In 1968 a man from Colombo stood in a BBC television studio with a singing partner named Sandra Edema and performed a song called "Feel Like a Clown" on Top of the Pops. Hardly any musician from this island has ever done that. The same year the pair sang it on Beat Club in West Germany, and the record's B-side, "Rainbow Land", became the A-side in the United States, where it later turned up as a collector's item among psychedelic-rock enthusiasts who had no idea the writer was Ceylonese.
His name was Nimal Mendis. At home he is remembered for two entirely different songs, both so thoroughly absorbed into Sinhala music that most of the people who love them have never wondered who wrote them. And both were written in English first.
A Colombo songwriter on Top of the Pops
Radio Ceylon picked Mendis up in the late 1950s, and that mattered more than it sounds. The station's Commercial Service was then the most powerful broadcaster in South Asia, heard across India, and listeners wrote in from all over the subcontinent asking for his numbers — "Kandyan Express", "Cherry Blossom Tree", "Butterfly in the Rain", "Champagne Blues". English Wikipedia calls these "number-one hits in Sri Lanka in the late fifties", and that is a claim worth refusing: Ceylon had no music chart to be number one on. What is not in doubt is that they were everywhere.
In Britain, twenty-two of his songs were published. An instrumental, "Kandyan Dance", was recorded in Germany by Friedel Berlipp and his orchestra and climbed to number two on Radio Luxembourg — the English-language station half of Europe tuned to after dark. Decca released Black Pearls & Green Diamonds, an album of eight Mendis songs performed by the British folk group One Two and Three.
That is the frame for everything that follows. Mendis was a Colombo man whose ear had been formed by Western pop radio, who wrote at a keyboard in English, and who then handed what he had written to somebody else to put into Sinhala.
Eight panam
In 1974 he was music director for the film Kalu Diya Dahara ("a column of black water"), and he wrote a song for it in English about colonial Ceylon. Its narrator is a plantation labourer addressing the man who owns his working life. The first verse turns on a raise of eight panam — enough to put a little rice in front of his child, and nowhere near enough. The second remembers the beatings, and the kneeling, and the shaking voice. Then the chorus lifts and asks whether the rope-pull between master and servant might one day stop, and the two of them become friends.
Karunaratne Abeysekera translated it. The Sinhala vocal heard inside the film was sung by Neville Fernando of the calypso group Los Caballeros, who was being treated for leukaemia; at the end of the session he turned to Mendis and Abeysekera and said he might not live to see the film released. He died on 23 April 1975, aged thirty-eight.
But මාස්ටර් සර් Master Sir — often listed by its opening words, Panam Aten — belongs to a different voice. Neela Wickramasinghe sang it over the film's title sequence, and her version, built on the 4/4 arrangement and guitar figures of the English original, is the one that has stayed on the radio for more than thirty years. The broadcaster Vernon Corea carried it to Sri Lankans in Britain on BBC Radio London's London Sounds Eastern. Bathiya and Santhush later cut an authorised cover. In October 2014 Wickramasinghe built an entire concert around the song at the Kularatne Hall of Ananda College; she died in Milan in January 2022, in office as Sri Lanka's Consul General there.
The dates are untidy, and it is better to say so. The film is usually given as 1974; Wikipedia's infobox dates the record to 25 November 1975 and the recording to 1974, and names the SLBC studio in Colombo 7, while the same article's text puts the session at Wijaya Studio in Hendala. Wickramasinghe told Sarasaviya in 2014 that she first sang it in 1973. All the accounts agree the recording came before the film.
Banks of the River
Mendis scored the first two features of Sumitra Peries, the first woman to direct a Sri Lankan film. Gehenu Lamai (1978) gave Wickramasinghe her first solo film song, වියෝ ගී ගැයෙනා හදේ Viyo Gee Gayena Hade, on a Sunil Ariyaratne lyric. Then came Ganga Addara (1980), adapted by Tissa Abeysekara from a novel by Letitia Botejue and set around the Kelani river.
Mendis wrote the title song in English, as "Banks of the River". Augustus Vinayagaratnam — a Tamil lyricist from Panadura who had already turned උපුල් නුවන් විදහා Upul Nuwan Widaha into Sinhala for Mendis — did the translation. And the man who sang ගඟ අද්දර Ganga Addara was Vijaya Kumaratunga: the film's leading man, one of the most famous faces in the country, and not, until that moment, a singer.
The song made him a playback vocalist. He went on recording, and two years after his assassination in February 1988 he was given a Sarasaviya award for best playback singer. The film swept that year's Sarasaviya awards — best film, best director, best music direction, and best actress for Vasanthi Chathurani. Its release year is not perfectly settled either: Wikipedia gives 1980, while a 2018 Daily Mirror account of a felicitation held "20 years after Ganga Addara was released, that is in 1999" implies 1979.
Tralalalala you, tralalalala me
The same film opens with a second Mendis tune, and the story of how it was made is the best-documented session here.
The English original was deliberate nonsense. "Tralalalala you / Tralalalala me / Tralalalala sing together / Tralalalala we," ran the chorus, and the second verse went "Swim like a fish / Fly like a bird / Be happy, little boy, little girl." Vinayagaratnam's brief was the hard one: keep the silliness while making it work for an audience that would never hear the English.
On 31 March 1978 the singers Victor Silva, about thirty, and Nirasha Perera, twelve, went to a studio near the Archbishop's House in Borella to record it with a chorus of primary schoolgirls from Sangamitta Balika Vidyalaya, Sarath Fernando orchestrating. The girls would not sing loudly enough. Mendis solved it by having Nirasha sing the first line into the microphone and then step back so that her voice blended into theirs; five or six takes later he had what he wanted. The song was රන් ටිකිරි සිනා Ran Tikiri Sina, "golden little smile".
Then more polished singers took it up — Wickramasinghe and T. M. Jayaratne among them — and for over a decade audiences assumed one of those was the original. Hudson Samarasinghe, then at the SLBC, obtained an original spool from the producers and, Victor Silva told the Daily Mirror, said that as long as he ran the division no other version would be broadcast. The two original singers were publicly acknowledged only at a 1999 felicitation for the film's cast and crew. Wikipedia dates their recording to 1979; they themselves gave 31 March 1978.
Why the credit goes astray
Two misattributions attach to these songs, and both are worth naming.
The first is that Master Sir is an Amaradeva song. It is not, and it never was: it is Nimal Mendis's melody, Karunaratne Abeysekera's Sinhala text and Neela Wickramasinghe's recording. The mistake happens because the song is grand and old enough that people reach for the biggest name of the period when asked.
The second is quieter — the assumption that Ganga Addara was born in Sinhala. It was not. Neither was Master Sir, nor Ran Tikiri Sina, nor Upul Nuwan Widaha. In each case an English lyric came first and a translator carried it across, which means the two men least remembered here, Abeysekera and Vinayagaratnam, did the half of the work that decided whether the song would live in Sinhala at all.
And then there is the chart. Mendis really did chart in Europe — number two on Radio Luxembourg, a BBC studio, a Decca album — which is precisely why the claims made for him at home should be resisted. In Ceylon there was nothing to be number one on.
What we know, and how we know it
Mendis's British career, the authorship of both songs and the awards come from the English Wikipedia articles on Mendis, Master Sir, Ganga Addara and Ran Tikiri Sina; the Ran Tikiri Sina session is documented far better by a 2018 Daily Mirror interview with Victor Silva and Nirasha Perera on its fortieth anniversary, which is also the source for Vinayagaratnam's origins and role. Three dates are genuinely unsettled, and this article gives both readings for each: when Master Sir was recorded and released, whether Ganga Addara came out in 1979 or 1980, and whether Ran Tikiri Sina was cut in 1978 or 1979. The Radio Luxembourg placing rests on Wikipedia alone; no contemporaneous chart listing has been traced for it.