[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":163},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-ananda-samarakoon":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":129,"description":130,"died":110,"era":131,"extension":132,"heroImage":133,"imageCredit":134,"imageLicense":135,"imageSource":136,"meta":137,"navigation":138,"notable":138,"path":139,"roles":140,"seo":144,"sources":145,"stem":161,"translated":138,"url":148,"__hash__":162},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fananda-samarakoon.md","Ananda Samarakoon",null,1911,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":120},"minimark",[11,15,18,23,26,29,33,36,44,55,59,70,73,76,82,86,97,104,107,111,114,117],[12,13,14],"p",{},"The story that gets told about his schooldays is that he hated arithmetic. One day the master caught him writing lines of verse instead of doing his sums, demanded to know what they were, and — on being told they were a song — ordered him to stand up and sing it to the class as a punishment. The boy sang the words to a tune he invented on the spot, about the riverside he walked past every morning on his way to school. The class was thrilled. The master, the account goes, was too, and did not let on.",[12,16,17],{},"It is oral tradition, retold long afterwards, and there is no way now to check it. But it fits the man: everything Ananda Samarakoon ever did began with a Sinhala sentence and ended with a tune fitted to it, and a great deal of his life was spent being told by other people what he was allowed to do with either.",[19,20,22],"h2",{"id":21},"watareka-to-santiniketan","Watareka to Santiniketan",[12,24,25],{},"He was born on 13 January 1911 near Watareka in the Padukka area, and christened George Wilfred — his full name Egodahage George Wilfred Alwis Samarakoon. His parents, Samuel Samarakoon and Dominga Peries, were Christians. He walked daily to the Wewala government Sinhala school, and later went to Christian College, Kotte, now CMS Sri Jayawardenepura College. While still a pupil there he wrote a patriotic song for the children of the school where his mother taught, and it won them first place in an inter-school competition. He passed the school leaving examination in 1929, and in 1934 joined his old college as a teacher of art and music.",[12,27,28],{},"That same year Rabindranath Tagore came to Ceylon with his dancers and musicians. The visit turned a number of young Ceylonese heads towards Bengal, and Samarakoon's among them: in 1936 he enrolled at Tagore's school at Santiniketan, studying art under Nandalal Bose and music under Shanti Devi Ghosh. He did not finish the course — accounts say six months, or that he came home in 1937, possibly because the money ran out. He came back a Buddhist, having changed his name to Ananda Samarakoon, and went back to teaching. From 1938 to 1942 he was the music master at Mahinda College, Galle.",[19,30,32],{"id":31},"ennada-menike","Ennada Menike",[12,34,35],{},"Sri Lankan popular song in the late 1930s largely meant Sinhala words fitted to melodies lifted from North Indian film and stage music, with lyrics that nobody pretended were literature. Samarakoon set out to make something that was recognisably of the island. His answer was \"Ennada Menike\" (එන්නද මැණිකේ, \"Will you come, Menike?\"), a love song built as a conversation between a village boy and a girl, rustic and unhurried and immediately popular.",[12,37,38,39,43],{},"He recorded first for HMV in 1939, singing duets with a young singer named Leelawathy; after her early death, with Swarna de Silva. The early 1940s were his best years, and the songs of that decade are still the ones people mean when they say his name: \"Podi Mal Etano\" (පොඩිමල් එතනෝ), \"Vile Malak Pipila\" (විලේ මලක් පිපීලා), \"Poson Pohoda\" (පොසොන් පොහෝදා), \"Sunila Guwane\" (සුනිල ගුවනේ), \"Nilwala Gange\" (නිල්වලා ගඟේ), \"Siri Saru Sara Kethe\" (සිරි සරු සාර කෙතේ), \"Punchi Suda\", \"Sumano\". Simple words, rural images, tunes that carried them without argument. He is often called the founder of modern Sinhala ",[40,41,42],"em",{},"geetha sahitya"," — song literature — and the label is fair.",[12,45,46,47,50,51,54],{},"Then his only child, a boy of five, died. Samarakoon was destroyed by it; he wrote the song \"Pahana Nivi Giya\" (\"The lamp has gone out\") and, in the late 1940s, left the country for India altogether to paint. He held eleven exhibitions there and was reviewed warmly in papers as far apart as the ",[40,48,49],{},"Straits Times"," and the ",[40,52,53],{},"Deccan Herald",". He came back to Ceylon in 1951 and returned to music.",[19,56,58],{"id":57},"how-a-school-song-became-an-anthem","How a school song became an anthem",[12,60,61,62,65,66,69],{},"Accounts of where \"Namo Namo Matha\" (නමෝ නමෝ මාතා) came from differ, and the difference matters. Samarakoon himself put it on record — as Sumana Saparamadu reported it — that he wrote it in 1940 while teaching at Mahinda College, to instil love of country in his pupils; it was first sung by Mahinda boys at Olcott Hall. His nephew Sunil Samarakoon told a different version to the ",[40,63,64],{},"Sunday Times",": that it was simply the last song in a songbook called ",[40,67,68],{},"Geetha Kumudini",", conceived on a flight home from India when he looked down and saw his own country from the air.",[12,71,72],{},"The two accounts agree on the thing that matters most. It was not written to be a national anthem.",[12,74,75],{},"Ceylon became independent on 4 February 1948 with no anthem of its own. A competition had been held before independence by the Lanka Gandharva Sabha; it was won by \"Sri Lanka Matha Pala Yasa Mahima\" by P. B. Illangasinghe and Lionel Edirisinghe, a result made awkward by the fact that both men sat on the judging panel. That song was broadcast on independence morning but not sung at the official ceremony, and Ceylon went on using the British anthem. At the first independence day ceremony in 1949 both songs were performed, in Sinhala and Tamil, as \"national songs\".",[12,77,78,79,81],{},"In 1950 the finance minister J. R. Jayewardene asked the government to recognise Samarakoon's song, and a committee under Sir Edwin Wijeyeratne was appointed to choose. It picked \"Namo Namo Matha\", altering one line with the composer's agreement, and the cabinet endorsed the choice on 22 November 1951. Samarakoon knew nothing about any of it at the time — he was in India, holding exhibitions. His wife and his brother Berty had submitted the entry. And because he had sold the manuscript of ",[40,80,68],{}," outright to his printer, R. K. W. Siriwardena, for want of the money to publish it himself, the prize of Rs 2,500 went to the printer.",[19,83,85],{"id":84},"the-gana","The gana",[12,87,88,89,92,93,96],{},"By the late 1950s a peculiar objection had taken hold. Poets, pundits and monks began arguing that the opening words were metrically inauspicious — that the ",[40,90,91],{},"gana",", the pattern of long and short in the first three syllables of ",[40,94,95],{},"na-mo-na",", was unlucky, and that it explained the country's misfortunes, including the untimely deaths of two prime ministers. Samarakoon, who had studied prosody in India, replied that he was the only person qualified to judge whether there was an error in his own lyrics.",[12,98,99,100,103],{},"He lost. The government decided in 1960 to alter the line, and from Independence Day in February 1961 the anthem opened \"Sri Lanka Matha, Apa Sri Lanka\". He was not consulted. Some days afterwards he drove to his brother's house, and as his eleven-year-old nephew ran out to greet him he put a hand on the boy's shoulder and said: ",[40,101,102],{},"Puthe, mage oluwa galawala, when ekak hi karala"," — son, my head has been removed and another one fixed on. The boy did not understand for years. Samarakoon, his nephew said, was never the same afterwards.",[12,105,106],{},"In a letter to a newspaper columnist shortly before his death, quoted by Saparamadu, he wrote: \"The anthem has been beheaded. It has not only destroyed the song, but also destroyed the life of the composer. I am frustrated and broken-hearted. It is a misfortune to live in a country where such things happen to a humble composer. Death would be preferable.\"",[19,108,110],{"id":109},"april-1962","April 1962",[12,112,113],{},"He was found in his bedroom, having taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. He had left a letter for Dudley Senanayake, then Leader of the Opposition, saying he did not want to live in this cruel society any longer, and a last painting: the Buddha in meditation beneath a tree, with a deer at the edge of the jungle looking on. He was 51.",[12,115,116],{},"Even the date is not settled. Most accounts — the Sunday Observer, the Sinhala Wikipedia, the infobox of the English Wikipedia article — give 5 April 1962; the opening line of that same English article gives 2 April. Nobody has reconciled them in print.",[12,118,119],{},"Almost every retelling of his life states that the alteration of the anthem caused his death. It is repeated so consistently that it has the shape of a settled fact, and it is not one. What can be established is what he said, what he wrote, and the order in which things happened. The rest is inference — and it belongs to the reader, not to the record.",{"title":121,"searchDepth":122,"depth":122,"links":123},"",2,[124,125,126,127,128],{"id":21,"depth":122,"text":22},{"id":31,"depth":122,"text":32},{"id":57,"depth":122,"text":58},{"id":84,"depth":122,"text":85},{"id":109,"depth":122,"text":110},"13 January 1911","The schoolmaster-painter who wrote Sri Lanka's national anthem, watched the state alter its opening words without asking him, and said his head had been taken off and another put in its place.","1930s-1960s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fananda-samarakoon.webp","Mirror Arts","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fmirrorarts.lk\u002Flife\u002Fnotes\u002F2651-ananda-samarakoon",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fananda-samarakoon",[141,142,143],"Singer","Composer","Lyricist",{"title":5,"description":130},[146,149,152,155,158],{"title":147,"url":148},"Ananda Samarakoon — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FAnanda_Samarakoon",{"title":150,"url":151},"ආනන්ද සමරකෝන් — සිංහල විකිපීඩියා","https:\u002F\u002Fsi.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E0%B6%86%E0%B6%B1%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A%E0%B6%AF_%E0%B7%83%E0%B6%B8%E0%B6%BB%E0%B6%9A%E0%B7%9D%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A",{"title":153,"url":154},"Kumudini Hettiarachchi, When words killed a great man — The Sunday Times, 4 February 2001","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F010204\u002Fplus5.html",{"title":156,"url":157},"Sumana Saparamadu, Ananda Samarakoon – The composer of our national anthem — Sunday Observer, 14 May 2006","https:\u002F\u002Farchives.sundayobserver.lk\u002F2006\u002F05\u002F14\u002Fjun02.asp",{"title":159,"url":160},"Sri Lanka Matha — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FSri_Lanka_Matha","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fananda-samarakoon","3xVC80PJJxXsDPz8KHZVD2Iy5mh4jf3W6iBPPtiDjcQ",1787999330643]