Bandula Nanayakkarawasam

“I was in Grade Four when Sunil Ariyaratne wrote ‘Sakura Mal Pipila’. That song first made me realise how abstract music could be. In later years, as he and Nanda Malini went on to endeavours like Sathyaye Geethaya and Pavana, I matured. Even now, when you listen to ‘Perahera Enawa’, you feel nothing but admiration for a man who rebelled against tradition and order in what he wrote.

By Uditha Devapriya

Tissa Abeysekara once called Bandula Nanayakkarawasam “the brightest spark in the fifth generation of contemporary Sinhala songwriters.” He didn’t name the five generations, but he did observe that their ancestry began with Ananda Samarakoon. With this we can try to chart the evolution of 20th century songwriters in terms of the singers who embodied those generations: Samarakoon, Sunil Shantha, Amaradeva, Victor Ratnayake, and T. M. Jayaratne, Sanath Nandasiri, and Neela Wickramasinghe among others.

By doing so we can also discern the cultural, social, and political impulses that distinguished each of these periods: Samarakoon by the gramophone Tower Hall culture; Shantha by the Hela Havula, led by its two chief heralds Munidasa Cumaratunga and Raphael Tennakoon; Amaradeva by the post-war generation of lyricists, Mahagama Sekara, Madawala S. Ratnayake, and Chandrarathna Manawasinghe being the definitive trio; Victor by the first post-1956 generation wave, epitomised by Premakeerthi de Alwis, K. D. K. Dharmawardena, Sunil Ariyaratne, and Ajantha Ranasinghe; and those who followed them among the second post-1956 generation, among them Bandula Nanayakkarawasam, Lucian Bulathsinghala, Buddhadasa Galappaththy, and the great Ratna Sri Wijesinghe. I see Jackson Anthony has described Nanayakkarawasam as the last of his kind. If he’s not quite the last of his kind, he’s certainly the last anyone will be able to equal.

It’s important to locate Nanayakkarawasam in the wider social and cultural landscape of the country. The generation who followed the likes of Sunil Ariyaratne and Ajantha Ranasinghe were witnesses to some of the most widely felt changes in the economy: the adoption of free market policies, the privatisation of the cinema that democratised cultural tastes and standards, and the introduction of television that would eventually cripple the theatre and cinema. While earlier generations had found employment in the universities (Ariyaratne) and journalism (Ranasinghe), the new artistes, by dint of these vast changes, were compelled to seek refuge in the private sector; the State could no longer insure them against the vagaries of the economy. In this context, Nanayakkarawasam would take the occasional leave from his bank, come to Colombo, and record his show aboard the SLBC.

In fact, most of these artistes, working from nine to five, had to prioritise their employment over their artistic pursuits. Nanayakkarawasam was no exception. Palitha Perera, reflecting on his days in the SLBC, remembers trying to get the man “to do his own programmes in Colombo” and failing to entice him to leave his fulltime job at the bank.

The biggest irony was when Madawala S. Ratnayake decided to take Nanayakkarawasam to his programme Yawwana Samajaya; as with other attempts, this too failed to get the man to leave his banking career. For Palitha though, it was more a fortunate coincidence than a missed opportunity: “Given what happened to the SLBC later on, it was Bandula’s luck that he didn’t end up wasting away here.” I’m sure that Bandula, being the self-effacing man he is, would disagree, but I am convinced, given the plight the likes of Palitha fell into in later years, that it was his luck which kept him away.

Nanayakkarawasam was born in Galle, around two or three kilometres from town. His childhood was, in his own words, quite fortunate in terms of the education he received. His first encounter with music had been a large Mullard radio bought by his uncle, a connoisseur of the arts who had apparently been a collector of rare items and instruments. “Since we lived at a time when not even the richest families from our neighbourhood owned a radio, big or small, owning a Mullard was certainly a big deal.”

The contraption had entranced young Bandula in more ways than one. “Back then we had just two local services run by one station, Radio Ceylon. It was on this radio that I first ‘obtained’ an education in music. I was also the youngest in my family by a wide margin, my podi akka being eight years older than me. Naturally, I was a bit of a loner in my house, and in my free time, which I never lacked even when I was at school, I used to place my ears on it and listen to songs.” He jokingly tells me that he once believed that the singers and announcers who sang and spoke were hidden in that device: “So when I listened to it during a thunderstorm and loku akka warned me that when lightning struck it would break apart, I honestly believed her. At the time I would have been five.”

I ask him whether he looked for the lyrics in a song. “Not really. We first hear a tune, then a voice, then a name. It was in my time that people like Victor Ratnayake and Sanath Nandasiri emerged. Amaradeva came before them. As a child I went for Victor’s songs because of his voice.” I put to him that the likes of Victor emerged as a result of the efforts Amaradeva made. “Yes. It was thanks to Victor that we realised how poetic Amaradeva’s lyrics were. But poetry didn’t figure highly in me then.”

His interest in the arts developed beyond music. His father, a firm leftist and an avid reader, would give him as much as 100 rupees to buy books. “I used to go to a store owned by a man called Lionel and purchase as much as I could, because back then a book cost four rupees.” He would get hooked on to Russian literature, which he says made him see the world in a different light, even through translation. “We had novels, short story collections, and poetry published by Progress Publishers. I indulged in them all.”

Young Bandula was sent to Richmond College, where his teachers inculcated in him a wider appreciation of what he’d grown to love. “One of my English teachers was a man called W. S. Bandara. He introduced me to the English translations of Chekhov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev. It was then that I realised how woefully inadequate our translators were. Of course there were exceptions like K. G. Karunathilaka, but barring them the others didn’t feel the text they were working on.”

Apparently the radio figured so much in his life that he couldn’t really do without it even when studying. “A man called Jinasena lent me some flexible wires, which I then used on an American speaker which belonged to my uncle. Our house overlooked a wel yaya. When I listened to the radio in my room while studying Arithmetic, that wel yaya was always in my sight. That was the kind of childhood and education I had.” As he grew up though, it wasn’t just songs that he listened to but other programmes too: E. W. Adikaram’s Vidya Dahanaya, Mahinda Ranaweera’s Sithijaya, Lucien Bulathsinghala’s Sandella, H. M. Gunasekera’s Irida Sangrahaya, and Tissa Abeysekara’s Art Magazine. It should be mentioned that Bandula got to host Irida Sangrahaya in the 1980s, “a happy coincidence given that my father, who grew up listening to Gunasekara with me, was now listening to his son presenting it.”

Curious as to what his tastes were, I then ask whether he differentiated between “low” and “high” art. “That came later. But back then we read and we exchanged newspapers with our neighbours.

So we weren’t completely ignorant of this divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. For instance, I came across Jayawilal Wilegoda’s articles on the cinema. Wilegoda lambasted Sinhala films that imitated Bollywood. People like him were asking questions like how a popular verse like ‘jeevithaye kanthare thurunu wiyali walle uthura gala yayi adare’ made sense, when they didn’t. By the time we grew up and passed adolescence, we knew about this divide. The important thing is it didn’t intimidate us.”

Bandula’s reference to films isn’t arbitrary: even the cinema had entranced him. To put all his encounters here would be impossible, though. Suffice it to say that he entertained the idea of being a scriptwriter at one point, even getting into the Sri Lanka Television Training Institute (or SLTTI) along with Sumitra Rahubadda, K. B. Herath, and Douglas Siriwardena. “I was taught by Tissa Abeysekara.” Notwithstanding his stints at the SLTTI, though, he didn’t get to become a full time scriptwriter until later, with a TV adaptation of T. B. Ilangaratne’s Vilambita, directed by Lakshman Wijesekara and telecast on Swarnavahini.

He gets back to his musical career. “I was in Grade Four when Sunil Ariyaratne wrote ‘Sakura Mal Pipila’. That song first made me realise how abstract music could be. In later years, as he and Nanda Malini went on to endeavours like Sathyaye Geethaya and Pavana, I matured. Even now, when you listen to ‘Perahera Enawa’, you feel nothing but admiration for a man who rebelled against tradition and order in what he wrote. The two of them taught me about the potential of a song. I can’t write about the things they explored with such vigour, but that doesn’t take away my admiration for them.”

It was under these circumstances that Nanayakkarawasam began what would become a very popular programme , in 2011. Rae Ira Pana picked up audiences so fast it defied the findings of the ratings agencies, which consistently demeaned it. Having shifted from one channel to another, it ended “for good” in 2015 and transformed into its own live show on March 10, 2017 at Nelum Pokuna, followed by a second show in November at the Polgolla Mahinda Rajapaksa Auditorium; two years later, on March 10, Bandula hosted a third show at the Karapitiya Auditorium in Galle, and on October 12 that year he organised a fourth at the BMICH. Nanayakkarawasam found in them all an ideal opportunity to do what he did from his days at the SLBC in the 1980s: tell us the story behind an objet d’art.

How viral did it become exactly? “People would come up to me showing me their pen drives and saying that they had recorded every, or every other, Rae Ira Pana show since 2011. I was just dumbfounded, because the ratings didn’t show it as a popular programme at all. I knew then that such agency findings, while scientific and verifiable, were in no way a measure of actual popularity outside the numbers. When it was jettisoned from one radio station after another, and when it evolved into its own live event, I came to realise it could be used to bring people together for worthy causes.”

What about now? According to Bandula, the Sinhala lyric is progressively deteriorating in quality. I ask him whether this is because our generation isn’t as receptive to the abstract in art as his had been. He tells me he doesn’t think so. “We’ve commercialised music, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we’re confused about what a popular song is. When was the last time you heard a meaningful bus sinduwa?”

I suggest here that things would certainly have been better in his time, but he agrees only half heartedly. “You suggested earlier that we’ve de-sensitised ourselves so much that we can’t appreciate art. This isn’t something new. In my day, to give you an example, there was a vocalist called Piyasiri Wijeratne. He isn’t remembered today because he wasn’t a very prodigious artiste. In later years, Tissa Abeysekara would observe that Piyasiri possessed one of the best voices in this country. But did we recognise him then? No.”

I see his point. Blaming some imaginary malaise for the “cultural desert” we seem to find ourselves stranded in today blinds us, to an extent at least, to the fact that in each and every epoch our music “industry” has faced a huge deficit.

Besides, and this is putting it mildly, I don’t hear Nanayakkarawasam much on the bus.

That should tell us something.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com