He wrote most of his lines in stolen minutes. "Even with all the work at the Nilwala company keeping me busy, I can find a minute to write a few lines for a song," he said. "If an idea comes I write it down quickly. It might happen while I'm on a journey." That is how the words to one of the best-selling Sinhala cassettes ever pressed got written — by a company manager with a notebook, somewhere between two appointments.
Channa Jayanath is one of the most-heard and least-documented figures in Sinhala popular song. He has no English Wikipedia article, no published interview archive in English, and no confirmed birth year. What survives is the work, and there is a lot of it.
Sudu Araliya Mala
සුදු අරලියා මල Sudu Araliya Mala ("the white temple-flower"), sung by Ajith Muthukumarana to music by Jayasiri Amarasekara, is the record that made his name. The cassette it titled set sales records in the Sinhala cassette market, and every song on it was written by Channa Jayanath — an unusual thing even then, when albums were normally assembled from several lyricists' work.
Two more from the same partnership stayed in circulation: වෙහෙරහේන විහාරයේ Veherahena Viharaye and නාමල් දෙකක් ළඟින් Namal Dekak Lagin.
The brother who showed him how
He was educated at Vidyakara Maha Vidyalaya in Maharagama, took an interest in every kind of literary activity from his schooldays, and won most of the competitions he entered. The direct influence, by his own account, was family: his brother is the lyricist Lalith Wasantha, and Channa said it was from him that he got the grounding for writing songs.
He lived in Maharagama and was the father of two children. Professionally he worked as general manager of the Nilwala group, a company that produced cassettes and teledramas — which put him at the exact commercial centre of the industry he was writing for, and explains both the volume of his output and the speed with which it reached the market.
He was not, on his own telling, a lone genius about it. When he got stuck he would talk it over with Professor Sunil Ariyaratne or Rathna Sri Wijesinghe. But he was firm about not imitating: "I don't believe in following fashions or copying other artists. I do my own thing."
The singers
His catalogue reads like a list of the biggest Sinhala pop voices of the 1990s and 2000s.
For Kingsley Peiris he wrote දෙළුම් මලක් Delum Malak, Deliya Malen and Mal Wadamata. For Nirosha Virajini he wrote ඉගිලෙන්න තහනම් නම් දුරක් Igilenna Thahanam Nam Durak ("if the distance is forbidden to fly"), one of the defining female pop songs of its decade. For Prince Udaya Priyantha there was Sigiriye Kurutu Gee and කඳුලු පූජාසනේ Kandulu Poojasane.
He worked repeatedly with the singer Chandana Liyanarachchi — කවි සී පද ඇහෙන රෑට Kavi See Pada Ahena Reta, සමාවෙන්න රත්තරනේ Samawenna Raththarane, සඳ යාත්රා කලා වගෙ මතකයි Sanda Yathra Kala Wage Mathakai, and සුමුදු වලාවක අඳුර වෙලා Sumudu Walawaka Andura Wela, which Gunadasa Kapuge set. Rohana Weerasinghe composed his lyrics for Asanka Priyamantha Peiris (සියඹලා මලක් Siyambala Malak, Anduru Iki Bindina, Ra Kumari Mal); H. M. Jayawardena set others. Chamika Sirimanna sang මගේ දුප්පත් ඇස් දෙක Mage Duppath As Deka and සඳ රැජිනියේ Sanda Rajiniye; Athula Adikari sang ඉමිටේෂන් මාල පොටේ Imitation Mala Pote; Namal Udugama sang සඳකට තහනම් Sandakata Thahanam.
One report puts his total at more than seven hundred songs. As with almost every Sinhala songwriter of his generation, that number comes from a single source and no one has checked it against a catalogue, so it is best read as "several hundred" rather than as a count.
What is not known
Almost everything biographical. No source found online gives his year of birth, when he wrote his first published lyric, or which of the awards circuits he passed through. The Sinhala Wikipedia article on him is short and rests on a single reference.
That reference is also the only account of his death. On 26 February 2022 the Sinhala news site Gossip Lanka News reported that Channa Jayanath had died while being treated for a COVID-19 infection, with his funeral to be held that afternoon at Borella Cemetery; the Sinhala Wikipedia entry follows that report and cites nothing else. No mainstream newspaper account of his death could be located. The report is detailed and consistent, and it is repeated here as a report — but a reader should know that a lyricist whose songs sold in the hundreds of thousands appears to have been buried without a broadsheet obituary.
That gap is the point of an article like this one. The songs are everywhere; the man who wrote them is barely on the record.