[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":311},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-madawala-s-ratnayake":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":268,"description":269,"died":270,"era":271,"extension":272,"heroImage":273,"imageCredit":274,"imageLicense":275,"imageSource":276,"meta":277,"navigation":278,"notable":278,"path":279,"roles":280,"seo":285,"sources":286,"stem":308,"translated":278,"url":309,"__hash__":310},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fmadawala-s-ratnayake.md","Madawala S. Ratnayake",1816,1929,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":259},"minimark",[11,15,32,39,44,47,62,73,77,80,83,86,90,96,118,136,150,154,168,223,230,234,237,256],[12,13,14],"p",{},"In 1955 a man at Radio Ceylon put village songs on the national station and the newspapers told him he was destroying them.",[12,16,17,18,22,23,27,28,31],{},"The programme was ",[19,20,21],"strong",{},"ජන ගායන"," ",[24,25,26],"em",{},"Jana Gayana",", \"folk singing.\" Its producer had been in the job barely a year. What he proposed sounded, to a Colombo reader in 1955, close to absurd: that ",[24,29,30],{},"jana gi"," — the songs farmers sang over paddy and drummers sang at village shrines, the sort of thing an educated person was supposed to have outgrown — deserved an evening slot on the country's only radio station. The Sinhala press attacked it. He pulled the programme off the air.",[12,33,34,35,38],{},"Two years later he put it back on, this time with a young composer newly returned from music college in North India, and this time it was acclaimed. The composer was W. D. Amaradeva. The producer was Madawala S. Ratnayake, and between them, in that second attempt, they invented most of what Sri Lanka now means by ",[24,36,37],{},"sarala gee",".",[40,41,43],"h2",{"id":42},"the-village-that-gave-him-his-name","The village that gave him his name",[12,45,46],{},"He is one of the very few people in this subject better known by a place than by a family name. Madawala is a village in the Dambadeni Udukaha Dakunu Korale of the Kurunegala district — part of the old Kandyan territory called the Sath Korale, sitting on the seam between the highlands and the low-country plains. The linguist J. B. Disanayaka, writing about him after his death, made the point that this is a dialect frontier, a village where several ways of speaking Sinhala met and rubbed against each other. Ratnayake grew up inside that mixture and spent his working life putting it into print.",[12,48,49,50,53,54,57,58,61],{},"Garrett Field, the one scholar to have studied his radio work in English, gives his dates as 1929 to 1997. He published his first collection of poems, ",[24,51,52],{},"Pem Ama"," (\"the nectar of love\"), at seventeen, and by 1948 he was a familiar name to Sinhala readers from the verse he contributed to poetry journals such as ",[24,55,56],{},"Dedunna"," (\"the rainbow\") and ",[24,59,60],{},"Mivadaya"," (\"beehive\").",[12,63,64,65,68,69,72],{},"He earned his living, though, as a journalist — first in print, at ",[24,66,67],{},"Dinamina"," and then ",[24,70,71],{},"Lankadeepa",", and afterwards in what Disanayaka nicely called the electronic media. That is the ordinary Ceylonese literary career of the period: the poem is the vocation, the newsroom is the salary. What was not ordinary was the job that came next.",[40,74,76],{"id":75},"the-scriptwriter-radio-ceylon-did-not-know-it-needed","The scriptwriter Radio Ceylon did not know it needed",[12,78,79],{},"In 1953 Radio Ceylon appointed a commission which recommended that the Sinhala service hire \"scriptwriters\" — in practice, staff songwriters. Ratnayake was taken on in 1954 as one of the first, and the consequences were larger than the job title suggests.",[12,81,82],{},"A poet on a salary writing lyrics for broadcast is a different creature from a hack fitting Sinhala words to a borrowed Hindi tune, and Field's judgement is that only once the station started paying poets to write literary songs did the Sinhala public begin to treat song lyrics as literature at all.",[12,84,85],{},"Then there was the second half of the job. Ratnayake had to review every song text before it was broadcast. If he judged a lyric unfit, he sent it back to its writer to be revised and resubmitted. For roughly the period in which the sarala gee repertoire was being formed, one man with a strong view about village Sinhala stood between every new song and the transmitter. It is difficult to think of a comparable position in the history of any national popular music.",[40,87,89],{"id":88},"ten-beats-from-a-horse-a-bee-from-the-southwest","Ten beats from a horse, a bee from the southwest",[12,91,92,93,95],{},"His method, once ",[24,94,26],{}," was revived in 1957, was consistent and unusually sly: keep the shape of an old form, replace what it says.",[12,97,98,99,22,102,105,106,109,110,113,114,117],{},"The first song aired was ",[19,100,101],{},"රන් වන් කරල් සැලේයි",[24,103,104],{},"Ran Van Karal Saleyi",", \"the golden paddy sways.\" He built it on the Turanga Vannama, the Vannama of the Horse — a Kandyan court song whose text describes Prince Siddhartha mounting his horse Kanthaka and riding away from the palace to renounce the world. Ratnayake took none of that. He took the ",[24,107,108],{},"tanama",", the spoken drum-syllable pattern that runs ",[24,111,112],{},"tat tat ta nat ta ne na"," three times and then ",[24,115,116],{},"ta na",", ten beats, and wrote his lyric so that its syllables fell exactly into it. Anyone who knew the vannama would hear it underneath. What the new words described was a paddy harvest: ripe grain barely swaying, like the steady mind of a woman observing the Buddhist precepts; overflowing tanks; a village blossoming.",[12,119,120,121,22,124,127,128,131,132,135],{},"In 1964 he did the same trick to ritual verse. ",[19,122,123],{},"බඹරෙකු ආවයි",[24,125,126],{},"Bamareku Avayi",", \"a bee came,\" aired on his programme ",[24,129,130],{},"Swara Varna"," (\"tone colours\"). Its diction is lifted from the quatrains sung at the kohomba kankariya and at ",[24,133,134],{},"bali"," rituals — the vocabulary of appeasing deities and warding off bad planetary influence, and Amaradeva said as much himself, pointing to the ritual words left visible in the lyric. But the song is not a ritual text. It is a love allegory in which a bee stings a flower with sweetness and leaves it to wither.",[12,137,138,139,22,142,145,146,149],{},"For ",[19,140,141],{},"මින්දද හීසර",[24,143,144],{},"Min Dada Hi Sara",", \"the Cupid's arrow,\" he reversed the procedure. The source this time was literary rather than folk — a stanza from the ",[24,147,148],{},"Parakumba Sirita",", a fifteenth-century panegyric to King Parakramabahu VI, in which the king's courtesan lies awake complaining that the moon is like fire and asking a friend to summon him. Here Ratnayake abandoned the old stanza's form and kept its meaning. Amaradeva's setting made it one of the best-known Sinhala songs of the century.",[40,151,153],{"id":152},"getawarayo-and-the-songs-that-left-the-radio","Getawarayo, and the songs that left the radio",[12,155,156,157,160,161,22,164,167],{},"The film industry noticed. At the second Sarasaviya Awards — held at the Asoka Cinema in Colombo on 1 July 1965 to honour the films of 1964, where ",[24,158,159],{},"Getawarayo"," took eight prizes including Best Film — Ratnayake won Best Lyricist. His song from the film was ",[19,162,163],{},"ස්වර්ණ විමානෙට එහා ලෝකයෙන්",[24,165,166],{},"Swarna Wimaneta Eha Lokayen",", composed and sung by Amaradeva, who took Best Male Playback Singer the same night.",[12,169,170,171,22,174,177,178,22,181,177,184,22,187,177,190,22,193,196,197,22,200,177,203,22,206,177,209,22,212,215,216,22,219,222],{},"The Amaradeva partnership produced a substantial part of that singer's core repertoire: ",[19,172,173],{},"සැඳෑ අඳුර තුළ",[24,175,176],{},"Sanda Andura Thula",", ",[19,179,180],{},"බිංදු බිංදු රන්",[24,182,183],{},"Bindu Bindu Ran",[19,185,186],{},"රන් සිකි පිල්",[24,188,189],{},"Ran Siki Pil",[19,191,192],{},"තණ්හා ආශා",[24,194,195],{},"Thanha Asha"," — the last with music by Lionel Algama rather than Amaradeva himself. He also wrote extensively for Victor Rathnayake, whose own catalogue lists ",[19,198,199],{},"උදාගිරෙන් එබී",[24,201,202],{},"Udagiren Ebi",[19,204,205],{},"පුරිසදම්ම සාරථි",[24,207,208],{},"Purisadhamma Sarathi",[19,210,211],{},"චන්දන කල්කය",[24,213,214],{},"Chandana Kalkaya"," and ",[19,217,218],{},"වරෙල්ලා වරෙල්ලා",[24,220,221],{},"Warella Warella"," among the lyrics Ratnayake gave him.",[12,224,225,226,229],{},"And the novel outlived all of it. ",[24,227,228],{},"Akkara Paha"," (\"the five acres\", 1959) won the Don Predrick Award for the best work of fiction of its year. It is the story of Sena, a farmer's son sent to Kandy for an English education, who fails at city life and goes home to the village to farm — a plot Ratnayake justified in his own preface by saying that national development, in any period, starts with the people who hold the nation's most fundamental occupation. In 1970 Lester James Peries filmed it, from a screenplay by Tissa Abeysekera, with music by Amaradeva. It did indifferently in Ceylon and was well received at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.",[40,231,233],{"id":232},"what-is-not-known","What is not known",[12,235,236],{},"A great deal, and that is the point worth ending on.",[12,238,239,240,244,245,248,249,252,253,255],{},"Madawala S. Ratnayake has no article on English Wikipedia and none on Sinhala Wikipedia either. Search engines will happily offer you ",[241,242,243],"code",{},"en.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FMadawala_S._Ratnayake","; the page does not exist and never has. Almost everything reliable in English about his radio work comes from a single scholarly book published in 2017, which was itself working from his own Sinhala writings — ",[24,246,247],{},"Gita Prabandha"," (1977) and ",[24,250,251],{},"Tikiri Liya"," (1992) — and those are not online in any language. Even the expansion of the initial \"S.\" is unsettled: the bookshops that still sell ",[24,254,228],{}," print the name as මඩවල ඇස්. රත්නායක, while the song databases carry a bare Latin letter.",[12,257,258],{},"What is documented instead is a commemoration. In January 2004 the seventh annual Madawala S. Ratnayake memorial lecture was given by Professor K. N. O. Dharmadasa at the Mahaweli Centre in Colombo; Amaradeva spoke about his lyrics with examples, and Victor Rathnayake, Sanath Nandasiri and Neela Wickramasinghe sang. Seven years running, the best singers in the country turned up to perform the work of a man who has no encyclopedia entry. That gap is a fair summary of how Sinhala song history has been kept.",{"title":260,"searchDepth":261,"depth":261,"links":262},"",2,[263,264,265,266,267],{"id":42,"depth":261,"text":43},{"id":75,"depth":261,"text":76},{"id":88,"depth":261,"text":89},{"id":152,"depth":261,"text":153},{"id":232,"depth":261,"text":233},"1929","The poet Radio Ceylon hired as a scriptwriter in 1954, who put village folk song on the national station, vetted every lyric before it went on air, and wrote Min Dada Hi Sara for Amaradeva.","1997","1940s-1990s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fmadawala-s-ratnayake.webp","Sinhala Poets archive","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fsinhalapoets.wordpress.com\u002F2023\u002F07\u002F31\u002F%E0%B6%B8%E0%B6%A9%E0%B7%80%E0%B6%BD-%E0%B6%91%E0%B7%83%E0%B7%8A-%E0%B6%BB%E0%B6%AD%E0%B7%8A%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8F%E0%B6%BA%E0%B6%9A\u002F",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fmadawala-s-ratnayake",[281,282,283,284],"Lyricist","Poet","Producer","Broadcaster",{"title":5,"description":269},[287,290,293,296,299,302,305],{"title":288,"url":289},"Garrett Field, Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Sri Lanka (UC Press, 2017) — full text","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.org\u002Fstream\u002Fdli.doa.211\u002F211_djvu.txt",{"title":291,"url":292},"J. B. Disanayaka, 'At the heart of the village' — Sunday Times, 4 January 2004","http:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F040104\u002Fplus\u002F9.htm",{"title":294,"url":295},"2nd Sarasaviya Awards — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002F2nd_Sarasaviya_Awards",{"title":297,"url":298},"Getawarayo (1964) — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FGetawarayo",{"title":300,"url":301},"Akkara Paha (1970 film) — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FAkkara_Paha",{"title":303,"url":304},"Songs written by Madawala S Rathnayaka — Victor Rathnayake official site","http:\u002F\u002Fwww.victorrathnayake.lk\u002Fpeople\u002Fmadawala-s-rathnayaka",{"title":306,"url":307},"Akkara Paha — SL Books listing (Sinhala name form)","https:\u002F\u002Fslbooks.lk\u002Fmadawala-s-ratnayake","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fmadawala-s-ratnayake","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.org\u002Fdetails\u002Fdli.doa.211","cmB_0kQ1XMgELA3MNI6WPnFYHJ2fm-IWzb8ppTFCEz4",1787999332525]