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

For Aung San Suu Kyi

Muhammad Samad 

 For Aung San Suu Kyi

Dear Aung San Suu Kyi,

it was a long time ago that, marking a radiant photograph of yours,

you in your full youth decorated with roses in your bun of hair

and jasmine flowers blooming in the garland on your neck,  

I made one unnoticed comment: Wow! the East Asian beauty has outmatched the matchless Aryan ladies.

Later on, ignoring the comforts of your dear husband and children,

and immersing yourself in the cordial love

of the speechless and oppressed Burmese people,

yearning for light, you have, like Nelson Mandela,

become a dear Nobel-laureate political prisoner.

Dear Suu Kyi, on the day of Victory,

you put on garland of Bakul flowers on the neck;

a bouquet of roses drenched in people’s love was in your hand;

Kyang, green hills, forests and crop-fields

were soothing our eyes with the rhythm of your laughter as full as

the flow of the full moon; new leaves of spring were dancing in joy.

The flag of NLD, for bearing which

simple and freedom-seeking people and innocent

Buddhist monks of Burma were thrown into prisons,

that flag studded with white stars between red ground

and golden peacock is now swinging to the rhythms of dance

by colorful adolescents on the streets from Yangon to Mandalay,

from Mandalay to Naypido, the new city of bunkers of the junta,

swinging in the enchanting manner of elated pop singer Shakira.

And the waves of long-awaited freedom

are spilling over the banks of Iravati

into the turbulent stream of the Naf.

Suu Kyii,

you are free today. Many paths are open to you.

Know you surely which one to take; yet,

at the sight of grit and stone under your feet,

and the frequent appearance of hawks in the sky of Yangon

I am frightened a little.

So, remembrance of the grief of Chandrani,

the heroine created by the Bengali poet Doulat Kazi at the royal

court of the Arakan King and those in that of Alaol’s Padmabati,

makes it a liability for this present-day poet of Bangladesh

to tell it in the Bakul-covered ears of yours:

`Though the speed of light is about two hundred thousand miles

per second, one cannot be sure as to how and when that light

will find an entry into a society of bare subsistence,

society seized by engulfing flames, bloodshed

and avaricious foes at home and abroad.’

May 2012, University of Dhaka

Translated by Kajal Bandyopadhyay

Muhammad Samad

Muhammad Samad was born in a remote village in 1956 in the Jamalpur District of Bangladesh. He earned his Bachelor of Social Science (BSS) with honors and master’s degrees in Social Welfare (mostly known as Social Work) from the Institute of Social Welfare and Research (ISWR), University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He completed his PhD on the participation of the rural poor in development programs of government and NGOs in Bangladesh. Dr. Muhammad Samad was the Director at the Institute of Social Work & Research, University of Dhaka. Dr. Samad has taught the course Globalization of Social Welfare as a visiting Professor at the Department of Social Work of Winona State University (WSU), Minnesota, USA twice in 2005 and 2009 respectively. He has worked as a Fellow of Katherine A. Kendall Institute of International Social Work Education, CSWE, Washington DC, USA in 2009. Currently he is the Vice Chancellor of the University of Information Technology and Sciences (UITS).

Dr. Muhammad Samad has done extensive research on the rural poor, indigenous peoples and the underprivileged classes in Bangladesh. He has more than 30 articles published in national and international journals.  A well-known social scientist Dr. Muhammad Samad has authored and edited more than 10 books in the field of social science and development. Highlights include The Invisible People: Poverty and Resiliency in the Dhaka Slums (2008; Jointly with Dr. Cathleen Jo Faruque), PublishAmerica, Baltimore, USA, Participation of the Rural Poor in Government and NGO Programs: A Comparative Study (2002), Awareness About the Role of UN in Bangladesh: An Opinion Survey (2000), The Santal Community in Bangladesh: Problems and Prospects (2003; Jointly), Human Rights: 50 Years of Advancement 1999, (Ed. in Bengali), The Fourth World Conference on Women: Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action (Ed. 1997 in Bengali), Role of NGOs in Rural Poverty Alleviation of Bangladesh (1984, in Bengali) and The Struggle of Poets and Poems (A collection essays ed. in Bengali, 1994). He is widely published in America, China, India, Japan, Indonesia and Korea.

Muhammad Samad is a genius and popular poet of Bengali language. He has been writing poems since his school days. The first book of his verses Ekjan Rajnaitik Netar Menifesto (Manifesto of a Political Leader) was published in 1983 and won the Trivuj Literary Award in the same year from among the young poets aged 25 years in Bangladesh. His other published books of verses are Selected Poems (bi-lingual), Premer Kabita (Love Poems) Kabitasangraha (Selected Collection of Poems), Aaj Sharater Akashe Purnima  (The Full Moon in the Autumn Sky) Cholo, Tumi Bristite Bhiji (Let Us Be Drenched in Torrential Rain), Podabe Chandan Kaath (Will Burn Sandal Wood) Ami Noi Indrajit Megher Adale (I am not Indrajit Behind the Clouds) and  Utsaber Kabita (Poems From Festival ed. Bengali poems rendered in the National Poetry Festival). Dr. Samad has been serving as the President of Bangladesh Council for Social Work Education (BCSWE) since 2007. He has visited China, India, Nepal, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, United Kingdom and United States of America on invitation as academic and poet.

Ini Avan Review

By: Sivahami Vijenthira

The title of Asoka Handagama’s beautiful film Ini Avan is a play on words. The phrase “ini avan” means “him hereafter”, while the single word “iniavan” means “sweet, good-natured man”.

In the aftermath/hereafter of the war, the titular “Avan” (“Him”), an unnamed LTTE soldier, comes home from a government rehabilitation camp hoping to find meaningful work, reconnect with his lost love, and create a new life as an “iniavan” in his old village. But the village has turned against Avan and the separatist cause he fought for. From the first moments in the film, his old neighbours, all believably portrayed by amateur actors, stare at him in disapproving silence, and a child runs away from him. An old man comes to shout that Avan “killed” the man’s sons by luring them into the LTTE; we learn that he recruited everyone in the village who supported the cause, and they all died in the war. It was only Avan who survived to return and face those who were left behind to mourn their relatives while living in fear of LTTE extortion and government violence. He doesn’t want to face them, though. When anyone tries to talk to him, he replies, “piraiyosanam illai”: “no point”.

The film is slow, quiet, and elegantly framed, with long tracking shots of Avan riding his bicycle along dirt roads lined with palmyra trees, or through arid, windswept fields. People say little, and when they speak they use simple language that floats on the surface of their meaning. At the end of the TIFF premiere on September 7, a young audience member asked Handagama why the Sri Lankan military didn’t have a role in the film. They may not be there in uniform, Handagama replied cryptically, but their presence is felt. This is true: a woman in the film is described as unafraid, with “nothing left to save”, because she lived through war and refugee camps—a reference to rape and torture by military soldiers. While riding home in the dark, a sudden paranoid fear that he’s being followed makes Avan hide, shaking, behind a rock.

Handagama’s responses to audience questions were generally as inscrutable and seemingly simple as his characters’ dialogue. You would understand if you were close to the situation, he told a white woman who asked about the Canadian character in the film. “I don’t think you answered my question!” she called back. Maybe Handagama, like his film, had to be indirect because of the context in which he works. He was facing, that night, an audience full of emotional, politically-minded Tamils who may have done what the Canadian character is accused by Avan of doing (giving guns to the soldiers and getting visas for themselves), and he will soon fly home to a country where art and journalism are still tightly controlled. His work has been banned in the past, but he continues to produce it, because he sees its importance in times of oppression. “Why did you make this film?” asked one man. “I am a filmmaker,” Handagama replied, to laughter from people who saw this as a joke.

The brilliance of Ini Avan, which the TIFF audience repeatedly praised for its realism, is that its quiet simplicity allows us to find our own perspectives within the wide swath of characters and experiences it portrays: the widow who married while underage in order to avoid LTTE conscription; the impoverished father who loses his livelihood to

Avan; his wife, who survived refugee camps and giggles at her domestic abuse; Avan himself, now sapped of the charisma that was apparently so appealing to the soldiers he recruited; and the villagers around him, who have seen too much and buried too many to still believe that the war had any purpose.

Only the refugee camp survivor seems to have hope, and it is truly positive even though it is the hope of someone at the very nadir of her existence, someone looking up because she can no longer look down. If there is a message in Ini Avan, it is that it is possible to look up and try to “just live”, but it must still be acknowledged that the scars of war—physical, geographical, emotional, mental—will remain hereafter.

About the author: Sivahami Vijenthira was born in Sri Lanka and moved to Toronto when she was four years old. She graduated from McMaster University, and a frequent contributor to the Toronto Star.