Professor Sunil Ariyaratne once looked at Wasantha Kumara Kobawaka's first book of lyrics and did the arithmetic out loud. One hundred and twenty-one songs. Twenty-eight years. That is a writer, he said, who manages two or three or perhaps four songs in a year — a miser of a lyricist, the kind who will not give alms at his own door.
Kobawaka repeated the remark himself, in a newspaper interview in 2022, and did not appear to mind it. "You cannot write a song just because somebody asks for one," he said. "And I only hand a lyric to anyone else if what comes out of me is genuinely good." The exception he allows is commissioned work — film songs and teledrama themes — which, he notes drily, do not require anybody to take their time.
Yatiyanpitiya
He was born on 23 February 1963 at Yatiyanpitiya, a village in the Bulathsinhala area of the Kalutara district, and went to school first at the Yatiyanpitiya junior school and then at Thakshila Vidyalaya, Horana. His working life has been divided between lyric writing and the newspapers, where he has worked as an editor; when he is asked where his songs come from, a good part of the answer is the day job. "Some of these are based on things I heard and saw. Sometimes experiences from official life. Certain human incidents I came across in the villages." What he insists on is that none of it goes in raw: "You cannot state any of that directly. It has to be built up poetically, as a song. The intelligent listener has to be given room to think. Those are the songs that last."
Sinhala Wikipedia dates his working life from 1970, which cannot be right for a man born in 1963; the songs and the collections belong to the 1980s onwards.
The songs
The pattern of his catalogue is a small number of lyrics spread across a very wide range of singers, and a long-running partnership with the composer Rohana Weerasinghe.
The best known is probably රූකඩ මඩු Rookada Madu, the puppet-booth at the fairground, written for Victor Rathnayake, who set it himself. වෙරළු ගෙඩිය හරි අටකට කපා ගෙන Weralu Gediya Hari Atakata Kapagena — "having cut the weralu fruit neatly into eight" — went to Sunil Edirisinghe, and පමා වී ආ වසන්තයේ Pama Vee Aa Wasanthaye, "in the spring that came late," to Nanda Malini.
With Rohana Weerasinghe he wrote පලංචියේ ලී ඉරුවේ Palanchiye Lee Iruwe, the sawyers' song, as a duet for Edward Jayakody and Sunil Edirisinghe; ඇති දේ ඇති සැටියෙන් ලොව දකින මිනිස්සූ Athi De Athi Satiyen Lowa Dakina Minissu, "people who see the world exactly as it is," for Lakshman Wijesekara; කඳුළු පිසදාලන සඟවාලන Kandulu Pisadalana Sangawalana for Bandara Athauda; දුර ඈත සුළඟේද Dura Atha Sulageda for Uresha Ravihari and Udaya Sri Wickramasinghe; and හසරැල්ලක් Hasarallak for Pradeepa Dharmadasa. ආදර මල් වල පාට කියන්නද Adara Mal Wala Pata Kiyannada — "shall I tell you the colour of the flowers of love?" — went to Indrachapa Liyanage and Kasun Kalhara with music by Nawarathna Gamage.
The list runs on: සුනිල්වන් නුවන් යුග Sunilwan Nuwan Yuga for Somathilaka Jayamaha, ඔබ මා හමුවේ නම් Oba Ma Hamuwe Nam for Jagath Wickramasinghe, පෙම්බර කුමරාණ Pembara Kumarana for Deepika Priyadarshani Peiris, and, among the titles he names himself, දූවිල්ලෙන් වත්සුණු තවරා Duwillen Wathsunu Thawara, සියාතුවේ මා මිතුරේ Siyathuwe Ma Mithure, මල්මද බිසව් Malmada Bisaw and කඳුළින් අවසන් වන පෙම්පුවතක Kandulin Awasan Wana Pempuwathaka.
The vannama underneath
Kobawaka belongs to the generation that inherited the folk-source method rather than inventing it, and he is unusually explicit about using it. Of one of his earliest songs, ශිල්ප සොඳින් දැනගන්න ගිහින් නුඹ Shilpa Sondin Denaganna Gihin Numba, he says simply that it drew on the vannam — the Kandyan court songs that S. N. Ratanjankar had told Sinhalese musicians to go and mine back in 1952, and that Madawala S. Ratnayake and W. D. Amaradeva had duly mined for radio.
"When you keep looking into these things," he says, "you start to feel the need for a wide study of folk sources. We already possess the vocabulary for it, the metres for it, the ways of singing." His example of the method at its best is not one of his own: it is Chandraratne Manawasinghe's මහ බෝ වන්නම Maha Bo Vannama, sung by Amaradeva, which he cites as the moment a genuinely new metrical practice surfaced in Sinhala song. He makes a similar point about සිනිදු සුදුමුදු තලාවේ Sinidu Sudumudu Thalawe, which he credits to Elvitigala: what allowed the composer to write good music for it, on his account, was the particular quality of the words underneath.
What a song is
The interview that carries most of this material was published in Lankadeepa in February 2022, and its headline is a question he answers in the negative: does a poem become a song merely because you put a tune on it?
His argument is about time and space. A song is a form that ends in three or four minutes, so whatever idea the listener is given has to be pushed to its maximum inside that span. A poem has no such limit; a poet can extend an experience as far as he likes, and a whole book can be one poem. The familiar division of a Sinhala song into sthayi and antara he treats as a habit rather than a law — songs can be written on freer rules. But the tune is not what makes the thing a song.
He is equally unwilling to say that everything was better before. Good songs got made in the early period, he argues, because radio and some of the cassette companies made room for them, and that held until the 1980s and 1990s; afterwards the quality fell, cheap technology produced what he calls song thieves, and a talented newcomer found no way in. His taxonomy of the present is bleak and specific: those who write well and pay out of their own pockets to get a singer to record it, some of whom survive on the strength of the work; those with money who skip the waiting and the editing and sink anyway; those who write to a star's name for whatever popularity is available that month; and those who have simply stopped, because no environment exists for the work they want to do.
What is not known
Very little has been written about him in English, and there is no English Wikipedia article. The Sinhala Wikipedia entry is short and partly unreliable — its dates for his active years do not survive contact with his birth date, and one of its two citations points at a newspaper site that no longer resolves. Most of what is quoted above comes from a single long interview.
His second collection of lyrics, පමා වී පිපුණු මල් සුවඳයි Pama Vee Pipunu Mal Suwandai — "the flowers that bloomed late are fragrant" — appeared shortly before that interview, a long time after the first. For a writer who averages three songs a year, that is roughly the expected interval.