Nothing but Kumar

By Uditha Devapriya

“Non, je ne regrette rien.”
— Edith Piaf

Most stories never get written. Some do, but they involve, and include, other stories. Kumar de Silva has written his story many times over; to write once more is to commit plagiarism. Yet how much of it is personal, and how much of it involves his forays outside television? This, to me, is a question as irrelevant as it is invalid. What Kumar did outside television is as pertinent as what Johnny Carson did, or Jimmy Kimmel does, outside television. Yet the life of a TV host presents rather interesting subject matter for a biography, even a biographical sketch. But then who’ll take the time? Who indeed!

The first TV sets arrived in Sri Lanka somewhere in 1978, with the first transmission in April 1979. ITN came soon after: it broadcast foreign programmes for a while before, much to the government’s embarrassment, it fell under the threat of bankruptcy. Three years later, in 1982, with a powerful transmitter covering a much wider area than did ITN, the government launched another channel: Rupavahini. As the cost of TV licenses fell dramatically (USD 150 for colour, USD 30 for black and white), the number of TV sets rose even more dramatically (from 2,810 in 1979 to 360,370 seven years later). Foreign programming continued – BBC documentaries especially – as did local programming, including “teledramas.”

In 1982 my mother and father were sitting for their A Levels, or at least studying for them. Sri Lankans brought no fewer than 74,000 TV sets that year, a more than 57% increase from the previous year. With Rupavahini coming into the picture around this time, ITN dedicated most of its slots to imported, if not English language, programmes. The late D. B. Nihalsinghe meanwhile pioneered the 24-episode miniseries, with the country’s first serial, Dimuthu Muthu, taking in record-breaking audiences for Rupavahini. “Within 10 years of its advent,” Nihalsinghe later wrote, “television had grown rapidly in quantity, reach, and capability… to a predominantly Sinhalese, though multiethnic, nation.”

If in 1982 my parents were about to write their final exams at school, Kumar de Silva had finished school and embarked on his higher education. At the University of Kelaniya, Kumar selected English, Economics, French, and German. While in Wesley College he had offered a more unusual if not unprecedented subject combination, also including French. His parents had not dissented, and neither had the then Principal, the great Shelton Wirasinha. With an unmistakable bent for language, young Kumar had vague notions about his career. He didn’t crave the accountant’s path, much less the doctor’s, engineer’s, or lawyer’s. But what could a suburban middle-class 19-year-old aspire for in those days with French for his A Levels? He couldn’t aim for the sky, since the sky wasn’t the limit. He could, however, target journalism. Armed with an Honours Degree in English Literature three years later, in 1985, he thus made his way to Lake House, where, as cub reporter, he checked copy.

It was boring stuff, sedentary and duller than ditchwater. But a 19-year-old student who had done French could afford to dream; a 25-year-old graduate who had done English Literature could not. The only alternative Kumar could think of, then, was television. Yet there too the sky wasn’t the limit. Not many made it to a TV channel, and not many came out. Kumar had two strengths, however: a wide knowledge of French, and a passion for speaking.

Kumar’s Principal and in many ways guiding light at Wesley, Shelton Wirasinha, passed away in November 1985. Things moved rather quickly that year. Nine months earlier, in February, a Frenchman and Frenchwoman had conferred with two Sri Lankans, also man and woman, about an idea for a series about France, specifically about everything related to France. Few would have thought such a programme feasible in the Sri Lanka of 1985 – neither the British nor the Americans thought of a comparable series, even though locals obviously knew more about Britain and America than they did about France – yet Josiane Thureau and Bernard Prunieres, from the French Embassy, did. As for the two Sri Lankans, both Thevis Guruge and Nanda Jayamanne from ITN liked the idea. That’s how Bonsoir began. It started its journey in July, going on to adorn TV screens for a quarter of a century.

Bonsoir lasted for six months under its first host, Aruni Devaraja. Devaraja left in December. The directors wanted a new host. Just who could it be? Kumar has not divulged how exactly, but “fortune had it” (his words, not mine) that he was considered as Aruni’s successor, host for the programme in 1986. Now the issue was that while Kumar had two strengths, he had one major flaw. “This was terrible,” he chortles. “No one knew I stammered.”

The first screen test “was pure torture.” Thevis and Nanda gave up on him. “Putha,” Thevis advised him kindly, “why don’t you concentrate on production?” This Kumar could not and would not take. Growing up on a steady stream of literature and drama, he simply could not see himself in the producer’s seat. Nanda Jayamanne agreed, and let him do one more test. “That too, I flunked.” But then Jayamanne was as adamant as he. She gave him “as many screen tests as it took for me to break through my stammer.” The third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh tests went off as disastrously as, if only slightly less so than, the first two. Then came the eighth, the decisive one: “I scraped through.” He was in.

The first recordings were memorable for more reasons than one. Limited as it was to the four corners of a dingy studio at ITN, Bonsoir quickly proved to be Kumar’s baptism of fire, though that’s putting it mildly. The programme had two faces at the beginning: Kumar’s and Yasmin Rajapakse’s. Through the latter’s intervention, the Bonsoir studio was moved to the French Embassy. Yet even the less cloistered quarters of an Embassy lacked the amenities of a proper studio: “just two basic curtains, and the most primitive of setups.” The programme was waiting to go out. It soon did, first to the immediate surroundings (Rosmead Place) and then, slowly but steadily, to virtually every corner of the country.

Meanwhile, demographics were changing. Arguably more so than radio, television is linked to shifts in the population. Expensive as it may be, it nevertheless is receptive to growing demand, especially demand fuelled by electrification. In the Sri Lanka of the ‘80s, however, electricity came slowly: stage by stage, region by region. By 1986 when Kumar started out in Bonsoir, no more than 10.9% of all households had been connected to the grid; seven years later, no fewer than a third were. Taking the medium into the Sinhala heartland, both ITN and Rupavahini hence modified their programming to suit the palate of a rural lower middle class. These changes did not spare Bonsoir: in 1994, the year a Francophone came to power as the country’s president, a Sinhala Bonsoir sprang up.

By now Kumar, with Yasmin, had covered every corner, interviewed every personality, and done everything possible to take France to Sri Lankan homes. People soon began to talk of “pranshaya balanawa” (“seeing France”) on the idiot box. Whether it was shooting Romeo wooing Juliet at night at Anne Ranasinghe’s residence, staging a chilly Strasbourg Christmas evening somewhere in Borella near the Royal Golf Club, “chugging down the Kelani Valley Line” and ending up creating a mess of a traffic jam, or breathing in the airs of Montmartre at the Kala Pola along Ananda Coomaraswamy Mawatha, Bonsoir created nothing less and nothing more than history on television here. If it was unprecedented, it was so because no other foreign mission – certainly not the British, definitely not the American – came up with a pitch for a similar programme. And at the centre of it all stood Kumar.

Bonsoir had found its footing in Kumar. Kumar, conversely, had found his footing in Bonsoir. Yet he did not remain there. Even as he presented one episode after another, interviewing personalities and going places, he perched atop other programmes; top among these was “Fan Club”. Needless to say the stammer left him, though it cropped up from time to time. Didn’t matter: in 1994 he won the Golden Clef Award for Television Presenter of the Year. When, owing to circumstances he no doubt found painful and cathartic, he had to leave the programme that had nurtured him, “passing the mantle to a new generation”, he thus made an easy transition to other channels, other stations, other platforms.

ITN remained his home for quite some time thereafter. As news reader and talk show and Poya Day Dhamma discussion host, Kumar revelled in other endeavours. Soon he left ITN as well; first at TNL (where he hosted a business talk show, and co-hosted “Celluloid Lokaya” with celebrities of Sri Lanka’s silver screen), then at Prime TV (where he became the face of “CelebChat”, interrogating hundreds of “celebs” from directors to writers to musicians to bon vivants), and later at Rupavahini (Poya discussions), he witnessed the transformation in the industry from analog to digital. Entering Pulse (“Anything But with Kumar de Silva”, “The Lockdown Diaries”, and “Apperitifs with Kumar”), he oversaw the next big transformation: from digital to social media. That’s where he’s been ever since.

Kumar de Silva came to television via Bonsoir somewhere in 1986. He remembers the exact date: January 5. January 5, 2021 thus marks 35 years since the man entered the industry, transformed his life, and in a big way transformed ours too. I wasn’t lucky enough to see him on Bonsoir though; when he left the show in 2001, I was about to enter Grade Three, only just beginning to understand the intricacies of real-time television. My connection to Kumar, however, went well beyond Bonsoir: my Grade Three class teacher happened to be his mother, Manel. Bonsoir came to me through Ms Manel, or to be more specific, a pouch of hers that sported its famous tricolour elephant. Intrigued, I returned home and asked my mother what exactly it was. That was when I heard about, and saw, the show that made the man, transformed television in the country, and, as Kumar himself has put it, took France to the homes of Sri Lankans in the pre-internet era, in a way that has never, to my mind, been paralleled by any other foreign programme telecast over here since.

Athula Samarakoon’s Sinhala translation of “The Bonsoir Diaries”, the original of which was published in 2013, will hit bookshelves later this year.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com