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Some reflections on sinhala popular music
By Uditha Devapriya
In Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Sri Lanka (University of California Press, 2017), Garrett Field emphasises the role that radio played in disseminating and elevating musical standards in the newly independent colonies of South Asia. The 1950s, when this process played itself out, was a period in which the state and institutional politics “became inextricable from linguistic nationalism.” Across Sri Lanka, these links found their fullest expression in Radio Ceylon, specifically after the latter began to employ professional Sinhala songwriters.
This was not a development unique to Sri Lanka. As Coonoor Kripalani has argued, in India radio served a pivotal function “in building patriotism and nationhood” after independence. Radio was cheaper and more accessible, while in Sri Lanka it predated television by three decades. In India, as in Sri Lanka, it provided litterateurs, composers, and performers who had depended on the patronage of the colonial bourgeoisie, and had thrived on the cultural revivalist movements of the 19th century, a more solid institutional footing.
Field’s book is important for several reasons, in particular its attempt at understanding the subtleties of Sinhala music through translation. However, it ends at a point – the mid-1960s – when Sinhala music was about to embark on its most colourful period.
To say this is not to belittle Field’s book. Modernizing Composition fills a great many gaps, including its exploration of the links between commercial capitalism and the revival of Sinhala music in the early 20th century. It also acknowledges that music and poetry cannot be viewed in isolation from one another, particularly in the context of newly decolonised societies searching for a cultural identity. Indeed, its immense scope and breadth are why Field’s analysis, sound as it is, should be carried forward to the 1960s and 1970s, especially since it was in these later periods that the factors that underpinned the popularity of Sinhala music – free education and linguistic nationalism – reached their apogees.
To be sure, these two periods – the 1940s-1950s and the 1960s-1970s – were qualitatively different. They imbibed different cultural influences and pandered to different audiences and markets. Following Sheldon Pollock, Professor Field uses the theory of “cosmopolitan vernacularism” to explain how, following independence, poets and songwriters grafted or superimposed classical literary aesthetics on regional languages and thereby gave birth to “new premodern vernacular literatures.” Throughout South Asia in general, and across Sri Lanka in particular, it was Sanskrit that indigenous poets and songwriters turned to in their quest to elevate their linguistic heritages and lineages. The more Westernised among them also sought inspiration from modernist American and European poetry.
Since I am by no means a specialist in anthropology, I cannot pass judgments on how these developments played themselves out in the 1960s. Yet it is clear that these developments had their origins in the period immediately preceding 1956. Now, 1956 meant a great many things to a great many people. To some it symbolised the triumph of the indigenous over the foreign; to others, the triumph of ethno-religious majoritarianism. Whichever way you look at it, 1956 provided the crucible through Sinhala music could continue to transform, to evolve, and to thrive. Here I am concerned with two musical forms: baila and pop music. My justification for this is simple: it is these two genres which facilitated the popularisation, or what I call the “middle-browing”, of Sinhala music after the 1960s.
Baila is more controversial and more contentious than Sinhala pop. As Anne Sheeran has noted, baila as a musical genre, activates both conformist and conservative elements. It at once provokes many of us to flout tradition, and compels not a few others to protest that flouting of tradition. Thus nationalist ideologues can bemoan the deterioration of cultural values, and parents can bemoan their children’s addition to the latest cultural trends, by invoking its name. In other words, is it the proverbial bogeyman in the room, a scapegoat for the death of culture, and the last resort of the puritan.
It is all these things. Yet as one historian communicated to me some years ago, baila stands with ves natum as one of the most uniquely indigenous cultural forms in Sri Lanka, an irony given their foreign roots (Portuguese and Indian). And in the 1960s and 1970s, it underwent a transition that would define the trajectory of Sinhala music.
The significance of this transition cannot be overrated. Such transitions were taking place in other cultural spheres as well. In literature, the renaissance that had been heralded by Martin Wickramasinghe had meandered to the popular fiction of Karunasena Jayalath. In film, Lester James Peries’s experiments had enabled a number of directors, including two of his assistants and colleagues, Titus Thotawatte (Chandiya) and Tissa Liyanasuriya (Saravita), to seek a middle-ground between artistic and commercial cinema. The situation was rather different in the theatre, where a new generation of bilingual writers, including Dayananda Gunawardena, Premaranjith Tilakaratne, G. D. L. Perera, Henry Jayasena, Dhamma Jagoda, Gunasena Galappatti, and Simon Navagattegama, continued to hold on to some semblance of a benchmark. Yet even they sought a break from the past.
By this I do not mean to say, or suggest, that there was a complete rupture in Sinhala music. The old musical forms continued to thrive, if not evolve. The first generation of lyricists and songwriters, including Chandraratne Manawasinghe, Madawala Rathnayake, and the great Mahagama Sekara, continued to write for old collaborators, as well as new voices. However, many of them remained utterly classical in their views on music, and it was these views that prevailed at Radio Ceylon. As Tissa Abeysekera has controversially remarked, on more than one occasion, this had the effect of stunting the growth of Western music in Sri Lanka, even as Western music was gaining popularity over the airwaves and on film in India. Against that backdrop, a new generation of composers was bound to emerge.
In a series of essays, all anthologised in Roots, Reflections and Reminiscences (Sarasavi, 2007), Abeysekera argues that the conflict here was between those who advocated the Indianisation or Sanskritisation of local music and those who promoted more vernacular, indigenous musical forms. He refers to the visit of S. N. Ratanjankar and the audition that was conducted at Radio Ceylon, under his supervision, and points out that these led to the stagnation of Sinhala music. However, Garrett Field’s take on the visit, and the audition, is different: citing a speech that he delivered at the Royal Asiatic Society in Colombo, a speech Abeysekara does not quote from, Field contends that Ratanjankar wanted artistes to “create a modern song, based on folk poetry and folk music.” This is at variance with Abeysekera’s reading of events, which make it out that Ratanjankar, if not the authorities at Radio Ceylon, marginalised proponents of folk music, including Sunil Shantha.
I think both Field and Abeysekera have a point, and both are correct. While promoting if not advocating the indigenisation of music, Sinhala composers consciously went back to North Indian influences. Contrary to what Abeysekera has written, what this achieved in the end was a fusion of disparate cultural elements – Sinhala folk poetry and Sanskrit aesthetics – which laid the groundwork for an efflorescence in Sinhala music. At the same time, those who diverged from the mainstream trend of incorporating North Indian musical elements retreated to a world of their own. They included not just Sunil Shantha, but also the first-generation proponents of baila, like Wally Bastiansz, who found a niche audience eager to listen to them but failed to penetrate more middle-class audiences.
The question thus soon arose as to who could push these developments on to mainstream listeners. In the 1950s Sinhala composers and lyricists had popularised folk poetry through sarala gee, or light classical songs. In the 1960s baila had succeeded folk poetry as a popular musical form. The task of making baila palatable for young, Sinhala speaking audiences, fell on a new generation of composers. This new generation found their inspiration not so much in North Indian music as in Elvis, the Beatles, and Jimi Hendrix.
Their turning point, if it can be called that, came in 1967, a decade after 1956, when a little-known group, called The Moonstones, made their debut on Radio Ceylon. Featuring guitars, congas, maracas, and Cuban drums, their impact was immediate, so much so that within the next two years, both Phillips and Sooriya had signed them onboard.
What The Moonstones, and its lead Clarence Wijewardena, did was not so much challenge or flout the musical establishment of their time as to perform for an audience different in outlook and attitude to the audiences which the establishment had pandered to until then. This is a very important point, since I do not think there was a grand overarching conflict, in any way, between the new generation and the old. The old lyricists continued to write for their collaborators, and they willingly collaborated with the new voices: Sekara, for instance, wrote a song for one of the more prominent new voices, Indrani Perera, while Amaradeva sang for Clarence Wijewardena. Contrary to Abeysekera, I hence prefer to see this period as one of collaboration rather than outright, fight-to-the-death competition.
Field’s analysis, as I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, ends somewhere in the 1960s. His research is impeccably sound, and it deserves being carried forward. More than anything else, we need to know more about the audiences that the new composers, vocalists, and lyricists pandered to, and how exactly the latter groups pandered to them. We also need to know how their predecessors, who remained active in this period, interacted with them. I am specifically concerned here with the period from 1967 – when The Moonstones entered the mainstream – to 1978 – when a new government, a new economy, and an entirely new set of cultural forms and influences took the lead. All this represents much fieldwork for the anthropologist and historian of Sri Lankan, and South Asian, music. But it is the least we can do, given Garrett Field’s wonderful book and the many gaps it fills.
(The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.)