The stage is a semicircle of earth piled up and beaten flat, roofed with a thatch of coconut palm. There is no curtain, no scenery and no building. The musicians sit on the stage itself, and so does the narrator. At about nine at night a man walks on with a book, and begins to sing. He will introduce the story, then introduce each character in verse before that character is allowed to appear, then come back between scenes to sing the parts nobody acts. The performance will run until morning, and the same company will do it again the next night, and the night after, for a week.
That is a නාඩගම nadagama, and the first one in Sinhala was a Christmas play.
Raja Tunkattuwa
The attribution belongs to Edmund Peiris, the Bishop of Chilaw, who spent much of his scholarly life on the origins of the form. Peiris held that the first Sinhala nadagama was රාජ තුන්කට්ටුව Raja Tunkattuwa — "the three kings" — written by M. S. Gabriel Fernando of Chilaw on the Nativity and the adoration of the Magi, and modelled directly on a Tamil natakam on the same subject. It was recast and re-staged in 1882 by Juan Pinto, and the viyarana viriduwa of Pinto's version names Gabriel Fernando of Chilaw as the original author. Because Raja Tunkattuwa succeeded, Fernando wrote a second, Marigida Nadagama, on the life of St Margarita, and after that the saints' lives came in a flood.
Two things about that account are unresolved, and both trace back to Peiris, whose original writings could not be consulted here. The first is the date. The summary of Peiris's argument published by W. T. A. Leslie Fernando gives 1761 for the first staging of Raja Tunkattuwa; 1746 is also in circulation. The second is a rival claim entirely. Sinhala Wikipedia's short entry on nadagam asserts that the first Sinhala nadagama was එහෙළපොල නාඩගම Ehelapola Nadagama and that the first nadagama brought to the island was Harishchandra Nadagama — a straightforward contradiction of Peiris on both counts, with no source attached. Ehelapola is generally credited to Philippu Sinno, born around 1770, and dated 1824. Where a single work by a single man is dated to 1824 in one place and named as something else in another, the honest position is that the record is not settled.
What made it drama
A. J. Gunawardana, surveying Sri Lankan traditional theatre, is careful about what the nadagama actually contributed, because the island already had performance in quantity — kolam, sokari, gammaduwa, tovil. What it did not have was drama in the ordinary sense: fiction, told for its own sake, outside ritual.
The nadagama brought three new things. The first was invented story. Ritual theatre was tied to a small fixed set of myths; the nadagama dealt in long tales of kings and warriors and aristocratic beauties, and it could be about anything. The second was the raised, covered stage, with musicians and narrator on it. The third, and the reason it belongs in a music history rather than only a theatre history, is that it was sung from end to end. As Gunawardana puts it, every other Sinhala theatre used prose dialogue in some degree; in the nadagama, prose was reduced to an intoned utterance between songs. It was, in the strict sense, an operatic form — the only one the traditional framework ever produced.
The music came from South India. Meddegoda's 2026 study traces the nadagama to the terukkuttu street theatre of Tamil Nadu and its melodic material to sindu ragas, the tunes of South Indian folk performance. Against the strophic, rhythmically plain Sinhala village song, this was a different order of thing: longer melodic lines, stylised ornament, and singing that could carry dramatic argument. The vocabulary came with it — pothe gura for the narrator, innisai for the verse in which he introduces each character, kavi sindu for the sung introductions, athval gayanaya for the chorus that repeats after the narrator and the actors. Gunawardana adds the deshanvadi, two members of the opening company who narrate the story to come, and the stock characters — jester, drummer, herald — who each had their own identifying dance and song.
The Sinhala performers then took it apart and put it back together. Meddegoda, following Sarachchandra, describes them replacing Dravidian pronunciation with Sinhala phonetics and bending the melodic turns to local vocal habit, until audiences stopped hearing the form as imported at all. Folk dialogue, folk dress, folk dance and folk tunes were absorbed. The texts stayed mixed — heavily salted with Tamil words and invented learned ones — which tells you who was writing them. Philippu Sinno, to whom so much of the early repertoire is attributed, is believed to have been a blacksmith.
The Passion came first
Catholic performance in Sinhala was older than the nadagama. A nativity play is on record at Kammala in 1615, in Portuguese times, though nothing of it survives. In the eighteenth century there was the pasku, the Passion play, which Leslie Fernando credits to Joseph Vaz: noticing how much people liked puppet shows, he adapted the religious drama he had seen in Goa and staged it with statues of the sacred figures. The Oratorian Mission records Passion shows in Kandy and the Vanni during Lent in 1706, and later in Trincomalee and elsewhere. They were performed inside a large shed walled to about six feet with cadjan, so that the men moving the statues were hidden and the figures appeared to walk; a leader called the annavi rala, chosen for his voice, chanted the scenes.
But the pasku was meditation, not drama — a narration on the sufferings of Christ. The nadagama had a full dramatic convention, and that is why it, and not the older form, is counted as the beginning.
From saints to kings, and then out
The move from church to marketplace was quick. Philippu Sinno wrote Catholic nadagam — Santha Joseph, Helena, Santha Nicholas — and secular ones. Ehelapola, Sinhavalli, Portia and Mathalan were played across the country; Balasantha by Eugene Perera, Eugene Nadagama by V. Pieris and Selesthina by Charles de Abrew followed. Buddhist stories, local folklore and chronicle history entered a repertoire that had begun with the Magi.
Then, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Parsi theatre arrived from Bombay with painted scenery, mechanical effects and North Indian melody, and the Sinhala imitation of it — nurthi — ran for three and a half hours instead of all night, in a lit hall, with an orchestra. The nadagama was overshadowed within a generation, and Meddegoda argues the reason was less musical than social: performed in villages, it was reclassified as folk, and folk had become the wrong thing to be. Gunawardana adds a longer-running reason. Sinhala writing survives from the sixth century onward, and in all of it he can find no author who worked in dramatic form; the literati had eschewed the theatre for as long as there had been a literature. A form they would not touch was never going to become a literary art.
Most nadagam players moved into puppet drama, taking the stories and the characters with them — Ehelapola and Wessanthara became puppet staples, and the jester Konangi and Sellan Lama turn up in the puppet booths. In the Catholic villages of the western seaboard, the nadagama stayed alive as a religious exercise: the Raja Tunkattuwa text still performed at Duwa at Christmas is a later version written by Marthelis Gurunnanse.
Its rehabilitation came in the mid-1950s, when Ediriweera Sarachchandra went through the entire nadagam repertoire looking for music and built මනමේ Maname (1956) and සිංහබාහු Sinhabahu out of what he found. Meddegoda notes the awkwardness in this: Sarachchandra was critical of traditional forms such as sindu nadagam and elsewhere argued for the superiority of North Indian music, while drawing on that same South Indian style to make the two most admired Sinhala plays ever written.
What we know, and how we know it
The attribution of Raja Tunkattuwa to Gabriel Fernando of Chilaw, the Juan Pinto recasting of 1882, the pasku and the Oratorian records all come to us through Bishop Edmund Peiris, summarised by W. T. A. Leslie Fernando in the Sunday Observer; the description of the stage, the sung dialogue and the form's place in Sri Lankan theatre history is A. J. Gunawardana's; the terukkuttu descent, the sindu raga basis and the argument about nadagam's social demotion are from Nishadi Meddegoda's peer-reviewed 2026 article.
Two things are genuinely unresolved, and both should be treated as open. The first nadagama's date is given as 1761 in the account followed here and as 1746 elsewhere. Philippu Sinno's 1824 work is named as Ehelapola by most accounts and as Harishchandra by others, with Sinhala Wikipedia additionally claiming Ehelapola — not Raja Tunkattuwa — as the first Sinhala nadagama altogether. Both disputes lead back to Peiris's Sinhala scholarship, which is not available online; anyone wanting to settle them will have to read him directly.