[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":273},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-lionel-ranwala":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":235,"description":236,"died":237,"era":238,"extension":239,"heroImage":240,"imageCredit":241,"imageLicense":242,"imageSource":243,"meta":244,"navigation":245,"notable":245,"path":246,"roles":247,"seo":252,"sources":253,"stem":271,"translated":245,"url":243,"__hash__":272},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Flionel-ranwala.md","Lionel Ranwala",82,1939,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":227},"minimark",[11,20,23,28,31,56,63,66,70,73,96,120,124,127,176,193,203,207,221,224],[12,13,14,15,19],"p",{},"In 1964, at Dharmapala Vidyalaya in Pannipitiya, a music teacher did something that had never been done in a Sri Lankan school. He put together a ",[16,17,18],"em",{},"hevisi"," band — the drum-and-horn ensemble that walks in front of a perahera, the one everybody in the country has heard and nobody in a classroom had ever been taught. The drums came into the school hall and the boys learned to play them, not as folklore but as music, with parts and discipline and a repertoire.",[12,21,22],{},"The teacher was Lionel Ranwala, then twenty-four and five years into a career that would keep him in government schools for thirty-eight of them. He is remembered now for songs and for a famous performing group, but the school band came first, and it is the truest thing about him: he did not want village music admired from a distance. He wanted children playing it.",[24,25,27],"h2",{"id":26},"kalubowila-to-the-villages","Kalubowila to the villages",[12,29,30],{},"He was born on 27 November 1939 at Kalubowila, the youngest of five children, and went to Buddhaghosha Vidyalaya in Kalubowila, then Kumara Vidyalaya in Wellawatte, then Lumbini College in Colombo. He learned Eastern music from Devapriya Athukorala. Then he met the man who redirected his life.",[12,32,33,34,37,38,41,42,41,45,41,48,51,52,55],{},"W. B. Makuloluwa was, by then, the country's leading argument for building a Sinhala music out of village song rather than out of North Indian raga. Ranwala became his student and then his working partner. He sang, played and acted in Makuloluwa's ",[16,35,36],{},"gee natya"," — the sung dramas ",[16,39,40],{},"Hela Mihira",", ",[16,43,44],{},"Hiragei Marumuwa",[16,46,47],{},"Ahum Balum",[16,49,50],{},"Pahanin Pahana"," and ",[16,53,54],{},"Depano",", the last of which is generally described as the first Sinhala opera.",[12,57,58,59,62],{},"More important than any of these was the fieldwork. The two men travelled from village to village recording what people actually sang. The Ranwala Foundation puts the total at more than three thousand folk songs, all of them deposited with the Department of National Archives — which is where they still are, and which is why the claim can be checked rather than merely repeated. Ranwala's son Sahan has said that his father's whole aim in this was not a personal repertoire but a national one: to build a Sri Lankan music that people would accept as their own, at a time when Hindustani classical music was widely treated as ",[16,60,61],{},"the"," respectable Sinhala music and village song as something faintly embarrassing.",[12,64,65],{},"Accounts differ on his own formal training abroad. English Wikipedia states that he studied music at Panjab University in Chandigarh; the foundation's own chronology of his life mentions Panjab University only once, in 1976, when he represented Sri Lanka at a working session there on village theatre and performed in one of its productions. No source reachable for this article settles the question.",[24,67,69],{"id":68},"thirty-eight-years-of-school-music","Thirty-eight years of school music",[12,71,72],{},"He received his appointment as a government music teacher in January 1959 and held it until he retired in 1997. In between he taught at Arawwala Central College, Dharmapala Vidyalaya in Pannipitiya, Meegoda and Kiriella and Homagama Central Colleges, Royal College Colombo and Ananda College Colombo — a list that covers both village schools and the most competitive schools in the capital, which was rather the point.",[12,74,75,76,79,80,83,84,87,88,91,92,95],{},"The results came quickly. In 1965 his indigenous-instruments group beat forty-two other schools to win the national final of a UNESCO-run competition in local singing, playing and dancing, held in Jaffna. In 1966 his first play, ",[16,77,78],{},"Nogiya Gamana"," (\"The Journey Not Taken\"), won the inter-school drama competition; in 1967 ",[16,81,82],{},"Eka Gediyayi Pala Gaththe"," took the best-production award at the Arts Council's senior drama festival, from a field of seventy-two plays. He went on to produce ",[16,85,86],{},"Kalagola"," as a nadagama in 1969, and ",[16,89,90],{},"Beeri Ali"," (\"Deaf Elephants\") and ",[16,93,94],{},"Wadiya Kadana Naraka Lamayi"," in 1977, and in 1970 he began taking stage plays out to village audiences and performing them free.",[12,97,98,99,102,103,41,106,41,109,51,112,115,116,119],{},"He acted, too — in teledramas including K. W. Perera's ",[16,100,101],{},"Gamana",", and in ",[16,104,105],{},"Pramada Wadi",[16,107,108],{},"Pasal Guruwariya",[16,110,111],{},"Waranga",[16,113,114],{},"Nidi Kumari",". His last was Milton Jayawardhana's ",[16,117,118],{},"Rangamadala Samugani",", in which Sahan Ranwala appeared alongside him: the son's first teledrama and the father's last.",[24,121,123],{"id":122},"a-first-record-at-sixty","A first record at sixty",[12,125,126],{},"For most of his life Ranwala did not release records. His son's explanation is blunt and worth quoting in substance: his father had no great interest in writing songs, and wrote them only because, for most people, music means songs. What he actually wanted was a local music built from folk material that the public would take up as its own.",[12,128,129,130,134,135,138,139,134,142,145,146,134,149,152,153,134,156,41,159,134,162,41,165,134,168,171,172,175],{},"So the songs came late and came out of the research. ",[131,132,133],"strong",{},"අහසෙ ඉන්නවලු"," ",[16,136,137],{},"Ahase Innawalu"," — the title track of his first cassette — was launched at the John de Silva Memorial Theatre on 27 November 1999, his sixtieth birthday. Most people retire at sixty; he issued a debut album. The songs on it and around it are folk material reworked rather than folk material imitated: ",[131,140,141],{},"මේ අවුරුදු කාලේ",[16,143,144],{},"Me Awurudu Kale"," for the New Year, ",[131,147,148],{},"වන්නම් සව්දම් ගායන",[16,150,151],{},"Wannam Sawudam Gayana"," out of the Kandyan dance repertoire, ",[131,154,155],{},"කජු වාරේ එරබදු යායේ",[16,157,158],{},"Kaju Ware Erabadu Yaye",[131,160,161],{},"අකුලාගෙන සොඬ",[16,163,164],{},"Akulagena Sonda",[131,166,167],{},"කැලේ පනින්නේ",[16,169,170],{},"Kele Paninne",". Sahan Ranwala names ",[16,173,174],{},"Keli Poddi"," as the first song his father both wrote and composed.",[12,177,178,179,182,183,41,186,41,189,192],{},"In 2000 he opened the Thalama national foundation at the Folk Arts Centre in Battaramulla and started what were described as the first courses in Sri Lanka devoted to folk music, and issued a cassette of children's songs for the Department of Education. He had already been honoured at the first State Music Awards, in 1995, for his work on behalf of folk song; he had led a Sri Lankan cultural group to the first Asian music festival in Dhaka in 1998, and had taken part in children's theatre workshops in France and Germany in 1989. He entered cinema as a music director with the film ",[16,180,181],{},"Karate Joe",", and made music programmes for television — ",[16,184,185],{},"Mal Mal Waram",[16,187,188],{},"Mayaleela",[16,190,191],{},"Pile Paduru",".",[12,194,195,196,134,199,202],{},"He was preparing a second collection, ",[131,197,198],{},"ගම අවුලඤ්ඤං",[16,200,201],{},"Gama Awulangnang",", when he was killed in a road accident at Thalawathugoda on 13 November 2002, two weeks short of his sixty-third birthday. His wife was in the accident with him and was seriously injured. The album was released a year later, on 27 November 2003, on what would have been his sixty-fourth birthday.",[24,204,206],{"id":205},"ranwala-balakaya","Ranwala Balakaya",[12,208,209,210,51,213,216,217,220],{},"The group that carries his name grew out of the fieldwork. In the 1980s, as he travelled the villages trying to put folk music back into circulation, a handful of musicians began travelling with him, playing and singing; that ensemble became the Ranwala Balakaya. It still performs, still uses the ",[16,211,212],{},"geta bera",[16,214,215],{},"thammattama"," rather than substituting for them, and still tours abroad — a 2024 concert in California drew a full house for an evening of ",[16,218,219],{},"jana gee",", the work songs of ploughing, carting and harvest that Ranwala spent his twenties writing down.",[12,222,223],{},"The group is credited with being judged the world's best performing folk-song ensemble at a Chinese international folk-music festival, though the date is not agreed: the foundation's own website gives the 2011 festival at Zhangjiajie, while a 2024 Sunday Observer notice gives 2001. It is the kind of small discrepancy that runs through this whole subject, and it is worth saying plainly rather than picking one.",[12,225,226],{},"What is not in dispute is the shape of the work. Makuloluwa argued that Sinhala music should be built from village song; C. de S. Kulatilake proved it could be documented like a science. Ranwala did the third thing, which was to get it played — by schoolchildren, on a stage, in front of an audience that had been taught to think of it as beneath them. His son runs the foundation now and has spent years asking the state for a permanent centre for Sri Lankan folk music. There still is not one.",{"title":228,"searchDepth":229,"depth":229,"links":230},"",2,[231,232,233,234],{"id":26,"depth":229,"text":27},{"id":68,"depth":229,"text":69},{"id":122,"depth":229,"text":123},{"id":205,"depth":229,"text":206},"27 November 1939","The schoolteacher who carried W. B. Makuloluwa's folk-collecting project onto the stage, put a drum band into a Sri Lankan school for the first time, and released his first record at sixty.","13 November 2002","1950s-2000s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Flionel-ranwala.webp","Ranwala Foundation","Unverified — fallback source","http:\u002F\u002Franwala.lk\u002Fabout-us\u002Flionel-ranwala\u002F",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Flionel-ranwala",[248,249,250,251],"Musician","Singer","Researcher","Composer",{"title":5,"description":236},[254,256,259,262,265,268],{"title":255,"url":243},"ලයනල් රන්වලයන් — Ranwala Balakaya \u002F Ranwala Foundation",{"title":257,"url":258},"Lionel Ranwala — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FLionel_Ranwala",{"title":260,"url":261},"ලයනල් රන්වල — සිංහල විකිපීඩියා","https:\u002F\u002Fsi.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E0%B6%BD%E0%B6%BA%E0%B6%B1%E0%B6%BD%E0%B7%8A_%E0%B6%BB%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A%E0%B7%80%E0%B6%BD",{"title":263,"url":264},"Remembering Ranwala — Ceylon Today, 26 November 2022 (interview with Sahan Ranwala by Ama H. Vanniarachchy)","https:\u002F\u002Fceylontoday.lk\u002F2022\u002F11\u002F26\u002Fremembering-ranwala\u002F",{"title":266,"url":267},"Ranwala Foundation unveils the magic of Sri Lankan 'Jana Gee' in California — Sunday Observer, 29 September 2024","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundayobserver.lk\u002F2024\u002F09\u002F29\u002Fnews-features\u002F33684\u002Franwala-foundation-unveils-the-magic-of-sri-lankan-jana-gee-in-california\u002F",{"title":269,"url":270},"අපි ගැන — Ranwala Balakaya \u002F Ranwala Foundation","https:\u002F\u002Franwala.lk\u002Fabout-us\u002F","en\u002Fpeople\u002Flionel-ranwala","sgP6Hyupeh4zL0GzgoXlnZMxB3afYWxkQR3Rqt_-VHM",1787999332380]