Locating Anoja

By Uditha Devapriya

The first generation of actors who made their way to the Sri Lankan film industry, hailed, for the most, from suburban, lower middle-class, and Anglicised backgrounds. They entered the industry, despite opposition from their parents, who saw acting as an unworthy, unbecoming profession. Not surprisingly their prospects were limited, and most of them had to learn on their own, often through a patron or a mentor; this was, after all, a medium quite unlike any other, groundbreaking, innovative, and accused then as now of being too Western. Perhaps the latter association unnerved a conservative middle-class who linked it to a Westernised middle-class residing in either Colombo or the immediate periphery.

These first generation actors did not make the transition from stage hall to movie hall their successors did in later years. Many had dabbled in the theatre at school, yet few returned to it. Indeed, despite the symbiotic link between the theatre and film in the early days of our cinema, actors, in general, and actresses in particular, gained no more than a rudimentary smattering of experience in either medium. The Prema Ganegodas and the Malini Fonsekas came later, much later; until then actors continued to defy parental strictures, taking part in beauty contests, being selected by the few (mostly Colombo-based) producers and directors in vogue at the time, and finding a home of sorts in one of the studios.

Indeed, though it lacked a proper financial base, Sri Lanka boasted of its own studio system, with rivalries between producers compelling aspiring actresses to stick to one company or another. Shanthi Lekha’s career is a case in point here: K. Gunaratnam’s most coveted if not most popular actress, she was offered her first role in Sujatha on condition that she not take part in films produced by other companies. Such contractual obligations survived the change of government in 1956 and even the 1965 National Film Commission: as late as 1966, Lester James Peries had to obtain permission from Robin Tampoe to take Swineetha Weerasinghe onboard Delovak Athara. This trend would continue until the 1970s.

If 1956 didn’t entirely change this landscape, it certainly changed the perspective. The rural middle-class, forced into the background until then, made their way to the performing arts industries. Whereas earlier they would have had to defy their elders to act directly in film, now they had a safer intermediary: the theatre. Not every actress took that path; from this period one hears of Malini Fonseka among the big names that did. Yet many kept coming to the cinema through the stage hall: Leonie Kotelawala, Anula Karunathilaka, even the great Denawaka Hamine. Bilingual at most, they were a far cry from the heavily Anglicised urban-suburban middle-class who were dominating the industry then.

Naturally this second generation looked up to the first, just as the third generation following them looked up to the second. That third generation emerged somewhere in the mid-1970s – a period different to the 1960s – and their entry to the cinema differed considerably, if not significantly, from the second and first. By then, largely thanks to the expansion of the film industry and the curtailment of film imports, a rural lower middle-class were growing up on the likes of Malini Fonseka and Swarna Mallawarachchi. If they did not want to be like them, they wanted to be with them. Yet bereft of opportunity and away and apart from the milieu that Fonseka and Mallawarachchi had grown up in, few of them could hope to, and few ever did, make it to the city. Among that few was Anoja Weerasinghe.

I have seen Anoja in a great many films – the good, the bad, the passable – and from them four stick indelibly in my memory: Keli Madala, Siri Medura, Janelaya, and Seilama. It’s not a coincidence that Keli Madala and Maldeniye Simion (which I have not seen) were directed by D. B. Nihalsinghe. Nihalsinghe had been at the forefront of the industry in the 1970s, less as a director than as an administrator, overseeing the biggest overhaul of the sector since its genesis in the 1940s. The National Film Corporation, of which he became the founding CEO, had identified the Indian blockbuster as a negative influence, curtailed imports from Madras and Delhi, brought in films from continental Europe, and attempted unsuccessfully to strike a deal with a major Hollywood studio. Thanks to his efforts, larger numbers of Sinhala films began invading theatres far, far away from Colombo and the Kelani Valley.

Growing up in Badulla and attending school there and later in Moneragala – the two poorest districts in Sri Lanka – Anoja remembers seeing one film in particular: Welikathara, no less than Nihalsinghe’s directorial debut. The first Sinhala film shot in Cinemascope, it required a wide screen the likes of which were not available in theatres outside Colombo at the time. Forced to adapt, theatre owners screened it through conventional projectors, distorting the image. Despite this, Welikathara’s interest transcended its technical limitations. For Anoja it seemed like a baptism of fire: “from then on,” she recalls, “I resolved to see as many Sinhala films as possible, and to enter the industry.”

If in the city she discovered the cinema, in the village back home she was discovering the theatre. She didn’t receive any formal training until much later, but as a child, she tells me, she kept an “intimate bond with the stage hall.” Artistically inclined, her parents encouraged her penchant for the theatre. In Badulla and in Moneragala, not surprisingly, “I took part in several concerts and plays.” The first of those plays, “staged when I had turned five or six”, had her play out the role of a Japanese princess. Her first real theatrical performance came much later, when she had turned 13. The latter had impressed a visiting MP so much that he had praised her. The MP, she recalls, “came from the city”, and his comments had struck her visibly. In response, “I could only stare and gape at him.”

Going to the movies had not been easy. In the Sinhala village of the 1970s, it was considered almost a ritual. “My friends and I would invariably pick on the 6.30 show and we’d invariably go for as many screenings as we could.” The challenge was to sample the latest movies, all of them if possible, and this Anoja attempted to balance with her studies. But for a Sinhala lower middle-class village girl with very few prospects outside her home, there was really no world beyond the actors, the actresses, and the directors she consumed. From seeing them to being with them would take some years, but in the end she managed to make it with a bit role in Yasapalitha Nanayakkara’s Tak Tik Tuk.

Yasapalitha Nanayakkara released Tak Tik Tuk a year after he wrapped up work on another film that featured Anoja in a more prominent role, Monarathanne, where she found herself acting opposite not just Vijaya Kumaratunga and Malini Fonseka, but also the grande dame of the Sinhala cinema herself, Rukmani Devi. Anoja had lasted for just 30 seconds in Tak Tik Tuk; here her performance spanned the entirety of the production. Filled as it was with the great Khemadasa’s music and an uncharacteristically restrained performance by Rukmani, Monarathanne proved to be Anoja’s second baptism of fire after her encounter years ago with Welikathara. Nanayakkara, however, came and went; following him, soon to become Anoja’s mentor, was Welikathara’s director, D. B. Nihalsinghe.

To list down all of Anoja’s credits here would be pointless, both for reasons of space and for the simple fact that not all of them reveal her potential well. I can think of four films – all of which I’ve listed above – and I can think of one other which really brought out her thespian prowess: Jackson Anthony’s Julietge Bhoomikawa. Anthony released his film somewhere in 1998, eight years after Lever Brothers sponsored a scholarship to the London Academy of Music and Drama (LAMDA). That milestone had come two years after she had won the Silver Peacock for Best Actress at the 11th International Film Festival in New Delhi. The winning performance had been in another film by Nihalsinghe, Maldeniye Simion.

At this point in the interview Anoja opts to reflect on Nihalsinghe. She is noticeably eager. “I was like a ball of clay under him, to be honest,” she recalls. “He moulded me. To this day, I can’t explain how he did it, and how I played for him, whether in Maldeniye Simion or in Keli Madala. Contrary to most accounts of him, he was quite gentle if not soft-spoken, careful with his players. When he instructed me, he lowered his voice so much that the actor beside me couldn’t hear what he was saying. In a very subtle manner he managed to draw out the character he wanted me to play. Working for him, acting for him, was always a pleasure. He got out what he wanted, and I gave out what I could.”

Nihalsinghe, in fact, retained his trust in her so much that he went against both producer and storywriter when he suggested her for Maldeniye Simion. “Arawwala Nandimitra, who wrote the original novel, and the producers, among whom was Vijaya Ramanayake, opposed his choice. They tried to back out. But Nihalsinghe held firm. He told them that if he couldn’t have me for the film, he would not make it. However begrudgingly, they relented, and in the end admitted they had been quite wrong about me.”

Just what makes Anoja’s acting tick? Part of her charm, I think, lies in how well she has been able, not to emulate, but to invert, Malini Fonseka. The contrast between the two comes off vividly in Parakrama Niriella’s Siri Medura. Critics have invariably compared Anoja to Swarna Mallawarachchi, but to me the analogy remains superficial at best and misleading at worst. Swarna’s forte in the 1980s (her best period) lay in how well she inverted the stereotype of the good village girl corrupted by the immoral city man. It is in how she fights back, and (as with Dadayama) dies or (as with Kadapathaka Chaya) becomes a female counterpart of the chauvinists she’s battling, that her élan comes out.

Anoja’s élan is of a different order, and I wrap up this tribute to her by recalling the endings of Seilama and Nihalsinghe’s Keli Madala, which have her as defeated protagonists; whereas Swarna emerges triumphant, even in death, Anoja can only despair and give up, though this does not make her defeat any less poignant. To me the finest performance she’s given will always be the final sequence in Siri Medura; there, with just one take, she gives completely into hysterics and runs off, shocked that she’s just killed not just the man she loved, but the woman who intervened to break up their relationship. It is a master-class in acting, and in its own way, a testament to how well that third generation I wrote of at the beginning sprang up, and carved a place for themselves, in the annals of our cinema.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com