Somewhere around 1886, a painter working on the walls of the Purvarama temple at Kataluwa, a few miles east of Galle, put a dance band into a Buddhist mural. The costumes are part European and part local; so are the instruments. It is a picture of baila, painted on a temple wall, roughly sixty years before anybody wrote a baila song in Sinhala.
That mural is one of the oldest datable images of the music, and it is a useful correction to the way the story is usually told. Baila is not a twentieth-century pop invention that borrowed an old rhythm. It is an old music that was eventually given Sinhala words.
Brought here to work
Africans were brought to Sri Lanka by every European power that held the coast, beginning with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and continuing until the British left in 1948. The date most often cited for the start of large-scale arrivals is 1630, when Africans were being brought in as slaves and as soldiers. In 1817 the British shipped a further group from Mozambique; most of the soldiers in the Third Ceylon Regiment were African, and some of those stationed around Puttalam simply stayed when the regiment was disbanded.
The list of work they were put to is worth reading slowly, because it is a portrait of a colonial economy: mercenaries and bodyguards, road builders and railway constructors, bricklayers, palanquin carriers, divers in the pearl fisheries, watchers in the salt pans, domestic servants, nannies and nurses, village officials — and musicians.
They were labelled with a Portuguese word, Kaffir, which is not a name anyone chose. In Sri Lanka today the word survives mostly in academic writing and newspaper articles; ordinary Sinhala speakers say Kaperi, or simply African. Elsewhere in the world the same word became one of the ugliest racial slurs in any language. Community members have told researchers that they often keep their identity to themselves in public.
Chicote and kafrinha
Out of this came two named dance forms. In 1894 the advocate C. M. Fernando described them with a precision that has kept his words in circulation ever since: chicote was "slow and stately"; kafrinha was "faster and more boisterous," and danced "with a peculiar jerky movement."
The word kafrinha is usually explained as kaf — from Kaffir — plus rinha, a local woman. The rhythms are thought to draw on Mozambique.
The band was small and portable. A kafrinha ensemble meant singers, a guitar, a banderinha (a small mandolin-like instrument, sometimes likened to a banjo or ukulele), a rabana — the single-headed frame drum already thoroughly at home in Sinhala village music — and a triangle, the ferrinhos. A violin often joined, or the viaule, a thirteen-stringed instrument. The Sinhala scholar Sunil Ariyaratne gives essentially the same four-piece line-up for the seventeenth century: violin, mandolin, rabana, guitar.
African, Portuguese Burgher and Sinhalese musicians mixed freely, and over time both chicote and kafrinha were swallowed by a single word: baila, Portuguese for dance. Travelling Burgher entertainers carried it into wealthy households in Colombo, Galle, Kandy, Jaffna, Batticaloa and Trincomalee — which is how a coastal minority's dance music became something the whole island had heard.
Two of its habits have never gone away. The best singers, the "baila captains," are expected to keep going for thirty or more songs in an evening. And the form is competitive: two singers trading improvised verses, each trying to outdo the other, which is where vaada baila comes from.
Verses in a language nobody speaks any more
Baila's other inheritance is a body of Portuguese creole verse called cantigas. It was an oral tradition until 1914, when a hundred of them were printed as Cantigas ne o lingua de Portuguez, mostly from the seafaring communities around Matara.
They are small, sharp and mostly about pleasure. One is an invitation to sing: "Nona pequinino, parqui calado santa. Ouvri vossa doce boca, oen cantiga canta" — young lady, why do you sit silently? Open your sweet mouth, sing a cantiga. Another turns a wedding ring into a whole life: "Anela de ouro nona, baila sober mesa. Si acha anela to tem, vida fortunesa" — ring of gold, lady, dance on the table; if you find the ring, life is good fortune. A third is about leaving: "Se jera pervos, Au lo lava mea tera. Mea korpo fia barco, Brasso fia vala" — if you want, I will take you to my land; my body becomes a boat, my arm becomes a sail.
The American musicologist Ronald Walcott, in a 1978 doctoral thesis for the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, argued that what makes Sri Lankan music sound Sri Lankan is the primacy of words — performers think first of the syllables and the poetic metre, and everything else is arranged around them. Baila, a hybrid form in a borrowed language, obeys that rule as strictly as any ritual music does.
What the community calls its own music
Here is the part of this story that is almost never told. The surviving Afro-Sri Lankan community, concentrated around Sirambiyadiya near Puttalam, does not call its own tradition kaffrinha. It calls it manja.
A 2023 study in the Asian-European Music Research Journal by Geethika Abeysekara and Chinthaka Prageeth Meddegoda is blunt about the state of knowledge: manja songs are not widely known in Sri Lanka, and "a specific study of these songs has not yet taken place." What the authors were able to describe is a music quite different from stage baila. Manja lyrics are entirely in Portuguese or creole — the songs are about nature, the sea, animals and birds, love, a child flying a kite — and modern Portuguese speakers played the recordings could not understand them. The accompaniment is percussion and household objects: a dhol, a rabana, spoons, metal coins struck against a glass bottle, coconut shells, and stamping on a wooden plank. The melody is simple, inside a five-note scale, in 6/8, and the tempo climbs steadily through the song until it is racing. Women mostly sing; men mostly drum.
The community is small and poor. The demographic figures in the literature are fragments — thirty-eight families across the whole Puttalam district in 1952, around fifty families at Sellakkandal Sirambiadiya in 2001 — and most performances now happen for visitors with cameras. The 2023 authors are uneasy about that: staging a tradition, they warn, also means pressing people to stay old-fashioned. Young women in jeans and T-shirts are not very welcome in the photographs.
Condemned, but never banned
When baila finally arrived in Sinhala, in the hands of the Galle-born traffic policeman Wally Bastiansz in the mid-twentieth century, the respectable musical establishment did not enjoy it. He fitted Sinhala words to the 6/8 kaffrinha rhythm and added a chorus, and the Sinhala Vishwakoshaya — the national encyclopaedia — flatly defined the fusion of kaffirinha and baila as a type of fast musical dance that stimulates intoxicated men and women. The disdain was real, sustained and snobbish. It also had a practical edge: broadcasters were slow to play the stuff, and the older word all but disappeared, swallowed by baila, surviving as a living genre in its own name only in pockets — Negombo, Chilaw, Puttalam, Batticaloa, Trincomalee, Galle, Wahakotte.
It was never a ban. No source records baila being prohibited by the state, censored on air by statute, or removed from sale. What happened was social: a music associated with the coast, with Burghers and Africans, with drink and with dancing was written down as low, and stayed low in the eyes of people who wrote encyclopaedias, until the scholar Sunil Ariyaratne took the form seriously enough to write a book about it. Meanwhile everyone kept dancing to it, and සුරංගනී (Surangani) went on to colonise Tamil Nadu.
What we know, and how we know it
The 1894 descriptions of chicote and kafrinha are C. M. Fernando's own words, and the Kataluwa mural of 1886, the kafrinha instrument list and the cantigas verses come from Tony Donaldson's 2006 essay in the Sunday Times, drawing on the printed 1914 collection and Walcott's thesis. The account of manja — the name, the creole texts, the household percussion, the 6/8 acceleration — comes from the peer-reviewed 2023 paper by Abeysekara and Meddegoda, which is also the source for the demographic figures and for the warning about staged performance.
The largest uncertainty is the one the 2023 authors state themselves: the songs of the Afro-Sri Lankan community have never been properly studied, the creole in them is not fully understood even by Portuguese speakers, and the line connecting seventeenth-century kafrinha to present-day manja and to modern baila is drawn from scattered descriptions rather than from any continuous record. What can be said flatly is that this music arrived with people who did not choose to come here, and that it has been in Sri Lanka far longer than the Sinhala lyrics that made it famous.