The Passing of Sanath Nandasiri

By Uditha Devapriya

Sanath Nandasiri’s passing away, at the age of 81, compels one to reflect on the generation he hailed from and in a way epitomised. Nandasiri was born in 1942, around the time that Victor Ratnayake, Mervyn Perera, Shelton Perera, Sarath Dassanayake, and T. M. Jayaratne were. They were more than just cotemporaries: they were peers and collaborators. Each of them left a lasting mark on the country’s cultural landscape. Nandasiri was no exception to this: having entered Radio Ceylon in the 1950s, he threw himself into a career in music with much fervour, immersing himself in the world of oriental music.

Like his contemporaries, Nandasiri entered these fields at a time of deep social change and transformation. With the advent of independence, Sri Lanka was searching for an identity of its own. By all accounts this was an unprecedented moment. The country had been under colonial rule twice before the British, but on both occasions, freedom had been followed by a transition from one European power to another. With the granting of independence in 1948, by contrast, Sri Lanka found itself in a different position, the equal of other societies that were struggling to break free from their colonial pasts. In search of their own destinies, these societies strived to reconcile their past with their present. That led to a contradiction: formally they were identified as nation-states, but at home they struggled to align that legal reality, or fiction, with the absence of unifying national ideologies.

In Sri Lanka these developments more or less centred on Radio Ceylon, the country’s premier radio station. As Garrett Field notes in his study, Modernising Composition, it was during the 1950s that “state and institutional politics became inextricable from linguistic nationalism.” This more or less tied Sri Lanka’s attempts at forging a uniquely national identity to the entry of Sinhala poets, writers, and vocalists to the radio station. In other words, Radio Ceylon was to be the crucible of these transformations.

Arguably the two most prominent officials or artistes working at Radio Ceylon at the time were Madawala Ratnayake and Karunaratne Abeysekera. Ratnayake in particular, through the sarala gee or light classical songs that he penned and broadcast, drew on the country’s literary tradition. In doing so, he made Sinhala classical poetry accessible to the people, and spurred a revival of folk art. That encouraged a generation of vocalists to pursue their calling in radio, in the face of a resurgence in Sinhala nationalism.

Sanath and Malkanthi during a foreign trip

It was around this time that Nandasiri’s generation came of age. Though hailing from diverse backgrounds, they were moulded by the same values. They were all products of their time, of a Sinhala Buddhist middle-class struggling to find a voice of their own. Nandasiri’s parents epitomised this class: his father was a petty businessman, his mother a housewife. In 1955 he got the chance to work with Madawala Ratnayake and Karunaratne Abeysekera aboard Radio Ceylon. He was not quite 14 at the time. Tall, athletic, and exceptionally good-looking, Nandasiri looked every bit the oriental musician. Four years after entering Radio Ceylon, he studied the tabla under D. R. Peiris, one of the more underrated and overlooked musicians from that period. Two years later, in 1961, a time when the Sri Lankan State was formulating plans to reform the country’s film and other cultural industries, for the benefit of non-elite, popular audiences, he left Sri Lanka to study at Bhathkande.

Nandasiri returned to Sri Lanka around four years later, in 1965. By then the Sri Lankan State was slowly closing in on its aim of bureaucratising the arts, in particular music and dance. For the intrepid music teacher, especially Sinhala music teacher, the best path at this point lay in the Government College of Music. Founded in 1952 by J. D. A. Perera, the Government College roped in Nandasiri’s generation. Having passed out as a music teacher from there, Nandasiri received his first appointment on 7 September 1967, to a school in Ampara. The date is important: according to T. M. Jayaratne, it was on that day that he and Nandasiri, together with Victor Ratnayake, Shelton Perera, Mervin Perera, and Sarath Dassanayake,received their first appointment letters. Fervently passionate as they were about Sinhala and oriental music, these individuals had now found their calling as teachers.

A happy family

By this time, the folk-and-classical revival of the 1950s was giving way to other revivals, other genres, other artistes, composers, and vocalists. Prime among them was the pop and baila revival, signified more than anyone by Clarence Wijewardena. These developments pushed composers and vocalists to explore their boundaries, to experiment, to challenge hitherto unchallenged norms. A product of his time, Nandasiri now had to establish himself as a singer, and a composer, in somewhat different circumstances. He hailed from a firmly oriental tradition, from the hallowed grounds of Bhathkande. Yet even as he climbed the ladder, joining the University of Kelaniya, heading its Music Department, and getting First Class Honours at the Sangeeth Nipun Examination in the 1990s, he readily collaborated with new voices and faces, prime among them Premasiri Khemadasa.

It is his association with these composers and collaborators that distinguishes Nandasiri from many of his contemporaries, including Victor Ratnayake, who being the dazzling iconoclast he was preferred to forge his own path. This is not to say that Nandasiri did not compose his own songs. Indeed, some of his original work, like Du Anuradha, rank among his finest, his most memorable, and his most personal. But Nandasiri’s contribution as a vocalist has been better appreciated, perhaps because, to popular audiences, what matters in a vocalist is his voice; his compositional skills, if at all, come later.

One can make the same argument for Mervyn Perera: consummate as he was with the violin, it was his voice that ultimately endeared him to lay audiences. Yet the fact of the matter is that they were all thoroughly grounded in their field, not only as singers, but also as composers, teachers, and, for the lack of a better word, professionals.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, Nandasiri and T. M. Jayaratne began working with Premasiri Khemadasa. In the long run, this proved to be a fruitful relationship; it coincided with Khemadasa’s maturing as a popular artist, a composer capable of responding to the public. That followed, in turn, from his collaborations with popular film directors, specifically K. A. W. Perera, whose middle-brow conception of cinema found a ready audience in villages and suburbs. Having found their calling as composers, vocalists, and teachers, Nandasiri and Jayaratne now established themselves as playback singers, winning one major award after another. Nandasiri, in particular, thrived during this period: from Duleeka (1974) to Nedeyo (1976), he gave his best work, the work for which he is indelibly remembered for today: Anantha Wu Derana, Sitha Rae Yame, Game Kopi Kade, and the underrated Sanda Pem Yahanin, the latter from T. Arjun’s Wasanthaye Dawasak (1978).

The personal lives of artistes intrude on their public careers in many ways. Nandasiri’s case, it merely complemented his work, pushing his boundaries and encouraging him to explore. Through his marriage to Malkanthi Peiris in 1971, Nandasiri became part of a family and a generation of vocalists and composers that included Niranjala Sarojini, Nirmala Ranatunga, Sakunthala Peiris, Manoj Peiris, and through them Abeywardena Balasuriya and Wijeratne Ranatunga. Unlike many other vocalists and composers who kept their personal lives under cover, for perfectly understandable reasons, Nandasiri’s personal life served to promote his work, push him up. This is one aspect to his career that has, so far, not properly been delved into or appraised. Indeed, in the context particularly of his generation – a generation which included our most gifted musical talents – it remains highly unique.

We can do nothing but mourn the passing of these figures, and if possible to author their obituaries and epitaphs. Each year, each month, brings with it its share of deaths, of those who epitomised an era that has now all but completely left us. Nandasiri’s work, crucial as it was for the blossoming of the Sinhala song, remains as loved and memorable now as it was then. With a lusty voice that seemed to speak for Sri Lanka, and for Sri Lankans, it defied the limits of ethnicity: it spoke of the tenderest feelings, hopes, sorrows, and joys, of an entire nation. Nandasiri’s contribution, in that sense, remains seminal: his work helped us find a place of our own, in a nation ridden with conflict and contradiction. He will be missed, not merely for the songs he sang and composed, but for the era he epitomised.

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.