In June 1946 a theatre company from Negombo got on a boat. The Minerva Players — Eddie Jayamanne, Rukmani Devi, B. A. W. Jayamanne and the rest — were going to South India to make a film out of the stage play they had already performed more than eight hundred times. They would shoot it at a studio at Thiruparankundram, just outside Madurai, in a country whose language none of the technicians shared with them.
What came back was කඩවුනු පොරොන්දුව Kadawunu Poronduwa — "The Broken Promise" — the first film made in Sinhala. It opened at the Kingsley Cinema in Colombo, with D. S. Senanayake, then Minister of Agriculture, in the audience. Accounts of the date differ: Wikipedia and D. B. S. Jeyaraj give 21 January 1947, while the Sunday Times has it opening on 1 January 1947 in Colombo and eight other centres including Kandy, Galle and Trincomalee.
Sinhala cinema, in other words, was born abroad. So was Sinhala film music, and it stayed abroad a great deal longer.
A soap manufacturer builds a studio
The man who made it happen was Sundaram Mathura-Nayagam — S. M. Nayagam — an Indian Tamil businessman from Madurai with factories in both Madurai and Ceylon, making soap and perfume. When Indian cinema boomed in the 1940s he founded his own company, Sri Murugan Navakala Limited, and built a studio, Chitrakala Movietone, at Thiruparankundram.
By his own account his Sinhala friends enjoyed Hindi and Tamil films but were sorry there were none in their own language. He looked for a story, found one already proven on stage in Negombo, and negotiated with its author.
Everything else about the production was Indian. The director was a Bengali, Jyotish Sinha, who had made Nayagam's first Tamil picture Kumaraguru the year before. The assistant director, S. Soundararajah, was an Indian Tamil. The cinematographer was K. Prabhakar; the editor Pakeer Saleh. The music director was Narayana Aiyar. His assistant, R. Muthusamy of Tamil Nadu, liked Ceylon enough to settle there permanently and became one of its best-known film music directors. Of the people who made the first Sinhala film, essentially only the actors were Sinhalese.
Twelve songs and a stopwatch
The songs went out on Parlophone, with the film, in 1947 — and they were the last records the Parlophone label issued in Ceylon. Twelve titles are listed, among them "Prema Daya," "Deva Swarmi" and "Jevithaye Saamey" sung by Rukmani Devi, and the comic numbers "Is Issara Welaa," "Mage Saka Bambarea" and "Thakkita Tharikita" by Eddie Jayamanne with Gemini Kantha. Two of the twelve never reached a gramophone record at all, which is why they are now very hard to hear.
One correction is worth making here, because the claim is repeated constantly: Mohideen Baig did not sing in Kadawunu Poronduwa. His film debut came three months later, in අසෝකමාලා Asokamala, released on 9 April 1947 — the second Sinhala film, the first directed by a Sinhalese, and the film on which a young W. D. Albert Perera, later Amaradeva, also first appeared.
What Kadawunu Poronduwa did leave behind was a recipe, and B. A. W. Jayamanne stated it as precisely as a builder states a specification. A film had to run two and a half hours. One hour of that was scenes with dialogue. Half an hour was songs — about ten of them. Another half-hour was silent background scenes. Fifteen minutes was the interval.
Read it again and notice what it is: a schedule, not an aesthetic. Half an hour of song per picture, guaranteed, whatever the picture was about. That specification governed Sinhala cinema for roughly twenty years, and it is the reason the film song, rather than the concert or the record, became the main employer of Sinhala singers.
Singers who did not speak the language
Critics saw the problem at once. Reviewers of the day, Jeyaraj notes, called the film "overtly Indian in content and form," and when Asokamala followed the same path Martin Wickramasinghe reviewed it at length and harshly, objecting both to its history and to its handling of Sinhala and Tamil.
It made no difference. The commercial argument was settled in 1953 by සුජාතා Sujatha, released on 26 May, a remake of the Hindi film Badi Behen, produced by K. Gunaratnam and directed by T. R. Sundaram with music by V. Dakshinamurthi. It was the first Sinhala film to make its producer serious money, and it set the pattern for the rest of the decade — a run of Sinhala remakes of Tamil and Hindi originals followed, including Varada Kageda and Ahankara Sthree in 1954, Mathalan in 1955, Dostara and Duppathage Duka in 1956.
Gunaratnam's other innovation was in the singing. From Sujatha onwards he engaged South Indian playback singers — Jamuna Rani, K. Rani, A. M. Raja — and the results were enormous. "ප්රේම ගඟේ" Prema Gange, sung by K. Rani with Mohideen Baig, and "ප්රේමාලෝකය නිවී" Premalokaya Niwi, by Jamuna Rani and Baig, were among the most popular Sinhala songs of their moment.
They were also sung, in part, by people who did not speak Sinhala. The words were learned phonetically and delivered by voices trained in another language's music entirely. For a decade, a substantial share of the songs Sinhala audiences loved best were performed by singers who could not have held a conversation with the audience.
Cutting the cord
There is a phrase the researchers Ashley Ratnavibhushana and M. L. M. Mansoor use for all this in their study of early Sinhala cinema's South Indian connection: an "umbilical" link, intact for about two decades. Their judgement is not that the influence was shameful but that it was total — "pervasive and profound," and rooted in the plain fact that South Indian cinema was what Ceylonese audiences were already watching.
Resistance began early and from inside. Sirisena Wimalaweera, a writer and dramatist, took against the copying and made Amma (1949) and Pitisara Kella (1953) with local talent, building the Navajeevan Studio at Kiribathgoda in 1951 so that films could be made at home. The full break came later, with a generation of directors — Lester James Peries first among them — who moved the camera onto Sri Lankan ground and the music with it.
The irony of the beginning is worth holding onto. A Tamil industrialist from Madurai built the studio, hired a Bengali director and an Indian composer, and gave the Sinhala language its first talking picture because he thought his Sinhalese friends deserved one. Whatever the film's faults, that impulse was generous, and the industry it started has never quite acknowledged it.
What we know, and how we know it
The production details — Nayagam's soap factories, the Madurai studio, the Bengali director, the Indian crew, the June 1946 voyage and the formula Jayamanne stated — come from the Sunday Times "Kala Korner" column of 21 April 2013, which summarises Ratnavibhushana and Mansoor's NETPAC study, and from Wikipedia's articles on the film and on Nayagam, both sourced to D. B. S. Jeyaraj's seventieth-anniversary account. The song list and the Parlophone detail are from the film's Wikipedia article.
Two things remain uncertain. The release date is given as 21 January 1947 in most sources and 1 January 1947 in the Sunday Times, and we have not found a contemporary newspaper to settle it. Song counts also wobble: twelve titles are listed, while Jayamanne's own formula speaks of "about ten." The claim that Mohideen Baig sang in this film, on the other hand, is not uncertain — it is simply wrong, and Asokamala's April 1947 release date shows why.