On 8 December 1955 a Radio Ceylon announcer read out a cast list that no listener could see:
Princess Manohari … represents Universal Beauty King Jagatpati … represents The Universe Soma Kumaru … represents The Moon Divapati … represents The Sun Soldier Beams … represent The Rays of the Sun Manohari's servant Hemanta … represents The Misty Season
Then the singing started. What followed was මනෝහරී Manohari, the first Sinhala gita natakaya — "song drama," usually translated as radio opera. It had a libretto, characters, scenes and a narrator, but no stage, no scenery, no costumes and no audience in a hall. It was written to exist only in the air.
A genre invented in a meeting
The gita natakaya did not evolve. It was commissioned.
By the mid-1950s Radio Ceylon's Sinhala service was in the middle of a long argument about "raising the standards" of Sinhala music. Its director-general, M. J. Perera, had a bleak view of the raw material — "we have no traditions in music or drama," he said, and therefore the broadcasting station had a responsibility. In 1954 producers of the Sinhala division, together with the Department of Radio Broadcasting, the Department of Education, the State Arts Institution and the Lanka Kala Mandalaya, reached a unanimous decision about who should be entrusted with the job: musicians grounded in both North Indian classical music and Sinhala folk music.
Out of those discussions, in 1955, three men — Perera; the director of the Sinhala station, Tewis "Meghaduta" Guruge; and its music director, the flutist P. Dunstan de Silva — conceived a new type of radio song, one that would marry an operatic libretto to the music of North Indian ragas. Guruge gave it the name gita natakaya. He then invited the lyricist Chandrarathna Manawasinghe to write the first libretto, and later Wimal Abeysundara was chosen to follow him.
Both men were writing against something specific. In the 1950s the standard way to produce a Sinhala song was still vacana danava — "putting words," fitting Sinhala syllables to a Hindi film melody. Abeysundara described the radio opera as the direct answer to it: "Until very recently our singers were accustomed to singing lyrics set to already-composed melodies found in Hindi films. Composing original lyrics, or original music was a rare phenomenon… Radio Ceylon suspended the following of Hindi film songs and inaugurated a new form of Sinhala music. The pioneering result was the Sinhala radio opera."
Manohari, and the trick of double meaning
Manawasinghe's Manohari was an attempt to write a deva kata — a mythological story of the kind found in Sanskrit literature — in song. Every character stood for a force of nature, which is why the announcer had to read out the key before the music began.
Once you hold the key, the plot reads twice. Princess Manohari is the beauty of the universe. Her father King Jagatpati is the universe itself — so "father" is not a family relation but a statement that the universe begets beauty. When Soma Kumaru, whom she loves, and Divapati, whom she is to marry, fight over her, the moon and the sun are contending, and their quarrel is also the passage from night to day.
Sanskrit poetics has a name for this device, utpreksha: a flight of fancy, usually involving anthropomorphism, in which the listener holds the unreal and the real in mind at once. Manawasinghe was writing for people who would recognise it. An educated listener could hear both layers; everyone else heard a love triangle.
The music was set to North Indian ragas by P. Dunstan de Silva, who was the third Sinhalese musician ever to take a Sangeet Visharada degree from the Marris College of Music in Lucknow, after Lionel Edirisinghe and Sunil Santha.
Nisadi, named after a note
The second radio opera went further into the same territory. Wimal Abeysundara's නිෂාදී Nisadi aired around 1958, and its subject was music itself: "I composed 'Nisadi' with a strong love of Indian classical music," Abeysundara said, and its libretto drew on the lives of North Indian classical musicians.
The plot is a small myth. A young man falls in love with the youngest of a group of celestial women and starts to sing to her — but he has had no serious training, his singing has the opposite of the intended effect, and the women gather around Nisadi in tears. The celestial musician Tumbaru hears the crying and comes down to the riverbank.
The name is the joke and the key at once. Nisadi is named after ni, the seventh note of the Indian scale — sa, ri, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni. The music was composed by Lionel Edirisinghe, the first Sri Lankan to obtain the Sangeet Visharada from Marris College, who had spent close to thirteen years in North India studying under Allauddin Khan, the teacher of Ravi Shankar. Edirisinghe chose ragas that emphasise the note ni, so that the heroine was represented in the harmony as well as in the story. He drew, Abeysundara said, on all eight melas, the great families of Hindustani raga: Yaman, Bilawal, Khamaj, Bhairava, Purvi, Marwa, Kafi and Asavari.
Abeysundara wrote the verse in a metre he described as a blend between a Sanskrit poetic metre and the Sinhala metre used to recite raban pada — the verses sung by women drumming the wide raban frame drum at the April New Year. Mastery of metre was one of the classical ways a Sanskrit poet displayed skill, and Abeysundara was displaying his.
High-minded, and unpopular by design
It is easy to read all this as elitism, and Garrett Field, who is the reason we know any of it in English, does not soften it: the gita natakaya and its literary cousin, Siri Gunasinghe's nisandas kavya or free verse, "were more elite than they were popular." The men who made the first radio operas were not trying to sell anything. They produced these forms "for the idealistic sake of 'raising the standards.'"
There is something worth admiring in that and something worth questioning. The admirable part is obvious: a national broadcaster deliberately commissioned original Sinhala composition, at a moment when the commercial route was to lift a tune from a Hindi film for ten rupees, and it recruited the best-trained musicians in the country to do it. The questionable part is that its idea of "standards" was borrowed almost wholesale from Sanskrit poetics and Hindustani raga — the very North Indian model that Sunil Santha and the Hela Havula were, in the same years, denouncing as a foreign import. The radio opera was an argument against copying Indian film songs, made almost entirely in Indian classical vocabulary.
Both the radio opera and the argument were overtaken. Within a few years the energy at Radio Ceylon had shifted to sarala gee, the light-song genre built on folk material, and to Madawala Ratnayake and W. D. Amaradeva's programmes drawing on vannama and folk quatrain. The gita natakaya left no successors, no repertoire in circulation, and almost no trace in popular memory. What it left was a precedent — the first time anyone in Sri Lanka wrote an extended musical work meant to be heard and not seen.
What we know, and how we know it
Everything substantive here — the 8 December 1955 broadcast date, the cast list, the 1954 meeting and the 1955 conception of the genre, the quotations from Abeysundara, and the raga schemes of Nisadi — comes from Garrett Field's open-access Modernizing Composition (University of California Press, 2017), which footnotes them to Sinhala-language sources including Manawasinghe's and Abeysundara's own writings.
The gaps are large and worth naming. Field dates Nisadi only to "around 1958." No recording of either opera has been published online, so nothing here can be checked by ear; the librettos survive in Sinhala print rather than in sound. And how many gita natakaya were broadcast in total, and when the last one aired, does not appear in any source consulted for this article. If tapes exist, they are in the archives of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation.