[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":283},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-en-bakthi-gee-origins":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"category":244,"description":245,"era":246,"extension":247,"featured":248,"heroImage":249,"imageCredit":250,"imageLicense":251,"imageSource":252,"meta":253,"navigation":254,"path":255,"rawYear":256,"seo":257,"sources":258,"stem":280,"translated":254,"url":281,"__hash__":282},"storiesEn\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fbakthi-gee-origins.md","Bakthi Gee Was Invented to Answer the Christmas Carol",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":235},"minimark",[9,18,25,30,39,42,53,60,64,67,78,81,88,91,95,101,141,162,192,196,206,212,216,229],[10,11,12,13,17],"p",{},"Stand in a Sri Lankan street on a Vesak evening, anywhere, and the sound arriving from the pandal is the same sound: a voice singing about the Buddha over a melody that is unmistakably a ",[14,15,16],"em",{},"song",". Verses, a chorus, an accompaniment, a tune you can hum. Children in white will sing them at a school event in June with a lotus in one hand. Loudspeakers will carry them through the night.",[10,19,20,21,24],{},"It feels immemorial. It is not. Sinhala Buddhist devotional song — ",[14,22,23],{},"bakthi gee"," — is roughly the age of the electric light bulb, and it was made on purpose, by people who had a specific problem to solve.",[26,27,29],"h2",{"id":28},"something-to-sing-back","Something to sing back",[10,31,32,33,35,36,38],{},"Professor Asanga Tilakaratne, of Pali and Buddhist Studies, states the origin without ornament: ",[14,34,23],{}," began as a response to Christian influence. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Christian hymns and carols were becoming familiar to people in Ceylon. That familiarity produced ",[14,37,23],{},", songs written to commemorate primarily Vesak and Poson.",[10,40,41],{},"To understand why that mattered, you have to see what a hymn actually is as a piece of technology. A hymn is doctrine that ordinary people can carry around in their heads. It is metrical, so it is memorable; it is congregational, so it is learned socially; it is seasonal, so it comes back every year and reinforces itself. Missionary Christianity in colonial Ceylon had this instrument and used it. Buddhism, at that moment, had nothing shaped like it.",[10,43,44,45,48,49,52],{},"What Buddhism had was chant. ",[14,46,47],{},"Gatha"," and ",[14,50,51],{},"pirith"," are recited in Pali, in a manner deliberately unlike singing, by people who in most cases do not understand the words as language. That is not a defect — the sound is doing something else, and it does it well. But it is not a hymn. You cannot put a child in front of it and expect the Three Refuges to lodge.",[10,54,55,56,59],{},"So the revival built the missing instrument. ",[14,57,58],{},"Bakthi gee"," were written in Sinhala, in verse, on the themes the writers wanted taught: the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. Because they were composed at a moment when reviving Buddhism was the entire point, the emphasis fell heavily on the words. Prof. Tilakaratne describes the result as a balance the tradition had not previously offered in one object: aesthetic fulfilment through the music, intellectual fulfilment through the philosophy, in the same three minutes.",[26,61,63],{"id":62},"the-rest-of-the-apparatus","The rest of the apparatus",[10,65,66],{},"The songs did not arrive alone. They came as part of a full retooling of what a Buddhist public festival looked like, and most of the retooling borrowed its logic from what it was answering.",[10,68,69,70,73,74,77],{},"The Buddhist flag was designed in Colombo in 1885 by a committee of monks and laymen and first hoisted on Vesak day, 28 May 1885, at the Dipaduttamarama in Kotahena; Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, the American Theosophist, advised on cutting it down to the proportions of a national flag so it could be used like one. Olcott had already written the ",[14,71,72],{},"Buddhist Catechism"," in 1881 — set out, quite openly, in the question-and-answer format of a Christian catechism. Buddhist schools followed: Ananda College in 1886, Dharmaraja College in Kandy in 1887, Maliyadeva in Kurunegala in 1888, Mahinda in Galle in 1892. And the ",[14,75,76],{},"daham pasala",", the Sunday school, arrived with a Sunday school's characteristic apparatus of lessons, prizes, recitations and songs.",[10,79,80],{},"Every one of those is a Christian form filled with Buddhist content. That is not a criticism. It is how revivals work — you take the machinery that is beating you and you run your own material through it.",[10,82,83,84,87],{},"The lights came later, and they came from a different direction. In 1913 a structure of Buddhist paintings illuminated by oil lamps appeared at Ambalangoda: the first ",[14,85,86],{},"thorana"," of the kind that would take over the festival. The modern electric pandal followed in 1956 — the beginning of the Thotalanga pandal, still shown annually. From there the scale ran away with itself: structures up to a hundred feet high, thousands of bulbs pulsing in sequence, panels painted months in advance and hoisted onto scaffolding, hired out afterwards to towns beyond Colombo for Poson.",[10,89,90],{},"The pandal is a comic strip about a Jataka tale, and a comic strip needs a caption. So the narration became its own craft. Mervyn Senarathna, who spent sixty years writing scripts for the SLBC, is credited with more than six hundred pandal narrations, from Colombo to Avissawella. Six hundred. That is a career of writing words to be shouted through a loudspeaker at people standing in a street at night, and hardly anyone knows the man's name — which tells you how thoroughly this became infrastructure rather than art.",[26,92,94],{"id":93},"the-voices","The voices",[10,96,97,98,100],{},"Two singers, more than any others, are what people actually hear when they hear ",[14,99,23],{},", and neither of them fits the neat picture.",[10,102,103,104,108,109,112,113,116,117,112,120,116,123,112,126,129,130,112,133,136,137,140],{},"The first is ",[105,106,107],"strong",{},"මොහිදීන් බෙග්"," Mohideen Baig, a Tamil-speaking Muslim from Salem in South India who came to Ceylon after his brother drowned and never learned to read Sinhala. He sang ",[105,110,111],{},"සුව දේ මට සීතල සුළඟ පවා"," ",[14,114,115],{},"Suwa De Mata Seethala Sulanga Pawa",", ",[105,118,119],{},"ගිරි හෙල් මුදුනේ",[14,121,122],{},"Giri Hel Mudune",[105,124,125],{},"බුදුන්ගේ අමා ධර්මේ",[14,127,128],{},"Budunge Ama Dharme"," and — the recording that plays over more loudspeakers than any other — a Sinhala rendition of ",[105,131,132],{},"බුද්ධං සරණං ගච්ඡාමි",[14,134,135],{},"Buddham Saranam Gachchami",", made in India in 1960 for the Sinhala dub of the film ",[14,138,139],{},"Angulimaal",". \"Until I die,\" he said, \"I will sing for Sinhala Buddhists.\"",[10,142,143,144,147,148,116,151,116,154,157,158,161],{},"The second is ",[105,145,146],{},"විවියන් ද සිල්වා බොරලැස්ස"," Vivienne de Silva Boralessa, who auditioned for Radio Ceylon in 1940 before a panel including the Pali scholar Gunapala Malalasekera and made the devotional repertoire her own: ",[14,149,150],{},"Sambudu Mangalle",[14,152,153],{},"Budu Magula Langama Awi",[14,155,156],{},"Ma Sanghabodhi Swamine",". She sang at the 2500th Buddha Jayanti and again at the 2550th in 2006 and the 2600th Sambuddhatva Jayanthi in 2011, when she performed ",[14,159,160],{},"Me Pin Bime"," as a duet with her son. Both have full profiles on this site.",[10,163,164,165,168,169,172,173,116,176,116,179,116,182,116,185,116,188,191],{},"The line continued through W. D. Amaradeva and Nanda Malini, and through composers writing new devotional songs for a mass audience: Rohana Weerasinghe's ",[14,166,167],{},"Nidu Kanane"," for Sunil Edirisinghe, and ",[14,170,171],{},"Pansale Bo Maluwe"," for Nanda Malini. The songs most often named at Poson today — ",[14,174,175],{},"Poya Sande Sanda Kiranin",[14,177,178],{},"Wadi Sugande",[14,180,181],{},"Meth Mal Pibideva",[14,183,184],{},"Paramitha Bala",[14,186,187],{},"Budhdhanubavena",[14,189,190],{},"Uththama Muni Dalada",", which tells the story of how the Sacred Tooth Relic came to the island — are a nineteenth-century idea in twentieth-century clothes.",[26,193,195],{"id":194},"whether-it-is-still-working","Whether it is still working",[10,197,198,199,202,203,205],{},"Weerasinghe, who has written as much of this repertoire as anyone alive, thinks it is fading. He recalls that ",[14,200,201],{},"budu guna geetha"," — songs on the qualities of the Buddha — were common in the gramophone period and says the form is in decline, with young listeners largely uninterested; he puts the responsibility for reviving it on them. Jagath Wickremasinghe, who has written and sung more than a hundred Buddhist songs himself, argues that ",[14,204,23],{}," with real depth are now rare, because the interests of the audience have fragmented.",[10,207,208,209,211],{},"Against that, the form keeps finding new delivery systems. Since 2001 a \"mobile ",[14,210,23],{},"\" programme run by the Media Cultural Foundation under the journalist Nishantha Peiris has toured Panadura, Kalutara and Moratuwa each Vesak week, singing at places including a nursing home — which, for a genre invented so that doctrine could travel by tune, is about as faithful to the original design brief as it is possible to get.",[26,213,215],{"id":214},"what-we-know-and-how-we-know-it","What we know, and how we know it",[10,217,218,219,221,222,225,226,228],{},"The origin claim — that ",[14,220,23],{}," arose in the late nineteenth century as a response to Christian hymns and carols becoming familiar — is Prof. Asanga Tilakaratne's, given in a ",[14,223,224],{},"Sunday Times"," feature of June 2024, which also carries the Rohana Weerasinghe and Jagath Wickremasinghe comments and the standard Poson song list. The 1913 Ambalangoda illuminated ",[14,227,86],{},", the first electric pandal in 1956 and Mervyn Senarathna's six hundred narrations come from Roar Media's 2017 survey of Vesak pandals. The flag, catechism and school dates come from Wikipedia.",[10,230,231,232,234],{},"What is not established is anything at the level of individual songs: no source consulted here names the first ",[14,233,23],{},", its author, or its date. The genre's beginning is documented as a movement and not as an event, and this article does not manufacture one.",{"title":236,"searchDepth":237,"depth":237,"links":238},"",2,[239,240,241,242,243],{"id":28,"depth":237,"text":29},{"id":62,"depth":237,"text":63},{"id":93,"depth":237,"text":94},{"id":194,"depth":237,"text":195},{"id":214,"depth":237,"text":215},"genre","Sinhala Buddhist devotional song is not ancient. It was built in the late nineteenth century, deliberately, because Christian hymns had become familiar and something had to be sung back.","1890s-present","md",false,"\u002Fimages\u002Fstories\u002Fbakthi-gee-origins.webp","Sheviii 1234 — Vesak thorana at Grandpass, Colombo, 2022","CC BY-SA 4.0","https:\u002F\u002Fcommons.wikimedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FFile:Grandpass_Vesak_Thorana.jpg",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fbakthi-gee-origins",1885,{"title":5,"description":245},[259,262,265,268,271,274,277],{"title":260,"url":261},"Sajani Ratnayake, 'Beginnings of Bakthi Gee and its continuing tradition' — Sunday Times, 16 June 2024","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F240616\u002Fplus\u002Fbeginnings-of-bakthi-gee-and-its-continuing-tradition-560009.html",{"title":263,"url":264},"Dilina Amaruwan, 'The Kaleidoscopic World Of Vesak Pandals' — Roar Media, 10 May 2017","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.roar.media\u002Fenglish\u002Flife\u002Fsrilanka-life\u002Fthe-kaleidoscopic-world-of-vesak-pandals",{"title":266,"url":267},"'Mobile Bakthi Gee' — Sunday Observer, 23 June 2024","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundayobserver.lk\u002F2024\u002F06\u002F23\u002Fnews\u002F26247\u002Fmobile-bakthi-gee\u002F",{"title":269,"url":270},"Buddhist flag — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FBuddhist_flag",{"title":272,"url":273},"Henry Steel Olcott — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FHenry_Steel_Olcott",{"title":275,"url":276},"Mohideen Baig — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FMohideen_Baig",{"title":278,"url":279},"Vivienne de Silva Boralessa — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FVivienne_de_Silva_Boralessa","en\u002Fstories\u002Fbakthi-gee-origins",null,"234MQfMz6o_wPaMig2N0EHyWf4yCP4YGrDBjiX8ksnU",1787999337569]