In one of her best-known lyrics, a woman calls across two centuries to another woman. දුර ඈත වුවද ගතිනා Dura Atha Wuwada Gathina — "though far away in body, are you not close in mind?" — is addressed to ගජමන් නෝනා Gajaman Nona, the poet of the deep south who traded verses with the Mudaliyar of Elapatha and whose name is the one every Sri Lankan schoolchild learns when female poets are mentioned. The refrain teases her: mada hasa nagan, Gajaman Nona — give us a little laugh, Gajaman Nona.
Karunaratne Divulgane sang it. The words are by Yamuna Malani Perera, and the fact that a woman wrote them is not incidental. Until the generation she belongs to, essentially no Sinhala song lyrics were written by women at all.
The absence she stepped into
The musicologist Garrett Field puts it flatly: to his knowledge, between 1900 and 1965 there were no visible female songwriters in Sri Lanka. Not few — none that surface. What makes that strange is that both of the adjacent things were happening. Women were building real careers as singers, on radio and on record. Women were publishing poetry under their own names, in magazines whose very titles meant "the poetess". Only the credit line of a popular song stayed closed.
That story — why the studio and the film office were a workplace a respectable woman could not enter, while the microphone and the poetry page were not — is told on this site in the boat to Madras. It is the background against which the small catalogue described here should be read. By the 1980s the door had opened a crack. Yamuna Malani Perera is one of the handful of women who walked through it and stayed long enough to build a body of work.
Galle, and a late beginning
She was born Yamuna Malani de Silva on 30 May 1940 in Galle, and went to school at Sanghamitta Balika Vidyalaya there. She married Senaka Perera, whose surname she writes under. Sinhala Wikipedia dates her active career from 1981 — which means she published her first songs at around forty, after a life already largely lived. Nothing in the available sources explains the gap, and it would be invention to fill it in.
The Divulgane songs
The largest block of her work was written for Karunaratne Divulgane, and much of it was set by Gunadasa Kapuge — among the sharpest melodists of the period. ආදරය සුන්දර වරදකි Adaraya Sundara Waradaki, "love is a beautiful mistake", is the best known of them. Beside it stand ගහක මල් පිපිලා Gahaka Mal Pipila ("a tree has flowered"), සුළඟ නුඹ වගෙයි Sulanga Numba Wageyi ("you are like the wind") and රෝස තොල් සිඹිමි Rosa Thol Sibimi.
Rosa Thol Sibimi is worth quoting, because it shows what she does: I kiss those rose lips, and teardrops gather on them — that is exactly how you taught me love. Then the room takes over the grief. Jasmine has opened on the bed and the scent burns her; the things they said echo in both ears; the place where he sat is still warm. It is a break-up song built entirely out of furniture and smell, with no abstraction in it anywhere.
Two more Divulgane songs, සුදු ඇඳගෙන Sudu Andagena and මැනලාද සතුට Manalada Sathuta, were set by Rohana Weerasinghe. Sources disagree about who composed the Gajaman Nona song: Sinhala Wikipedia groups it with the Kapuge settings, while Sinhala Song Book credits Rohana Weerasinghe.
Ahasa Polawa
Her single most-played lyric is probably අහස පොළව Ahasa Polawa, sung by Sunil Edirisinghe to Rohana Weerasinghe's music, in a slow six-eight. Its opening is an image of pure emptiness:
The sky, the earth, everything around is a hollow place — a desert with no tree, no leaf, no water. Come to me in that moment, to a heart falling apart with weeping. Where you and I are standing, where is the loneliness? There is no loneliness.
The rest of her catalogue spreads across singers and decades: ප්රේමය ලොව Premaya Lowa and සුවඳ මට දී Suwanda Mata Dee for Chandana Liyanarachchi; මහද ගගන තලේ Mahada Gagana Thale, set by H. M. Jayawardena; සඳ කිනිති නැමී Sanda Kinithi Nami, sung and composed by Lakshman Wijesekara; සිල් සුවඳ අසපුවේ Sil Suwanda Asapuwe for Asanga Priyamantha Peiris; කැලණි ගඟට සඳ වැටිලා Kelani Gangata Sanda Watila for Prince Udaya Priyantha; and, much later, මා අහසේ ලියූ දේ Ma Ahase Liyu De with Kasun Kalhara.
What is not recorded
Very little else is. There is no English Wikipedia article and no newspaper profile in English. The Sinhala Wikipedia entry rests on a single reference — a 2022 interview in the newspaper Deshaya, headlined, temptingly, "the poem I wrote and sent to Russia ended up becoming a lovely song" — and deshaya.lk no longer resolves, so the interview itself could not be read. Her own account of how she started is therefore sitting behind a dead link, which is a fair summary of the documentation problem for women in this field generally.
Even the spelling is unsettled: this site's own artist database writes her name යමුණා with a retroflex ṇa, while Sinhala Wikipedia and the lyric databases write යමුනා. Sinhala Wikipedia still lists her as active.