A song written to raise money for a scholarship fund is not usually where a career begins. In the late 1980s a schoolgirl from Anula Vidyalaya in Nugegoda sang ආජු තපර ලාහිලා Aaju tapara lahila as a duet with Ananda Weerasiri — words by Bandara Eheliyagoda, tune and arrangement by Rohana Weerasinghe — and by the next morning half the country could sing it back at her. As the Sunday Times' veteran arts columnist Dee Cee put it, "in one night a schoolgirl rocketed to fame."
There is a small disagreement about the year and the occasion, and it is worth stating rather than smoothing over. Wikipedia dates the start of her career to 1985 and attaches the song to Vijaya Dharmasiri's teledrama Bhagya. The same Sunday Times column, drawing on Professor D. P. M. Weerakkody, says Aaju tapara was sung to promote the Mahapola scholarship fund and dates that to 1987. Both things may be true — a teledrama song taken up by a national fundraising campaign is not unusual — but the accounts are not identical, and no source reconciles them.
Kalubowila, and a house that sang
She was born in 1966 in Kalubowila, on the southern edge of Colombo, to Sumanadasa and Karuna Peiris. Music was in the house before it was in the school: her mother sang on radio programmes, and her mother's sister, Priya Gunawardena, was a singer too. At around ten she was already in front of an SLBC microphone, singing on the children's programmes Sanda Mama and Sangeetha Handawa.
At Anula Vidyalaya she studied under Manjula Vithanage, B. Victor Perera and — this matters, given what she later became — Nanda Malini. She went on to study with the musician Dunstan de Silva, and then, properly and at length, in India: a Bachelor of Music Education and the Vocal Visharada from Bhatkhande in Lucknow, both with first class, completed in 1990. Later degrees followed at home — a Bachelor of Education in 2002, an MA in mass communication from the University of Kelaniya in 2007.
The cassette decade
Her recording career belongs to the years when the Sinhala album meant a cassette on a shop counter, and she has been unusually unhurried about it. Sina Podak Vee — සිනා පොදක් වී, "a shower of laughter" — appeared in 1990 and is still the record most listeners name first. Saroja followed in 1996, Malvarusa in 2000, and Numbata Inne Mang Vitarada in 2003. Four releases in fourteen years is not the output of someone chasing a chart.
The fifth, Sudu Hansini — සුදු හංසිනි, "white swan" — had been five years in the making. The Sunday Times reported its release alongside a tribute volume about her in October 2010; Wikipedia gives 2020 and describes it as sixteen original songs, so the date is unsettled.
The songs that carried across those years are mostly not the loud ones. පෙම්බර කුමරාන Pembara Kumarana, අහසයි ඔබ මට Ahasai Oba Mata, ඔබ හීනයක් වගේ Oba Heenayak Wage (Upul Shantha Sannasgala's lyric to Rohana Weerasinghe's melody), රාත්රී ඔබ Rathri Oba and මල් මාවතේ Mal Mawathe to lyrics by Kumaradasa Saputhanthri, බොරළු ඇනෙන පය රිදවන Boralu Anena Paya Ridawana, the devotional පහන තියා බුදු සාදුට Pahana Thiya Budu Saduta, and the mother-song කඳුළු හෙලා නෑබිලියට සහල් ගරන අම්මා Kandulu Hela Nebiliyata Sahal Garana Amma. She has also recorded a great deal of children's material, including the theme songs for cartoons such as Ha Ha Hari Hawa.
Teaching, all the way through
The detail most often left out of profiles is that she has held a teaching job for most of her singing life. She was appointed a music teacher in the state school system in 1989 — five years at Gokarana Maha Vidyalaya in Panadura, ten at her old school Anula Vidyalaya, five at Visakha Vidyalaya in Colombo — and in 1993 opened her own school, Saundarya Shalikawa, in Kalubowila. Its pupils have their own concert series, Daru Tharu Waruna, first staged in 2003.
That background shows in how her singing is described. She holds an A grade on radio in both the classical and light categories, and the compliments paid to her by other musicians are technical ones: Professor Carlo Fonseka, writing in the 2010 tribute volume, praised her intonation, diction and phrasing before concluding that she was "perhaps the last link in the golden chain of female singers in the history of Sinhala music" — a lineage he traced from Rukmani Devi through Nanda Malini and Neela Wickramasinghe. Amaradeva called her a pleasant singer; Victor Rathnayake called her "a singer with a Sinhala voice."
Fonseka also put his finger on the category she belongs to: her claim to fame, he wrote, is as an exponent of the art song — the deliberately literary Sinhala song, written by a named poet and set by a named composer, that Sri Lankan radio spent the middle of the twentieth century building an audience for. That is an unfashionable thing to be good at in a decade of cassettes and playback work, and it is a large part of why the songs have lasted. The 2010 tribute volume, edited by the lyricist Buddhadasa Galappatty, went so far as to print her songs with musical notation, so that they could be studied rather than merely played.
The Gusi Peace Prize, and after
In 2012 she was named one of twenty laureates of the Gusi Peace Prize, awarded annually in the Philippines, in the performing arts category — recognition attached in the Sri Lankan press to මා තොටින් එන Ma Thotin Ena, the song she sang in the film Saroja (2000) to a lyric by Mahinda Chandrasekara and a melody by Rohana Weerasinghe. She remains the only Sri Lankan vocalist to have received it.
The other honours are the domestic ones a career like hers accumulates: a presidential award for best singer, Sirasa FM's most popular female singer in 2009, and a Sumathi Award in 2017 for the theme song of the teledrama Maada Obama Viya, after several earlier nominations. She has sung at the Sydney Opera House (3 September 2006), the Melbourne Concert Hall and the Camden Centre in London, and her solo concert Kaviya Oba filled the BMICH on 24 November 2015.
Alongside the music she has served on the board of the National Youth Services Council, on the board of the Sadaham Sevana International Buddhist Research Centre, and as a consultant to the Ministry of Buddhasasana and Religious Affairs, and has worked on drug-prevention education among university students. Thirty-odd years after a fundraising duet made her famous overnight, she is still, on paper and in practice, a teacher who sings.