Ranjith Rubasinghe’s journey into television

By Uditha Devapriya

A movie industry is, by default, an industry. It’s manned by a reserve force of actors, writers, directors, technical assistants, and tea boys. It survives on money and thrives on patronage. If, occasionally, an artist who can afford to weather the storm without being part of the industry does emerge, it is almost always a rare occurrence. This is as true of Sri Lanka as it is of the rest of the world, India and America included. Ranjith Rubasinghe, who has worked as actor, assistant, and now director, would no doubt agree.

Just who is Ranjith Rubasinghe? Friends and acquaintances call him “Ruba.” The Sri Lankan film industry boasts of a plethora of crew and cast members who know everyone, and indeed everything, related to movies, not so much the process as the politics behind the art of making them. Rubasinghe is a member of this (I daresay) privileged crowd.

There is not a name he doesn’t know, not a movie or serial he hasn’t seen. Bring up an actor or director or crew member, and chances are he will wax eloquent. I sometimes wonder how he earns his bread; suffice it to say he earns it somehow. Having started out as assistant and worked his way up as actor and dubbing artiste, he has gone over to the director’s seat. This essay, then, is a rough summing up of what “Ruba” has done until now.

Ranjith was born in Matara, Akuressa to be more specific. He hailed from the Southern rural petty bourgeoisie; his father, a peon, was, like most members of this milieu, a follower of the performing arts, in particular theatre. Rubasinghe remembers him as extremely versatile: “He could sing, he could act, he could craft.” Not surprisingly, the son’s love for movies stemmed from the father’s love for the theatre. “He used to stage dramas near our house frequently. He would invariably enlist my help, and I would invariably enlist my friends to help him out by preparing a makeshift stage with a pol weta. Choreography and set designing were two other tasks we undertook. Lighting was obviously a problem, given that we didn’t have electricity then, so we would resort to Petromax lamps, utilising coloured paper, green, red, and yellow, to add effect whenever a scene or act or situation demanded it.”

No doubt the most important lesson Ranjith took from these encounters was the fact that the performing arts requires stamina as much as it does creativity. In other words, manual labour counts a lot, not unlike most other professions. “We didn’t stop at staging dramas. We helped in organising musical shows. We built a large thorana by the Maramba Wewa. That Thorana turned into a Vesak ritual in our village, and it continues to this date.”

As for his education, he passed through two schools in Maramba and Godapitiya, ending up at Rahula. While he credits his family for encouraging his artistic streak, he reserves some fondness for his teachers. “I indulged in some sports, but most of the time I engaged in arts related activities,” he remembers, citing drama and music as his favourite pastimes. These, no doubt helped him get an understanding of the rather complex nature of the performing arts, in particular the relationship between cerebral creativity and hard labour.

I remember Chandran Rutnam once telling me that “the person who tries to enter the movie industry on the hope that he can automatically churn out what he thinks, without putting in some hard effort, is a hopeless case.” Even Satyajit Ray warned that moviemaking, indeed the performing arts in general, involves a heavy dose of manual dexterity.

This Ranjith picked up in his childhood. Once he finished school, he left for Colombo to find a job. In the Sri Lanka of the 1970s, the sky may not have been the limit for someone like him, but as he tells me, he was hopeful of getting involved in “some venture, some endeavour, that would satisfy my yearning.” If his first job didn’t help him realise it, it paved the way for his future career. He began, unpromisingly enough, as a security guard at Sathosa.

Eventually he grew to dislike his job. Working in the midst of a tight bureaucracy, he became rather “restless, fidgety, and sometimes blunt.” More than once he felt the urge to talk back to his superiors, though with some effort he held his tongue. Cooped up and forced to comply with red tape, he found it difficult to work, even if the job did pay a decent salary. Besides, as he realised quickly enough, “the arts had got to me by then.” He just couldn’t let it go: “when it strikes you, the desire to carve your own path enraptures you.” Predictably, after a while he quit Sathosa. In the late 1970s this was probably not a monumental decision to make, but on the eve of an era of massive change, it would prove to be a life-changing one.

Not that he didn’t know what he was getting himself into. “I was faced with uncertainty and insecurity. Where could I find a job? How would I live? I did not want to depend on my parents and I certainly did not want to live on the charity of others.” Against the chaos of these years, Rubasinghe eventually got a job at Selacine. Television had arrived in Sri Lanka and while the sky was not yet the limit, it portended massive opportunities. At Selacine, Ruba worked his way around the new medium. It was around then that he first encountered D. B. Nihalsinghe, who pioneered television production in Sri Lanka. “Nihalsinghe had studied the medium well, before many of his contemporaries. When he called me to come and work for him at Telecine, I took the cue and left Selacine.” From there he shifted to Telestar, where his superior happened to be Bandula Weerakkody. Next he moved to Rupavahini, where he made the acquaintance of Athula Ransirilal, Titus Thotawatte’s de facto successor in the animation unit. “Athula,” Ruba remembers, “taught me the ABCs of dubbing.”

At Selacine, at Telecine, at Telestar, even at Rupavahini, Rubasinghe remained a freelancer. I know only too well what “going freelance” entails: lack of security. When I ask him whether money became a concern for him in these years, he chortles and says that while it was a very big concern, “I never let it bother me.” But how did he survive during this period? Where did he live? How did he sleep? What did he eat? Nagging questions, and Ruba answers them all in one go. “To be honest, we didn’t care how we led our lives outside work. One night we’d be at a director’s house, the next night we’d be at the Sudarshi. We slept when we wanted to and ate what we got. We were more concerned about what we did than how we lived. That is the price for ‘going freelance’, but it is a price we were willing to pay.”

In those heady days of the 1980s, when under J. R. Jayewardene the movie industry opened its doors to everyone and anyone, Rubasinghe craved to work for, and under, the top-notch directors of the era. He got what he wanted: soon he was assisting the likes of Lester James Peries, Sumitra Peries, Vasantha Obeyesekere, and D. B. Nihalsinghe. His association with Sumitra stood out and continues to stand out: from Yahalu Yeheli (1982) to Yahaluwo (2007) and beyond, he has now become something of a minor fixture in her work.

As with hundreds of other budding artists, he quickly became a frequent guest at the Perieses at No 24, Dickman’s Road (now no more). While Rubasinghe remembers his work for the First Family of the Sinhala cinema quite fondly, one credit in particular stands out: Sumitra’s Loku Duwa (1996), where he not became assistant to the great Willie Blake, but also read the lines and “prepped” the great Gamini Fonseka (and even acted in one sequence). Loku Duwa was based on a novel by Edward Mallawarachchi (the Sujeewa Prasannarachchi of the more highbrow 1990s); so involved did he become in it that he would visit the Perieses every other day to read the book out to them. For their part Lester and Sumitra welcomed Ruba warmly. Right until Lester’s death, Ruba remained his unwavering disciple, if not follower; today he remains so with Sumitra and her coterie of veteran crew members.