[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":197},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-en-danno-budunge":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"category":168,"description":169,"era":170,"extension":171,"featured":172,"heroImage":173,"imageCredit":174,"imageLicense":175,"imageSource":176,"meta":177,"navigation":178,"path":179,"rawYear":180,"seo":181,"sources":182,"stem":195,"translated":178,"url":185,"__hash__":196},"storiesEn\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fdanno-budunge.md","Danno Budunge: A Bombay Melody and the Argument of 2016",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":159},"minimark",[9,13,30,33,38,48,58,64,67,71,74,77,83,86,90,96,106,112,116,122,125,128,134,138,156],[10,11,12],"p",{},"Three men come over a wooden bridge and stop. Ahead of them, across the plain, is Anuradhapura. One of them says: look at this city like a great mansion, full of monks who keep the precepts. The second says: it is heaven on earth — so many monks that their shadow blocks the sun. The third says: I see flocks of ducks wading in deep ponds where the lotus stems come up to the surface.",[10,14,15,16,20,21,25,26,29],{},"That is the scene, from the thirty-sixth chapter of the ",[17,18,19],"em",{},"Mahavamsa",", and those three speeches are the three verses of ",[22,23,24],"strong",{},"දන්නෝ බුදුන්ගේ"," (",[17,27,28],{},"Danno Budunge",", \"those who know the Buddha\"), first sung on a Colombo stage in 1903. A century later it would be described, in a national argument conducted largely on television, as a sacred Buddhist song that a Sri Lankan soprano had defiled by singing it in a Western way.",[10,31,32],{},"Almost every part of that description runs against the song's own history.",[34,35,37],"h2",{"id":36},"a-lawyers-theatre-and-an-indian-composer","A lawyer's theatre and an Indian composer",[10,39,40,41,44,45,47],{},"The words were written by Makalandage John de Silva (1857–1922), born in Kotte to Catholic parents, educated at Christian College and then the Colombo Academy, a schoolmaster and later a lawyer who fell into the theatre and never got out. He wrote ",[17,42,43],{},"Sirisangabo Charitaya"," — the play ",[17,46,28],{}," belongs to — and staged it first in 1903. After it, his company turned professional as the Arya Subodha Natya Sabha and played more or less nightly.",[10,49,50,51,54,55,57],{},"De Silva was working in ",[17,52,53],{},"nurthi",", the Sinhala musical drama that grew up in imitation of the Parsi theatre troupes from Bombay who had been visiting Colombo since 1877. He was a writer, not a musician, and ",[17,56,53],{}," needed melodies. So he paid an Indian musician to come from western India and stay: Pandit Visvanath Lawjee, variously spelled Lauji or Lowji, who had arrived with the Parsi theatre and remained in Ceylon.",[10,59,60,61,63],{},"Neither man had the other's language. Accounts differ on the order they worked in. Garrett Field, drawing on Sinhala sources, describes de Silva explaining the scene to Lawjee in English, Lawjee composing a melody out of his knowledge of North Indian raga, and de Silva then writing Sinhala lyrics that fitted the melody's rhythm. A widely circulated account has it the other way round — that de Silva read out the Sinhala verse and Lawjee hummed possibilities until de Silva heard one he liked. The two versions agree on the essential thing, which is that the tune of ",[17,62,28],{}," was made by a Bombay musician for a Sri Lankan playwright who could not compose one himself, at a time when very few Sinhalese songwriters could.",[10,65,66],{},"A much-repeated story adds that the two men met at a Christmas party given by Sir Solomon Dias Bandaranaike. That detail appears only in blogs and newspaper features that do not name a source, and should be treated as unverified.",[34,68,70],{"id":69},"is-it-even-a-buddhist-song","Is it even a Buddhist song?",[10,72,73],{},"The lyrics describe a city. They praise the monks in it and the wisdom of following the Dhamma, but the subject is Anuradhapura: its ponds, its lotus, its ducks, its shade. It was written for a patriotic history play by a Catholic-born dramatist who believed that dramatising Sri Lanka's great periods would produce genuine patriotism — the same reason he wrote plays about Dutugemunu and Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe.",[10,75,76],{},"It became a religious song by use rather than by design, which is how most religious songs happen. Sung for a hundred years at Vesak and in temples, folded into the emotional grammar of Sinhala Buddhist life, it acquired a sanctity the 1903 script does not claim. The Central Bank clock tower in Colombo chimes its first two lines before striking the hour; Radio Ceylon once used it as the signature tune for election results.",[10,78,79,80,82],{},"Its melody has also travelled outward. Devar Surya Sena set the Reverend Walter Stanley Senior's \"Hymn for Ceylon\" — written in 1923, twenty years after ",[17,81,28],{}," — to a lightly modified version of the same tune for church singing. The borrowing ran from the Buddhist stage song to the Christian hymn, not the other way about, though you will often hear the reverse asserted.",[10,84,85],{},"Claims that Lawjee lifted the melody from Wagner or Mendelssohn circulate persistently. Nobody has produced evidence. The most anyone has shown is that the opening notes resemble Mendelssohn's Duetto, Op. 38 No. 6, which is a resemblance and not a source.",[34,87,89],{"id":88},"hubert-rajapakse-got-there-in-the-1920s","Hubert Rajapakse got there in the 1920s",[10,91,92,93,95],{},"In the 1920s a Tower Hall singer named Hubert Rajapakse recorded ",[17,94,28],{}," for His Master's Voice. Rajapakse was a member of a prominent Colombo family — his brother was the philanthropist Gate Mudaliyar Tudor Rajapakse — and thoroughly Westernised; he is said, though the evidence is thin, to have been trained by the opera teacher Mathilde Marchesi.",[10,97,98,99,102,103,105],{},"He sang it in a Western style, quite unlike the Hindustani manner of the original. On the record he even opens with a different word: ",[17,100,101],{},"Dharma Budunge"," rather than ",[17,104,28],{},", and the disc went out under that title, glossed as \"Ode to the Sacred City.\" The usual explanation is that a man educated entirely in English simply mispronounced it.",[10,107,108,109,111],{},"The public, by contemporary accounts, did not much like it. Which is worth stating plainly, because it complicates the neat version of this story: an operatic ",[17,110,28],{}," was not universally welcomed in the 1920s either. But it existed. It was pressed, sold, and catalogued. Whatever else can be said about singing this song in a Western voice, it is not a novelty, and it is not younger than the song's status as a beloved standard — it is nearly as old as the song.",[34,113,115],{"id":114},"the-argument-of-2016","The argument of 2016",[10,117,118,119,121],{},"On Independence Day, 4 February 2016, at Galle Face Green, the soprano Kishani Jayasinghe sang ",[17,120,28],{}," as part of a programme that also included Sinhala folk songs, accompanied by an arrangement built with the bands of the three armed forces. She sang it in a higher key, in her own voice, which is a full lyric soprano.",[10,123,124],{},"The reaction, which began on a private television station and moved onto social media, accused her of Westernising and Christianising a sacred Sinhala song. She said afterwards that she had changed neither music, text nor tune, and that the reaction was being driven for political ends. Writing in March 2016, the columnist Izeth Hussain cited her own published account that she had received half a million emails.",[10,126,127],{},"Musicians who were asked about it at the time mostly declined to take the offered side. The composer Navaratne Gamage pointed out that Sunil Santha carried Western and Bengali influence, Amaradeva Indian influence, and Khemadasa his own experiments. Lakshman Joseph de Saram noted that the song was written by a Christian to music by an Indian. The former ambassador Sarath Kongahage simply recalled that Hubert Rajapakse had sung it in the Western hymn style decades earlier. Others thought the singing fine and the occasion wrong — a national ceremony being the wrong room for an experiment. The veteran actor Jayalath Manorathna, who admired her, still preferred the original: introduce new presentations with new songs, he said, not established ones.",[10,129,130,131,133],{},"That is the more interesting objection, and the honest one. But the loud charge — that an operatic ",[17,132,28],{}," is a foreign intrusion on something purely Sinhala and Buddhist — collapses under the song's own record. The tune came from Bombay. The lyricist was born Catholic. The words are about a city. And the operatic version is a hundred years old.",[34,135,137],{"id":136},"what-we-know-and-how-we-know-it","What we know, and how we know it",[10,139,140,141,143,144,147,148,151,152,155],{},"The 1903 date, the ",[17,142,19],{}," source, and John de Silva's working relationship with Visvanath Lawjee are documented in Garrett Field's ",[17,145,146],{},"Modernizing Composition",", which footnotes them to Sinhala-language scholarship, and are consistent with the detailed account by Mahendra Gonsalkorale in the ",[17,149,150],{},"Daily FT"," — an article whose author is careful to state that it is not a scholarly treatise and that some of its claims lack firm evidence. The 2016 responses quoted here come from Isuri Kaviratne's round-up in the ",[17,153,154],{},"Sunday Observer"," of 28 February 2016, published while the argument was still running.",[10,157,158],{},"The soft ground is the biography of Lawjee, of whom almost nothing is securely known beyond his origin and his role; the Christmas-party meeting, the Wagner and Mendelssohn attributions, and Hubert Rajapakse's training under Marchesi are all repeated claims without sources behind them. The hard ground is enough: a play, a year, a tune from Bombay, and a 1920s gramophone record that already did what 2016 found unforgivable.",{"title":160,"searchDepth":161,"depth":161,"links":162},"",2,[163,164,165,166,167],{"id":36,"depth":161,"text":37},{"id":69,"depth":161,"text":70},{"id":88,"depth":161,"text":89},{"id":114,"depth":161,"text":115},{"id":136,"depth":161,"text":137},"song-story","A song written for a Colombo stage play in 1903, to a tune by an Indian musician, was defended in 2016 as sacred and un-Western. Its own history says otherwise.","1900s-2010s","md",false,"\u002Fimages\u002Fstories\u002Fdanno-budunge.webp","The Leader (theleader.lk), via Roar Media","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.roar.media\u002Fsinhala\u002Fmain\u002Fhistory\u002Fgramophone-songs-sung-at-the-vesak-pantheon",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fdanno-budunge",1903,{"title":5,"description":169},[183,186,189,192],{"title":184,"url":185},"Mahendra Gonsalkorale, 'Danno Budunge – A genesis' — Daily FT","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.ft.lk\u002Fentertainment-sectors\u002FDanno-Budunge-%E2%80%93-A-genesis\u002F10405-672058",{"title":187,"url":188},"Isuri Kaviratne, 'Pitched into controversy' — Sunday Observer, 28 February 2016","http:\u002F\u002Farchives.sundayobserver.lk\u002F2016\u002F02\u002F28\u002Ffea13.asp",{"title":190,"url":191},"Izeth Hussain, 'The Contretemps surrounding Kishani Jayasinghe's Operatic Dunno Budunge' — Thuppahi's Blog, 12 March 2016","https:\u002F\u002Fthuppahis.com\u002F2016\u002F03\u002F12\u002Fthe-contretemps-surrounding-kishani-jayasinghes-operatic-dunno-budunge\u002F",{"title":193,"url":194},"Garrett Field, Modernizing Composition — full text","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.org\u002Fdetails\u002Fdli.doa.211","en\u002Fstories\u002Fdanno-budunge","a7w8TiWuP6iHeMV2tyo40h0XNRE9bsbeCj4u178zBbA",1787999337715]