[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":322},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-ediriweera-sarachchandra":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":281,"description":282,"died":283,"era":284,"extension":285,"heroImage":286,"imageCredit":287,"imageLicense":288,"imageSource":289,"meta":290,"navigation":291,"notable":291,"path":292,"roles":293,"seo":297,"sources":298,"stem":320,"translated":291,"url":301,"__hash__":321},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fediriweera-sarachchandra.md","Ediriweera Sarachchandra",920,1914,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":272},"minimark",[11,32,35,40,43,46,62,66,93,107,118,122,165,168,184,189,192,196,221,248,252,257,260,269],[12,13,14,15,19,20,23,24,27,28,31],"p",{},"Some time in the mid-1950s, on a travelling fellowship that took him through India, China, Japan and the United States, a Ceylonese university lecturer sat down in a cinema and watched Akira Kurosawa's ",[16,17,18],"em",{},"Rashomon",". He came out of it thinking about a Sinhala village story. Years later he wrote that this was the moment the idea took hold — that the old ",[16,21,22],{},"Maname"," tale, until then performed in villages as rustic verse and ",[16,25,26],{},"kolam",", could be rebuilt as a fully sung ",[16,29,30],{},"nadagam",". Kurosawa's film, he noted, was itself drawn from a Japanese short story, and stripped to its bones that story was remarkably close to the Sinhala one.",[12,33,34],{},"What came of that thought, in 1956, was a play in which nobody speaks — everything is chanted, sung or danced. It changed what a Sinhala song could be.",[36,37,39],"h2",{"id":38},"the-scholar-who-catalogued-the-folk-play","The scholar who catalogued the folk play",[12,41,42],{},"He was born on 3 June 1914 at Rathgama, near Dodanduwa in the Galle district, the eldest child and only son of a postmaster, Charles Francis de Silva, and a schoolteacher, Lydia Pinto Moragoda. His parents named him Vedithanthirige Eustace Reginold de Silva. Like several of his contemporaries — Ananda Samarakoon, Sunil Santha, W. D. Amaradeva — he later replaced his colonial-sounding name with a Sinhala one, and became Ediriweera Sarachchandra.",[12,44,45],{},"He went to school at Richmond College and St Aloysius' College in Galle, St John's College in Panadura and S. Thomas' College, Mount Lavinia, and entered University College, Colombo, in 1933, reading Pali, Sanskrit and Sinhala. He took a first in 1936, and then, at his parents' insistence, sat the Ceylon Civil Service examination and came first in the island — an option he simply declined to take up. Instead he went to Santiniketan with his wife to study music and Indian philosophy, took a master's degree from the University of London, and completed a doctorate there on the Buddhist psychology of perception.",[12,47,48,49,52,53,55,56,55,59,61],{},"In 1952 he was appointed to the University of Ceylon at Peradeniya, and in the same year published the book that made everything afterwards possible: ",[16,50,51],{},"The Sinhalese Folk Play",". It was a scholar's survey of forms — ",[16,54,26],{},", ",[16,57,58],{},"sokari",[16,60,30],{}," — that educated Colombo had written off as village entertainment. Nobody, at that point, expected the researcher to start using his own material.",[36,63,65],{"id":64},"balapitiya-comes-to-peradeniya","Balapitiya comes to Peradeniya",[12,67,68,69,72,73,76,77,80,81,84,85,88,89,92],{},"Sarachchandra had already been writing plays for over a decade, and they were mostly adaptations of Western naturalistic drama: ",[16,70,71],{},"Mudalalige Peraliya"," (1943), ",[16,74,75],{},"Kapuwa Kapoti"," (1945), ",[16,78,79],{},"Hangi Hora"," (1949), ",[16,82,83],{},"Manager"," (1950). The turn began with ",[16,86,87],{},"Pabavati"," in 1952, his first script to use a ",[16,90,91],{},"pothe gura"," — the narrator who opens a nadagam and introduces each character in verse — and to carry songs.",[12,94,95,96,98,99,102,103,106],{},"For ",[16,97,22],{}," he went to the source. Charles Silva Gunasinghe Gurunnanse was a master of nadagam who worked and taught around Balapitiya on the south-west coast, where his village actors were mostly cinnamon peelers by day. He provided the music, advised on the dance movement and the singing, and, by Sarachchandra's own account, sat with him through every stage of the writing. Sarachchandra was frank about what he changed: the knockabout comic turns of the old form — the ",[16,100,101],{},"bahu bhutha"," and ",[16,104,105],{},"sella pille"," clowning — were cut out as not properly belonging to the play, while, he wrote, \"every custom the nadagam style required\" was kept.",[12,108,109,110,113,114,117],{},"The story itself came from the ",[16,111,112],{},"Chulla Dhanuddhara Jataka",", the 372nd tale in the ",[16,115,116],{},"Pansiya Panas Jataka Pota",": a prince, his newly married princess, a forest, a hunter-king, a duel, and a sword handed to the wrong man. Siri Gunasinghe of the Sanskrit department designed the costumes. When the play opened in 1956, the princess was Hemamali Gunasinghe.",[36,119,121],{"id":120},"the-songs","The songs",[12,123,124,125,127,128,132,133,136,137,132,140,143,144,132,147,150,151,132,154,157,158,132,161,164],{},"Because every line in ",[16,126,22],{}," is sung, its \"lyrics\" are the play. They are also, more than seventy years on, among the most widely known verses in the language. ",[129,130,131],"strong",{},"ප්‍රේමයෙන් මන රංජිත වේ"," ",[16,134,135],{},"Premayen Mana Ranjitha We"," (\"the heart is coloured by love\"), the young couple's duet as they set out through the forest; ",[129,138,139],{},"බරණැස් පුරයේ",[16,141,142],{},"Baranas Puraye"," (\"in the city of Baranas\"); ",[129,145,146],{},"ඉර හඳ දෙවියනි",[16,148,149],{},"Ira Handa Deviyani"," (\"O deities of sun and moon\"); ",[129,152,153],{},"මෑ වේ මා දුටු කොමල ලියා",[16,155,156],{},"Mae We Ma Dutu Komala Liya"," (\"this is the tender lady I saw\"); ",[129,159,160],{},"නැද්ද සිතේ අනුකම්පා",[16,162,163],{},"Nadda Sithe Anukampa"," (\"is there no pity in your heart?\").",[12,166,167],{},"The most consequential verse is the one the princess sings to the hunter-king after her husband is dead:",[169,170,171],"blockquote",{},[12,172,173,174,177,178,180,181,183],{},"මනමේ රජු ඔබ - ගෙල සිද ලන්ටා",[175,176],"br",{},"\nකඩුව ඉල්ලූ සද ඔහු වළකන්ටා",[175,179],{},"\nකල තැත දුටුවද - ඔබ ගලවන්ටා",[175,182],{},"\nසිතුණේ කඩුව ඔබ - අතටම දෙන්ටා",[12,185,186],{},[16,187,188],{},"When King Maname asked for the sword to cut your throat — though you saw me try to stop him and save you — all I meant was to put the sword into your hand.",[12,190,191],{},"Sarachchandra wrote afterwards that he had not intended the princess to be a fickle woman at all, and that when students at Peradeniya first saw the play they watched her with pity. At the theatre in Borella, some in the audience shouted abuse at her from their seats. He was studying, he said, not a woman's morals but the misfortune that can fall on anyone without warning.",[36,193,195],{"id":194},"sinhabahu-and-amaradeva","Sinhabahu, and Amaradeva",[12,197,198,199,202,203,206,207,132,210,213,214,132,217,220],{},"The second fully stylised play came in 1961: ",[16,200,201],{},"Sinhabahu",", taken from the ",[16,204,205],{},"Mahavamsa"," story of the lion who fathers a human son, and of the son who kills him. It is usually called his masterpiece, and it is the one with the strongest music, because the composer this time was W. D. Amaradeva. ",[129,208,209],{},"ගිරිකුල මුදුනේ",[16,211,212],{},"Girikula Mudune"," (\"on the mountain summit\"), Sarachchandra's text set by Amaradeva, and ",[129,215,216],{},"සිරිසාර වෘක්ෂ මූලේ",[16,218,219],{},"Sirisara Wruksha Mule"," (\"at the foot of the flourishing tree\") both belong to it. In 2003 Amaradeva gave the Sarachchandra memorial oration under the title \"Pleasurable experiences I had when I was creating the music for several of Sarachchandra's plays\".",[12,222,223,224,227,228,231,232,235,236,239,240,243,244,247],{},"Those two were the only plays he built entirely on nadagam. Afterwards he moved on — ",[16,225,226],{},"Kada Walalu"," (1958), ",[16,229,230],{},"Elova Gihin Melova Ava"," (1959), ",[16,233,234],{},"Mahasara"," (1968), ",[16,237,238],{},"Prematho Jayathi Soko"," (1969), ",[16,241,242],{},"Wessantara"," (1980), ",[16,245,246],{},"Bhava Kadathurava"," (1988) — mostly reworkings of Jataka tales and Sinhala folklore, which is a large part of why they lasted.",[36,249,251],{"id":250},"what-it-cost-and-what-it-changed","What it cost and what it changed",[12,253,254,256],{},[16,255,22],{}," arrived in the same year as the Official Language Act, and it landed on a Colombo elite that had no idea such a culture existed. Siri Gunasinghe later remembered an English-speaking friend asking him what \"this thing called Maname\" was, pronouncing it as though it were French. The play's success, Gunasinghe said, forced that part of the country to notice a Sinhala Buddhist culture it had not known was there.",[12,258,259],{},"Sarachchandra himself belonged to the university-and-radio establishment of the 1950s, and some accounts of the 1952 Radio Ceylon grading controversy — the auditions Sunil Santha boycotted before resigning his A grade — name him among the figures implicated. The documentation for that particular claim is thin, and it is repeated more often than it is sourced.",[12,261,262,263,265,266,268],{},"The honours came steadily: honorary doctorates from Jaffna and Peradeniya in 1982, the Kumaran Asan World Prize from Kerala in 1983, the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Literature in 1988. He served as Sri Lanka's ambassador to France from 1974 to 1977 and as Chancellor of the University of Peradeniya. ",[16,264,22],{}," was staged in London in 1986; ",[16,267,201],{}," went to the Asian Arts Festival in Singapore in 1991. He died in Colombo on 16 August 1996, and in 2014 UNESCO marked his birth centenary.",[12,270,271],{},"The plays are still performed by schoolchildren every year, which is the real measure. A country that had been buying its melodies off Indian film soundtracks was handed, in 1956, a set of tunes that were unmistakably its own — and had been all along, in the villages, waiting for someone to take them seriously.",{"title":273,"searchDepth":274,"depth":274,"links":275},"",2,[276,277,278,279,280],{"id":38,"depth":274,"text":39},{"id":64,"depth":274,"text":65},{"id":120,"depth":274,"text":121},{"id":194,"depth":274,"text":195},{"id":250,"depth":274,"text":251},"3 June 1914","The Peradeniya scholar who went back to the despised village nadagam, learned its tunes from a Balapitiya master, and out of them built Maname and Sinhabahu — the sung plays that gave Sinhala its most-loved theatre songs.","16 August 1996","1940s-1990s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fediriweera-sarachchandra.webp","Sakuna89","CC BY-SA 4.0","https:\u002F\u002Fcommons.wikimedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FFile:Vijaya_Nandasiri_as_the_prince_Maname.jpg",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fediriweera-sarachchandra",[294,295,296],"Lyricist","Poet","Researcher",{"title":5,"description":282},[299,302,305,308,311,314,317],{"title":300,"url":301},"Ediriweera Sarachchandra — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FEdiriweera_Sarachchandra",{"title":303,"url":304},"එදිරිවීර සරච්චන්ද්‍ර — සිංහල විකිපීඩියා","https:\u002F\u002Fsi.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E0%B6%91%E0%B6%AF%E0%B7%92%E0%B6%BB%E0%B7%92%E0%B7%80%E0%B7%93%E0%B6%BB_%E0%B7%83%E0%B6%BB%E0%B6%A0%E0%B7%8A%E0%B6%A0%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A%E0%B6%AF%E0%B7%8A%E2%80%8D%E0%B6%BB",{"title":306,"url":307},"මනමේ — සිංහල විකිපීඩියා (with Sarachchandra's own account of the play)","https:\u002F\u002Fsi.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E0%B6%B8%E0%B6%B1%E0%B6%B8%E0%B7%9A",{"title":309,"url":310},"Sarachchandra's life at a glance — sarachchandra.org (Internet Archive)","https:\u002F\u002Fweb.archive.org\u002Fweb\u002F20110219053714\u002Fhttp:\u002F\u002Fwww.sarachchandra.org\u002Fbiography.htm",{"title":312,"url":313},"Ernest MacIntyre, 'The Growth of a Tragic Princess' — Thuppahi's Blog","https:\u002F\u002Fthuppahis.com\u002F2023\u002F08\u002F26\u002Finfluences-in-the-characterisation-of-the-princess-in-maname\u002F",{"title":315,"url":316},"Garrett Field, Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Sri Lanka (full text)","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.org\u002Fstream\u002Fdli.doa.211\u002F211_djvu.txt",{"title":318,"url":319},"Fertile Cross-Fertilisation in Sri Lankan Theatre in the Mid-Twentieth Century — Thuppahi's Blog","https:\u002F\u002Fthuppahis.com\u002F2026\u002F06\u002F23\u002Ffertile-cross-fertsilisation-in-sri-lankan-theatre-in-the-mid-twentieth-century\u002F","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fediriweera-sarachchandra","7wKlh62l3xmEPKT5M-2iKsy2u6HuEf7dVOIK6E3ZrZU",1787999331727]