be able to pay back. “Sannaliyane” is about the inevitable vicissitudes faced by a weaver who weaves for the living and the dead. “Siripa Piyume” tunes in perfectly with the pilgrim’s progress to the Holy Peak of Samanalakanda (Adam’s Peak). They are timeless, true, but are also ingrained with a Sinhala Buddhist ethos which at once cuts across to every community in our land.

He’s much more than a singer or composer. I don’t need to write down his CV for you. It’s there for everyone to see. He was there when Queen Elizabeth wanted a national anthem for the Maldives. He was there in the Philippines when he was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay award. He was there, with his beloved wife adding to what he said and sang by his side, more than one month ago (October 2014), at the BMICH, performing for and with the Music Circle of Ananda College. He was there, everywhere. We saw him, and when we did, a kind of hush came over us. That hush I’m yet to see with another singer or artist, whether from here or elsewhere.

The truth is, and this I’m sure of, that he is a national force. He remains alive in us and in the memory of those who cherish him. If it’s about bringing together different communities, be it on either side of the racial or religious divide, no greater unifying force can be found. For he has touched what academic theses cannot, that timeless, space-less wish which resides in every human being: the wish to capture emotion and give it to the world (as he put it once) with no antipathies to any community. He is a communicator, a tool for harmony, and wherever he may be, he exudes that charm and humility which immediately draw us, whoever we are, to him.

He is Amaradeva. The Voice of the Nation, for the Nation. He turns 87 today. May we all put our hands together. May we all wish him: “Chiran Jayathu!”

This was published in the now defunct ESCAPE magazine on December 5, 2014. He had just turned 87 then. He would have been 89 next month.