When Nanda Malini won both the Presidential and the Sarasaviya award for the best song of the year, the song was අම්මාවරුනේ Ammawarune — "O mothers" — and it came from a film called Puja. The man who had written the words had also directed the film. He was not, by trade, either a lyricist or a director. He was a newspaperman, and had been one since he was eighteen years old.
Dharmasiri Gamage was born on 4 October 1939 at Katamburawa, the only son of Maththaka Gamage Peter Appuhamy and Kalegana Arachchige Chandrawathi, and the eldest of four children. What drew him was writing. He found his way to the Maha Bodhi Mandiraya at Maligakande, and there met the journalist U. A. A. Perera — "Siri Aiya" to a generation of young Sinhala writers — who steered him into the trade.
Lankadeepa at eighteen
In 1959 the deputy editor of the Sinhala daily Lankadeepa, K. M. Sirisena, invited him to join as a sub-editor. He was nineteen. Forty years later the Sunday Times described him as a veteran with over forty years of experience, "having joined the Lankadipa as a lad of 18 though he does not show his age" — the two accounts differ by a year, which is the sort of small discrepancy that follows a man who started too young to be believed.
In 1977 he moved to Lake House, the Associated Newspapers of Ceylon, where he worked on Dinamina, Janatha and Silumina. His column Pahan Weta, compiled weekly for Yovun Janatha, became one of the first real forums for young readers in the Sinhala press — a place where people who had no other platform argued in print.
The songs
He wrote lyrics alongside all of this, for decades, and the songs outlasted the columns. Accounts of how many differ sharply: English Wikipedia credits him with more than two hundred song lyrics, while the Sunday Times in 1999 described him flatly as a "lyric writer for over 300 films". Neither figure can be checked against a catalogue, and the truth is probably that nobody counted at the time.
What can be checked is the company he kept. His longest partnership was with Premasiri Khemadasa, and it began at the beginning. When the director K. A. W. Perera made Sanasuma Kothanada he did two unusual things at once: he asked Khemadasa to score a feature film, which Khemadasa had barely done before, and he brought in Gamage to write five songs for it. Out of that came සුළං කුරුල්ලෝ Sulang Kurullo — "birds of the wind" — sung by Haroon Lanthra, and සංසාර ගමනේ Sansara Gamane, sung by W. D. Amaradeva. English Wikipedia dates the film to 1963; films.lk, which keeps release dates, gives 18 April 1966, and the later date fits the rest of Khemadasa's chronology better.
The Khemadasa collaborations kept coming: චාමර සැලුනාවේ Chamara Salunawe for Neela Wickramasinghe, රෑණ ගිරා ජෝඩුවයි Rana Gira Joduwayi for Amaradeva and Nanda Malini together, සීත මෝසම් Seetha Mosam and මා ප්රාර්ථනා ආසාවෝ Ma Prarthana Asawo for H. R. Jothipala, ලෝකේ ජීවත් වන්නට Loke Jeewath Wannata for Clarence Wijewardena and Latha Walpola. He wrote for Clarence's own tunes as well — සිකුරුලියා Sikuruliya and කලක් ඇවෑමෙන් Kalak Awamen — and for Victor Ratnayake, Rohana Weerasinghe, Sisira Senaratne and Rookantha Gunathilake. It is an unusually wide range for one pen: art song, film playback and guitar pop, without any apparent embarrassment about moving between them.
It is often reported that he wrote his first lyric, Ho Mage Prema Matha, in 1955 at the age of sixteen, for the singer and Radio Ceylon producer G. S. B. Rani Perera. The story is repeated widely but the source usually cited for it does not in fact contain it, so it is best treated as tradition rather than record.
Scripts and two films
Cinema pulled him in properly in the 1970s. He wrote the screenplay for Dharmasena Pathiraja's Eya Dan Loku Lamayek (1977) and for Amaranath Jayathilake's Siripala Saha Ranmenika (1977), and for Sunil Ariyaratne's Sarungale (1980) — three of the most serious Sinhala films of their decade, made by directors who were arguing about what cinema in this country was for.
He then directed two features himself, Yasa Isuru and Puja. Puja, released in 1986, drew performances from Joe Abeywickrama and Amarasiri Kalansuriya, won Geetha Kanthi Jayakody a best actress award, and carried Ammawarune.
The traveller
After Lake House he became something the Sinhala reading public had very little of: a travel writer. He published a ten-booklet series called Charika Satahan — traveller's notes — on Italy and France, launched together as a single pack at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute in April 1999, taking Sinhala readers to Rome, Venice, Milan, Pompeii and the Vatican. Before that he had written three books under the heading Parisara Charika, environment travels: Hitha Nivena Than, Jatika Namal Uyana and Sansara Darshana. He also published a novel, Sittara Sithak, and three collections of short stories. The Sri Lanka Environmental Journalists Forum named him best travel writer in 2002; he had been honoured for the same thing in 1999.
He died on 19 September 2004, aged sixty-four, at Dambulla — suddenly, while travelling, which for this particular writer was almost a form of consistency. Four years later he was honoured at the commemoration for H. R. Jothipala, the singer who had carried so many of his lines.
He is not a famous name. Lyricists rarely are, and journalists who write lyrics on the side even less so. But if you have heard Sansara Gamane or Ammawarune, you have heard him, and neither song sounds like the work of a man doing it in his spare time.