On 22 May 2021 — Republic Day in Sri Lanka, and the middle of a pandemic in which nobody was going anywhere — a cover version went up on YouTube. It was two minutes and forty-seven seconds long, it was recorded in Sinhala, and it had been made by a producer in a small Colombo studio with a singer who had given up an accounting career eighteen months earlier. Within four months මැණිකේ මගේ හිතේ Manike Mage Hithe ("precious one, in my heart") had passed a hundred million views, had been danced to by Amitabh Bachchan, dubbed into more than a dozen languages, and had entered the UK Official Charts Company's Asian Music Chart at number eight. No Sinhala song had ever travelled like that.
The voice on it belongs to Yohani Diloka de Silva, who performs simply as Yohani. She is the most globally visible Sri Lankan musician of her generation, and the story usually told about how she got there is wrong in one important particular.
Before the song
Yohani was born in Colombo on 30 July 1993 and was schooled at Visakha Vidyalaya. Her family moved between army bases during her childhood — her father, Prasanna de Silva, was a career officer — and she has said the household ran on her parents' record collection: the Bee Gees, Elton John, the Spice Girls, A. R. Rahman. She studied logistics management and professional accounting at General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University and took a master's degree in accounting from CQUniversity in Australia.
She came home to Sri Lanka in March 2019 and turned to music full time, joining the small Colombo label Pettah Effect. The first releases were her own: Aaye, written with Dilanjan Seneviratne, in August 2020; Merry Christmas Baby, her first English-language original; Cold Sunday, which she wrote and composed herself; and Sitha Dawuna, a September 2020 collaboration with the producer Chamath Sangeeth. That last name matters, because it is the thread that leads to everything else.
The original, and then the cover
Manike Mage Hithe was not Yohani's song. The original was produced by Chamath Sangeeth in lockdown and released on 31 July 2020. It was sung by Satheeshan Rathnayaka, a young musician from Anuradhapura who used to ride his motorbike five hours to Colombo to work on music, with a rap verse by Dulan ARX — Dulanja Alwis — who also wrote the lyrics. The video was directed by Hasith Aryan. It did respectably. It did not do what came next.
Chamath Sangeeth then produced an official cover, with Yohani singing the melody and Satheeshan in the frame behind her delivering the rap. That is the version uploaded on 22 May 2021, and it is the one that went around the world. It spread first inside Sri Lanka, then across India, where it became a social-media staple in the late summer of 2021 and was dubbed into Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Assamese, Gujarati, Nepali and several European languages by other artists. Yohani recorded the Tamil and Malayalam versions herself; both went up on 28 August 2021. The Daily Mirror reported it past a hundred million YouTube views on 11 September 2021, and on 24 September it debuted at number eight on the Asian Music Chart Top 40. The view counts quoted in the press at the time — 60 million, 150 million, 190 million, 232 million — vary so widely by the week that only the chart position is worth treating as a fixed number.
The feud that was not
The story that attached itself to all this was that the original singer had been cheated: that Yohani had taken his song and his credit, and that there was a rights dispute behind the scenes. It is a good story and it is not true. Satheeshan said so himself, on the record, in the Sunday Times in October 2021.
"This is a major achievement and it became a success only because we worked as a team," he told the paper. "We had no issues on 'Rights' over the songs. Several times this song was in the breaking news. Yohani becoming popular with this song is not an issue for me or our team, and since I am new to the music scene, even Yohani helps me in many ways, many a times." He gave the credit for the whole thing to the producer: "It is Chamath who is the big strength behind the screen. The entire process is managed by Chamath and it is because of his management that the song became so successful." And he thanked, by name and in order, "the music director, lyrics writer, recorders, players and even those who provided a bottle of water to us."
Four people made Manike Mage Hithe — Chamath Sangeeth, Satheeshan, Dulan ARX and Yohani — and in March 2022 all four collected the SLIM award for the most popular song of the year together. The interesting fact about the biggest Sinhala song in history is not that it caused a quarrel. It is that it did not.
After Manike
Yohani toured on the back of it. Her first overseas concert as a headline artist was in Hyderabad in October 2021, followed by dates in Dubai, Muscat, Kolkata and Raipur, and appearances on Indian television. She released Ithin Aadare, the first single from her Sinhala album Kella, and Moving On, an English-language single for Red Bull Records. She sang on the official songs of the 2021 T20 World Cup broadcast in Sri Lanka and of the Lanka Premier League, recorded Unmada Prema Geeya with Bhathiya and Santhush and Kaizer Kaiz to a Nilar N. Cassim lyric, and cut Rider Fighter with the Tamil rapper ADK — a Sinhala-Tamil record, which in Sri Lanka is not a neutral thing to make.
In April 2022 she signed with T-Series. Later that year came a Hindi rebuild of her own hit: "Manike", recomposed by Tanishk Bagchi with Chamath Sangeeth, with Hindi words by Rashmi Virag alongside the original Sinhala lines by Dulan ARX, sung with Jubin Nautiyal for the film Thank God. Keeping the Sinhala verse inside a Bollywood playback track was itself a small first. She has since recorded in Tamil and Telugu for Indian films, and released Gajaman Nona with Tehan Perera and Medusa with Warunah at home.
What it changed
For decades the traffic in South Asian popular music ran one way: Hindi and Tamil melodies were copied into Sinhala films, and Sinhala songs stayed home. Manike Mage Hithe reversed it. A Sinhala-language song became a Hindi-language hit, and Indian audiences learned the Sinhala words rather than the other way round.
It is early to say what Yohani's body of work amounts to; she is in her thirties and most of it is ahead of her. What can be said is that a song made by four people in a locked-down Colombo, on ordinary equipment and with no industry behind it, did something no amount of institutional promotion had managed in seventy years of recorded Sinhala music. That is worth remembering accurately, and giving all four of them their names.