[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":271},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-nilar-n-cassim":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":246,"path":247,"roles":248,"seo":252,"sources":253,"stem":269,"translated":245,"url":256,"__hash__":270},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fnilar-n-cassim.md","Nilar N. Cassim",694,1970,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":226},"minimark",[11,15,20,23,31,34,38,56,66,70,82,150,153,159,163,201,212,216,219],[12,13,14],"p",{},"There was a boy at Rahula College in Matara who wrote poems and posted them, unasked, to singers he admired. This is a common enough story and it almost never ends anywhere. This one did. Somewhere in Colombo, a file of submitted lyrics kept by the singer Karunaratne Divulgane was opened by Malani Bulathsinhala, who picked one out and recorded it. The boy was Muslim, and his mother tongue was Tamil.",[16,17,19],"h2",{"id":18},"three-brothers-in-sinhala-two-sisters-in-tamil","Three brothers in Sinhala, two sisters in Tamil",[12,21,22],{},"Nilar N. Cassim was born on 3 June 1970 in Matara, into an ordinary Muslim family — two brothers, two sisters, and himself the second child. The decision that shaped everything afterwards was his parents': the three boys were put into Sinhala-medium schooling and the two girls into Tamil. He has been open about how unusual that was, and about what it cost and gave.",[12,24,25,26,30],{},"He fell in love with the language rather than merely learning it. He took a special degree in Sinhala at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura and passed with class honours, then an MA in Sinhala at the University of Kelaniya. When the ",[27,28,29],"em",{},"Sunday Times"," profiled him in 2007, it described him as the only Muslim honours graduate in the Sinhala language in the country — a claim it made without a register to check it against, and one worth carrying with that caveat.",[12,32,33],{},"His view of why this was so unusual is worth quoting, because it is not the answer most people expect. \"There was a time,\" he told the paper, \"where Muslims were considered a community who spoke broken Sinhala with a funny accent and this even was used in dramas to create humour.\" His own reading is that the mother tongue of Sri Lankan Muslims might reasonably have been Sinhala, as Muslim communities elsewhere adopt the majority language, and that history — geography, really, the concentration of Muslim settlement in Tamil-speaking areas — sent it another way.",[16,35,37],{"id":36},"radio-magazines-television","Radio, magazines, television",[12,39,40,41,44,45,48,49,52,53,55],{},"He started in broadcasting young, as a relief announcer on the Ruhunu Sevaya, the SLBC's southern regional service in Matara, where he produced Islamic cultural and religious programmes and wrote drama and feature scripts. Then came print: he contributed to ",[27,42,43],{},"Ravaya",", ",[27,46,47],{},"Vivarana"," and ",[27,50,51],{},"Yukthiya"," — the alternative, argumentative end of the Sinhala press — and spent about a decade as an editor of ",[27,54,47],{},".",[12,57,58,59,48,62,65],{},"Television followed. He joined the national broadcaster, Rupavahini, as a filler presenter on programmes such as ",[27,60,61],{},"Sanida Ayubowan",[27,63,64],{},"Irida Ayubowan",", was invited to join full-time, and worked in turn as a programme producer, news editor and assistant director for publicity and media before being appointed director of the Nethra channel and then head of the corporation's programmes division.",[16,67,69],{"id":68},"the-songs","The songs",[12,71,72,73,77,78,81],{},"The first of his lyrics to be recorded went out in the early 1990s in Malani Bulathsinhala's voice, on the cassette ",[74,75,76],"strong",{},"සුසුමක රාවය"," ",[27,79,80],{},"Susumaka Rawaya",". From there he wrote across three generations of Sinhala singers in a way very few lyricists manage — Latha Walpola, Nanda Malini, Sunil Edirisinghe, Milton Mallawarachchi, Abeywardena Balasuriya, Niranjala Sarojini and Edward Jayakody from the older generation; then Amarasiri Peiris, Asanka Priyamantha Peiris, Nirosha Virajini; then Bathiya and Santhush, Kasun Kalhara, Umaria Sinhawansa and Yohani.",[12,83,84,85,77,88,91,92,77,95,98,99,77,102,105,106,77,109,112,113,77,116,44,119,77,122,125,126,77,129,132,133,136,137,77,140,48,143,77,146,149],{},"The songs people name first are ",[74,86,87],{},"පැහැසර අරුණක",[27,89,90],{},"Pahasara Arunaka",", sung by Asanka Priyamantha Peiris to Samantha Perera's music, and ",[74,93,94],{},"සඳ දිය දෙවුන සේ සිනහව පිපුනාම",[27,96,97],{},"Sanda Diya Devuna Se",", a duet for Malani Bulathsinhala and Asanka Priyamantha Peiris. Others have travelled just as far: ",[74,100,101],{},"අහසින් එහා",[27,103,104],{},"Ahasin Eha"," with Kasun Kalhara, ",[74,107,108],{},"සරස වසන්තය",[27,110,111],{},"Sarasa Wasanthaya"," with Amarasiri Peiris, ",[74,114,115],{},"ඉඳුවර නීල නෙත් පියල්ලේ",[27,117,118],{},"Induwara Neela Neth Piyalle",[74,120,121],{},"ඔබ ගියාම දුක මට දී",[27,123,124],{},"Oba Giyama Duka Mata Di"," with Nirosha Virajini, ",[74,127,128],{},"රෑනේ",[27,130,131],{},"Raane"," — the theme for the teledrama ",[27,134,135],{},"Wes"," — and, for a much younger audience, ",[74,138,139],{},"උන්මාද ප්‍රේම ගීය",[27,141,142],{},"Unmada Prema Geeya",[74,144,145],{},"ලා හිරුගේ එළියේ",[27,147,148],{},"La Hiruge Eliye"," with Bathiya and Santhush.",[12,151,152],{},"The composers he has worked with run the same span: Premasiri Khemadasa, Sarath Dassanayake, Austin Munasinghe, H. M. Jayawardena and Rohana Weerasinghe at one end, Samantha Perera, Navaratne Gamage and Bathiya and Santhush at the other. And the subjects run wider than the love songs suggest — he has written about the war, about social discrimination and about environmental damage, and says he was relieved that audiences took those as readily as the romances.",[12,154,155,156,158],{},"How many songs is an open question, as it always is here. He told the ",[27,157,29],{}," in 2007 that he had written \"nearly 500\". The Sinhala Wikipedia article puts it at more than 700. Both are plausible for a working lyricist twenty years apart; neither is a count anyone has audited.",[16,160,162],{"id":161},"the-books-and-the-bridge","The books, and the bridge",[12,164,165,166,77,169,172,173,176,177,180,181,77,183,44,185,77,188,48,191,77,194,197,198,200],{},"By 2016 he had published ten books, of which the songs are only a part. There are scholarly works on Tamil poetry and its Sri Lankan strand, including a study of the poet Jeyapalan and one on \"the neighbour's literature\"; translations from Tamil into Sinhala — ",[74,167,168],{},"සහෝදර පියාපත්",[27,170,171],{},"Sahodara Piyapath"," (poems), ",[27,174,175],{},"Ardha Daruwa"," (short stories), ",[27,178,179],{},"Kurban Kala Sihinaya","; and Tamil primers for Sinhala children. His lyric collections are ",[74,182,87],{},[27,184,90],{},[74,186,187],{},"කිරිකෝඩු හිතට",[27,189,190],{},"Kirikodu Hitata",[74,192,193],{},"වලාකුළු වියන්",[27,195,196],{},"Walakulu Wiyan"," (2016); an earlier collection, ",[27,199,111],{},", took the Vidyodaya award for best book of song lyrics. He has also won the Janatha Sahitya and Swadheena Sahitya awards for lyric writing, and the Bunka Award in 2007.",[12,202,203,204,207,208,211],{},"When ",[27,205,206],{},"Sarasaviya"," interviewed him in 2016, the headline it chose was his own carefully hedged sentence: ",[74,209,210],{},"සිංහල ගීත රචනා කළ ප්‍රථම මුස්ලිම් ජාතිකයා මා විය හැකියි"," — \"I may be the first Muslim to have written Sinhala song lyrics.\" The Sinhala Wikipedia states it more firmly, noting that while Muslim musicians and singers had long enriched Sinhala song, lyricists had not appeared. His own version, with the hedge intact, is the better one to keep.",[16,213,215],{"id":214},"the-desk-job-nobody-sings-about","The desk job nobody sings about",[12,217,218],{},"Alongside the writing he has taken on the unglamorous institutional work that Sinhala song has always needed and rarely had. He is president of the Sri Lankan lyricists' association, and president of ACPOSL, the collective body that administers song copyright in Sri Lanka — the unglamorous machinery of getting writers paid, which almost none of the great Sinhala lyricists of the twentieth century had working in their favour.",[12,220,221,222,225],{},"In an essay for the ",[27,223,224],{},"Colombo Telegraph"," asking where the lyricists had gone, the critic Uditha Devapriya put it at its bluntest: \"The popular Sinhala song, from the nineties on, is the product mainly (though not jointly) of two lyricists: Nilar N. Cassim and the more flamboyant Wasantha Dukgannarala.\" It is a fair description of the career — a Tamil-speaking Muslim from Matara who became a custodian of the literary standard of Sinhala song, and then went to work on the paperwork that keeps it possible to earn a living from writing one.",{"title":227,"searchDepth":228,"depth":228,"links":229},"",2,[230,231,232,233,234],{"id":18,"depth":228,"text":19},{"id":36,"depth":228,"text":37},{"id":68,"depth":228,"text":69},{"id":161,"depth":228,"text":162},{"id":214,"depth":228,"text":215},"3 June 1970","A Muslim boy from Matara whose mother tongue was Tamil, who took a first-class honours degree in Sinhala and became one of the most-recorded Sinhala lyricists of the last thirty years.",null,"1990s-2020s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fnilar-n-cassim.webp","AmyNNN","CC BY-SA 4.0","https:\u002F\u002Fcommons.wikimedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FFile:Nilar_N._Cassim.jpg",{},true,false,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fnilar-n-cassim",[249,250,251],"Lyricist","Poet","Broadcaster",{"title":5,"description":236},[254,257,260,263,266],{"title":255,"url":256},"නිලාර් එන්. කාසිම් — සිංහල විකිපීඩියා","https:\u002F\u002Fsi.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%92%E0%B6%BD%E0%B7%8F%E0%B6%BB%E0%B7%8A_%E0%B6%91%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A._%E0%B6%9A%E0%B7%8F%E0%B7%83%E0%B7%92%E0%B6%B8%E0%B7%8A",{"title":258,"url":259},"Nilar; the Bridge between the Barriers — Sunday Times TV Times, 18 November 2007","http:\u002F\u002Fsundaytimes.lk\u002F071118\u002FTV\u002Ftv-times00008.html",{"title":261,"url":262},"සිංහල ගීත රචනා කළ ප්‍රථම මුස්ලිම් ජාතිකයා මා විය හැකියි — සරසවිය, 3 නොවැම්බර් 2016","https:\u002F\u002Farchives.sarasaviya.lk\u002F2016\u002F11\u002F03\u002F?fn=sa16110333",{"title":264,"url":265},"Where Have All The Lyricists Gone? — Colombo Telegraph","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.colombotelegraph.com\u002Findex.php\u002Fwhere-have-all-the-lyricists-gone\u002F",{"title":267,"url":268},"Nilar N Cassim — sarigama.lk song index","https:\u002F\u002Fsarigama.lk\u002Fartist\u002Fnilar-n-cassim\u002F58d11512-91fe-4584-bdf7-ddaa821f2bcc","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fnilar-n-cassim","uTJ3tqeIwjq4cQpDXokWa7boH0ubgfhn_ARSW3ubv6Y",1787999332900]