Tribute to Sucharitha Gamlath: Enlightened Prof.!!!

Sucharitha Gamlath: Enlightened Prof. brings out giant English-Sinhala dictionary

Vickrambahu “Bahu” (KARUNARATHNE)

27 September 2009

 

 The Sinhala-English dictionary was launched at the BMICH last Sunday. It was the brainchild of Professor Sucharitha Gamlath. At the inaugural ceremony, I too had the opportunity to join in the procession as a special guest, along with the Minister of Education and other political leaders to light the oil lamp. This finally ended up in the presidium. There was a huge crowd, mainly from Sinhala literature and art circles. Of course there were the Leftists who respected the committed “Trotskyite” professor, sprinkled among the crowd. It was a just tribute to a man who consistently and continuously expressed his displeasure about the reactionary capitalist system and took the side of the down trodden. The members of the bourgeoisie, both in the government and in the opposition were apologetic and compromising in the presence of this giant of a man, whose contribution to Sinhala literature is unique. After the goodwill speeches of academics, political leaders had to make their contribution. I was thinking as to what I should say of this great personality Sucharitha. Strangely, speeches stopped after Bimal Rathnayake of the JVP, made his speech. The so- called post modernist organizers of the event had concluded that my speech would be intolerable. Though I cannot complain, I must come out with what I was planning to say.

 

Contemporary
Comrade Sucharitha, the most respected professor of Sinhala, though two years senior to me, is a contemporary of mine at Peradeniya campus. Both of us were research students in England about the same time. However, except at political events we never met as we belonged to two different fields of study. His subjects were philosophy, literature and ethics while I indulged in electro magnetic theory. I have attempted in recent times to dabble in art criticism which attracted harsh words from Sucharitha the master! Today he has become a giant of the Sinhala society by devoting his energy to regeneration and development of the Sinhala language. This is a time where all goblins are talking about the development of the Sinhala nation. In nation building, one of the most important aspects is the language. In fact one could say that, without the Sinhala language there won’t be a Sinhala nationality. In the struggle for national democracy it was important to develop and regenerate the Sinhala language so that it could compete with the dominant language, English. Democratic liberation does not mean throwing English into the dust bin; but it means that local languages should emerge form repression to enlighten the common masses. Sinhala should develop with its sister Tamil, the language of the Tamil neighbour. Professor Gamlath is unique in this respect as he always saw both the importance of English as an international language and the close association of Sinhala with Tamil. So he gave the best part of his life to prepare a comprehensive Sinhala-English dictionary with over half a million words and thereafter, a Sinhala-Tamil dictionary of similar strength. He gave every encouragement for the development of Lankan Tamil identity. He could do this because of his understanding of the permanent revolution and Trotskyism.

Different social entities
In the 3^rd century BC, Gemunu, Nandimithra and others became giants of the day, not by defeating Tamils. Then Sinhala and Tamil meant different social entities, where there were no nations or nationalities. It may have been a struggle between leaders of the Asiatic regime and Arya Brahmins who believed in Varna divisions. Those who defeated Varna divisions and established an egalitarian Asiatic regime were made heroes in the related story. But it is difficult to select the real hero between the two Arya shasthriya: Gemunu and Elara! Today it is very different; the growth of capital has given impetus to the nascent development of nationalities. Both Sinhala and Tamil are local nationalities struggling to get a foothold in this miserable world dominated by global powers. The democratic ideal is for oppressed nations of the region’s Sinhalese and Tamils to get together with other communities such as Muslims, Christians etc and to fight against the hegemony of “Anglo-Saxon” ruling elites, the agents of global capital. The repression of the minority nation by the majority is the sure path to further enslavement by global capital. In fact, Lanka today is a classic example. Professor Gamlath is a giant today, because he understood this phenomenon in all its aspects. We are waiting to see the Tamil - Sinhala giant dictionary of Gamlath and Sivathambi. Sure I may not have said all this, but certainly my speech would have added colour to the occasion.

Vickrambahu “Bahu” (KARUNARATHNE)

* FROM LAKBIMANEWS 27 SEPT 2009 COLUMN.

Renowned scholar, writer and literary critic Professor Sucharitha Gamlath (80) has passed away

Professor Sucharita Gamlath is a highly experienced academic. He read classical Indian languages and Sinhala language at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya. He graduated with First Class Honours becoming the first in the Island and carried away:

1. The Rowland's Gold Medal
2. The Jayanayake Prize and
3. The Oriental Research Scholarship

In the same year, he was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Sinhala of the same University. In 1966 he entered the University of London and studied Western and Indian Philosophy, Philosophical Psychology and Aesthetics.

On the strength of his research, the Higher Degree Committee of the University of London then headed by Professor Karl Popper treated him as a special case and relaxed the University rules to register him for the Ph. D. degree in Philosophy, even though he did not posses a bachelor's degree in that subject. In 1969 he submitted a thesis comparing Indian and Western aesthetic theories and was awarded the Ph. D degree in Philosophy by the University of London.

In 1970 he was appointed Lecturer of the University of Colombo and in 1971, on the strength of his publications, the same University awarded him a merit promotion to Senior Lecturership.

In 1975 he was appointed Professor of the Sinhala language and literature of the University of Sri Lanka and posted to the Jaffna Campus. In 1975/76 he served this campus simultaneously in the following capacities: Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Head of the Departments of Philosophy, English and Sinhala, the Chief Student Counselor.

In 1977 the Colombo Unit of the Jaffna Campus consisting of Faculties of Arts and Science was established and he was appointed Head of this Unit with powers of a Vice Chancellor. In 1979 the University Grants Commission transferred him to the newly established University of Ruhuna in order to organize its Arts Faculty. He was unanimously elected Dean of the same Faculty.

During the past three and a half decades, he has been a regular contributor to the local press and the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation on matters of literary and artistic nature and has served on numerous Boards and Committees relating to these matters appointed by the University and Government.

OM MUTHUMARI OF TAMILNADU, INDIA: THE GREAT PERFORMER OF POLITICAL KOOTHTHU!!!

PEOPLE'S ART AND LITERARY FESTIVAL- CHENNAI, TAMILNADU, INDIA 2012

Amaradeva at 85: Maestro W.D.Amaradeva

Amaradeva at 85: Giving tongue to a nation’s soul

4 December 2012, 10:33 pm

by Ajith Samaranayake

Maestro W.D.Amaradeva

(December 5th 2012 is the 85th birthday of Maestro W.D.Amaradeva. This article by Ajith Samaranayake appearing in the “Sunday Observer” of January 10th 1999 was written to celebrate the Doyen of Sinhala music receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Peradeniya on December 29th 1998. It is reproduced here as a birthday tribute to the man who gave tongue to a nation’s soul)
Last year ended on a note of epiphany at the University of Peradeniya. December 29 as the day of the general convocation, for the graduates the highpoint of their academic life. There were also three eminent men who received honorary doctorates that evening in the sylvan groves of academe.

Among them was W. D. Amaradeva, the nation’s leading musician who wrapped in an ermine cloak lit the oil lamp to inaugurate the festivities. Later after dinner at the Vice Chancellor’s Lodge the hills of Hantane resounded and resonated to his songs as the dons and their spouses gave voice to his melodies while the maestro watched in silent wonder.

Of all the accolades and encomiums showered on him during the last so many decades Amaradeva confesses to being most greatly touched with this degree of Doctor of Letters (Honoris Causa) since coming from Sri Lanka’s first and still leading university it seals his place not merely as Sri Lanka’s leading composer and vocalist but also recognises the intellectual richness and depth of his musical knowledge and how deftly he has applied this to produce a vast corpus of semi-classical light music which has been outstandingly popular without ever being vulgar of meretricious.

As the Dean of the Faculty of Arts Prof. K. N. O. Dharmadasa said presenting the musician to the Chancellor, ‘In the field of contemporary music there is one person who has earned the rare distinction of being admired by artist, connoisseur and ordinary rasika alike for his dynamic influence on the creation of a national tradition and for his incomparable virtuosity and creative genius. I refer, Chancellor, to Pandit W. D Amaradeva who as the trail-blazer of a distinctively Sri Lankan musical tradition had as a comproser, conductor, violinist and singer over a period of more than half a century immensely enriched life in our country.’

Classical academic tradition

More than any other musician in Sri Lanka, past or present, Amaradeva has consistently sought to synthesise the classical academic tradition with the best features of contemporary culture.

This he has done without showing either any misplaced reverence or awe towards high culture or populist deference to mass culture. He has discovered the golden mean between the two and without breaching the walls of high culture so that the popular hordes would trample through the garden has nevertheless been able to open up the enclosed garden so that the ordinary rasika can taste the sweetest fruits plucked from its trees.

This Wannakawattawaduge Don Amaradeva has been able to accomplish perhaps because of the peculiarly fortunate position he has been occupying as a musician. Amaradeva like many others did not emerge as a musician after a fully-blown academic education.

On the contrary his formal education at the Bhathkande Institute of Music in Lucknow came after many years of actual experience in the field as a violinist, director of music for films and vocalist. Because of this unique apprenticeship and early conditioning Amaradeva was singularly equipped to reconcile within himself both the theoretical and the practical, both the high and the popular strands of contemporary music.

Amaradeva was born 72 years ago in Moratuwa, which was heavily influenced both by Catholicism and a consequent cosmopolitan way of life. It is the most popular seat of baila in Sri Lanka. The baila which is a genre of music borrowed from the Portuguese who were Sri Lanka’s first colonial invaders, is still the favourite mode of music at middle-class parties.

Amaradeva has no highbrow hang-ups about the baila. He concedes that it has its valid place in the natural order of things. In fact he had composed the music for the song ‘Pipi Pipi Renu Natana’ using baila melody, he says. Talking to me he hums that most popular Moratuwa baila, ‘Pun Sanda Paya Moratuwa Dilenna’.

But the baila was not all. Even as a schoolboy Amaradeva was quite a skilful violinist. The violin also showed the way forward for Amaradeva’s music has always and above all else been clean, purifying and soul-enriching. Even when as the assistant director to Mohamed Ghouse he was composing the music for and singing such songs as ‘Eli Kale Yameku Ale’ in ‘Asokamala’ there was nothing gaudy in Amaradeva’s songs unlike that of most of the early Sinhala films with their heavy South Indian influence.

Cultural renaissance

Amaradeva was also fortunate to be very much part of the cultural renaissance of this time expressed mostly through music and dance. As a schoolboy he had met Munidasa Kumaratunge from the adjacent town of Panadura, a scholar whose poetry has been overshadowed by his literary puritanism. Amaradeva’s song ‘Handapane Welithala’ is based on a poem by him.

Amaradeva also associated with the other giants of the time such as Ananda Samarakoon, Sunil Shantha, Vasantha Kumara, Premakumara, Panibharatha and Sesha Palihakkara while Chitrasena’s studio at Kollupitiya often provided them with a meeting place, a kind of cultural ashram later demolished by unthinking officialdom with monumental callousness.

The highpoint of Amaradeva’s achievements during this period is considered the music he composed for Premakumara Epitawela’s ‘Selalihini Sandesaya’ where he was able to offer a new interpretation to the traditional ‘samudragosha’ metre in which much of classical Sinhala poetry has been written and also a new style in poetry recitation.

It was with all these achievements behind him that Amaradeva proceeded to India for his formal musical education on an initiative taken by D.B. Dhanapala, then the editor of the ‘Lankadeepa’ and Prof. Ediriweera Sarachchandra who had already discovered his potential and introduced him to the Peradeniya University environment.

As Prof. Dharmadasa was to say in his presentation: ‘It was at this stage that Prof. Ediriweera Sarachchandra introduced Amaradeva to the university environs, thus marking not only the commencement of his association with this university, an association which has now lasted for more than fifty years, but also the abiding friendship between Sarachchandra and Amaradeva, which as some of us has the good fortune to observe, was highly productive, and was marked by deep mutual respect and affection.

We should recall that from about the early 1950′s, Amaradeva has been visiting our university, and through lucid lecture-demonstrations of the type which he alone could present, provided us glimpses into the world of raghadari sangita. University audiences have also had, from time to time, the enchanting experience of his music recitals’.

The rest is the stuff of recent history steadily developing into legend. Armed with both practical training and formal education Amaradeva was now in a position to explore the whole spectrum of music, both local and foreign, for new and innovative methods of expression.

He drew his melodies both from the folk as well as the North Indian classical tradition. He did not make a fetish of folk music but drew inspiration from it as it suited him. On the other hand, he drew from the Indian ragas for some of his best melodies while at times creatively combining as in ‘Pile Padura’ the folk ‘seepada’ with an Indian folk raga. For his Buddhist devotional songs of which John Ross Carter has written extensively in his monograph ‘On understanding Buddhists: Essays on the Theravada tradition in Sri Lanka’ he was inspired by Buddhist gathas and the manner in which they are rendered.

As a pure musician too he is in a class of his own. The music compositions he did for Chitrasena’s ballet ‘Karadiya’ are justly famous not only in Sri Lanka but wherever this masterpiece has been staged.
Amaradeva therefore stands today at the bridgehead of modern Sinhala music. He is without doubt the father of contemporary Sinhala music at its best. He has rescued Sinhala music from the crudities of the early film music. He has built on the works of Ananda Samarakoon, Suryashankar Molligoda and Sunil Shantha whose one ambition was to develop a clean and wholesome indigenous musical tradition.

That ambition it was left to Amaradeva to bring to fruition. Here he was well-served by his lyric writers chief among them being Mahagama Sekera (their partnership was particularly fruitful), Madawala S. Ratnayake and Dalton de Alwis all of them now dead. Of the contemporary lyricists W. A. Abeysinghe, Sunil Sarath Perera and of late Ratnasiri Wijesinghe have done some inspired work for him.

Parricide being a pastime of some in all ages there are those who would like to slay the sacred cow. Marxists and modernists alike sometimes charge Amaradeva with living in a golden past, of invoking a dead village and being trapped in petrified feudal social relations. But there is nothing mawkishly sentimental or saccharin about Amaradeva’s village unlike the romantically-blinkered vision of the Colombo poets.

The village he invokes is healthy and wholesome and embodies values which are salutary antidote to the contemporary rat race, the scramble for office, position, wealth and privilege. Anyway who are we to question the vision of the poet? Certainly it would be comic to demand that poetry and music should at all times be necessarily socially relevant.

We can only be thankful to Providence that we have Amaradeva amidst us to give tongue to the soul of a newly-awakened people. courtesy: Sunday Observer

Sitarist and composer Ravi Shankar

Sitarist and composer Ravi Shankar, who helped introduce the sitar to the Western world through his collaborations with The Beatles, died in Southern California on Tuesday, his family said. He was 92.

The veteran street theatre activist and scholar Mr.Gamini Haththotuwegama of Sri Lanka.

I am generally inclined to be deeply suspicious about art that claims to be “political.” It is for this reason that street plays by Gamini Haththotuwegama’s “The Wayside and Open Theatre” did not immediately ingratiate themselves with me. However, despite this, Haththotuwegama’s Cyanide inspired the last scene of my own theatrical (misad) venture The Commode, which was staged a few years ago. Recently I enjoyed the opportunity of reading Streets Ahead with Haththotuwegama, a compilation of essays by and about Gamini Haththotuwegama. Hats off to the editors for bringing to the general readership the idiosyncratic genius and intrepid radicalism of a man who has now attained legendary status! I can’t claim that Streets Ahead made me a convert to the craft of Haththotuwegama. I still find some of the plays by “The Wayside and Open Theatre,” too Manichean and for that reason too simplistic in outlook. However, I do feel that my initial assessment of his work, at least to some extent, was predicated on a bias that favored aesthetics over politics. Let us not debate the baffling question: what stuff constitutes great art? But to look at Haththotuwegama’s work from a solely aesthetic perspective is perhaps a flawed approach for most certainly it was not his intention to please us aesthetically, nor was it his intention to remain within the politically complacent comfort zone of “high-art” and enjoy its suavity. On the other hand, how much thoughtful gravity could you invest theatre with when your avowed purpose is to take it to the masses? Perhaps this (condescending) argument accounts for the lack of analytical depth in quite a few of Haththotuwegama’s better known numbers. It could be said that Sinhala theatre has an incurable tendency to engage politically. This is perhaps because of the immediacy of theatre to the masses. In Haththotuwegama’s most profoundly analytical critique of Sinhala Theatre (which is impressive both in terms of scope and depth) entitled “Unresolved Contradictions, Paradoxical Discourses and Alternative Strategies in the Postcolonial Sinhala Theatre” (this essay could be found in Streets Ahead), he traces the political trajectory of Sinhala theatre. This essay is by far the best critique of Sinhala theatre that I have ever read. Politics got into theatre (most notably in the theatre of Sugathapala de Silva’s ‘Ape Kattiya’) almost as a knee-jerk reaction to Sarachchandra’s highfaluting and seemingly politically detached ‘operas’. However, it should be questioned if theatre and art in general, could animate people into meaningful political action; if it could stir people out of their middleclass complacency and inertia? I personally feel that art does not have that kind of clout over the lives of people. Art does not bring about revolutions, hunger does. If this is the case, then, is political theatre impotent? Does it have the potency to achieve the political ends that it desires? After all what change has the politically charged theatre of Haththotuwegama and Co. has brought about? It has only substantiated the Wildean truism: All Art is quite useless. Amongst the essays in Streets Ahead, Haththotuwegama’s perceptive analysis of the discontents of English academe is particularly interesting. Haththotuwegama, who was a wayward “product” of the English Department of University of Peradeniya, could shun the English Department only to the extent to which Maupassant could shun the Eiffel Tower. In that, he could never really leave it. “Unreasonable Postulates and Treasonable Practices Correlative to English-Rescuing the Liberal Impulse,” is Haththotuwegama’s E.F.C. Ludowyk memorial lecture. In his lecture he directs his polemics against the English education in the country. This lecture is refreshing in its appeal to more “radical” and “progressive” elements within the English academe who in Haththotuwegama would, no doubt, find a worthy ally. Haththotuwegama’s memorial tribute to Lakdasa Wickramsinghe has a story of its own. As the legend has it, he delivered this critique off the top of his head at an event organized to honor the memory of Wickramasinghe following his death. It was later edited and published in Navasilu II. Among other essays in the collection ‘50 Years of Sinhala Cinema: Sacred Cows to Buffaloes: Reverse Althernatives’ provides an incisive overview of Sinhala Cinema. Haththotuwegama’s early journalistic writings on theatre and cinema, although not as insightful as his later criticism, do not lack the rigorously critical approach that Haththotuwegama practices in his criticism. And, of course, it should be mentioned that his witty and intelligent writing style makes his criticism infinitely readable. However, a prominent short-coming of Streets Ahead is its lack of critical engagement with Haththotuwegama’s craft. In most of the pieces ‘about’ Haththotuwegama, the contributors fall short of providing any critical insight into his work and limit their criticism to awed idolizing. Perhaps it is not with idolatry zeal that we should appreciate his work but with critical precision; an approach that the great man himself would have, no doubt, approved. Courtesy:The Nation