[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":252},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-en-place-of-folk-songs-lecture":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"category":223,"description":224,"era":225,"extension":226,"featured":227,"heroImage":228,"imageCredit":229,"imageLicense":230,"imageSource":231,"meta":232,"navigation":233,"path":234,"rawYear":235,"seo":236,"sources":237,"stem":250,"translated":233,"url":240,"__hash__":251},"storiesEn\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fplace-of-folk-songs-lecture.md","The Lecture That Invented Sarala Gee",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":214},"minimark",[9,13,16,23,28,31,34,41,45,48,84,90,94,105,108,129,132,166,170,180,187,194,198],[10,11,12],"p",{},"In April 1952, in a lecture hall belonging to the Royal Asiatic Society in Colombo, an Indian musicologist told a Ceylonese audience where their national music was. He did it in English, in a talk with a dry academic title — \"The Place of Folk Songs in the Development of Music\" — and the sentence that mattered was this one:",[10,14,15],{},"\"The proper DESHI SANGEET of Lanka is in its villages. The Vannams, Astakas, the Sivupadas, the Stotras, the Pirits are the proper DESHI SANGEET of Lanka. They are still retained in their traditional forms. But much refined music can be built upon the basis of these.\"",[10,17,18,22],{},[19,20,21],"em",{},"Deshi sangeet"," means local music. The speaker was Pandit S. N. Ratanjankar, principal of the music college at Lucknow, and he was not in Colombo to give lectures. He was there to grade singers. But two men in Ceylon read that speech as a programme of work, and out of it came the genre that most people now simply call Sinhala song.",[24,25,27],"h2",{"id":26},"why-an-indian-musicologist-was-in-colombo-at-all","Why an Indian musicologist was in Colombo at all",[10,29,30],{},"Radio Ceylon had a problem that was entirely of its own making. It had become a state broadcaster with hours of Sinhala airtime to fill and no agreed standard for who was fit to fill it. Its solution was to import an examiner.",[10,32,33],{},"Ratanjankar first came in 1949 to audition Sinhalese musicians for radio posts. In April 1952 the station's Director General, M. J. Perera, brought him back — this time both to audition and to advise the station on how to fashion a Sri Lankan national music. On that visit he auditioned 716 applicants.",[10,35,36,37,40],{},"That decision produced Ceylon's most famous musical row. Sunil Santha, one of the five musicians Ratanjankar had awarded an A grade in 1949, boycotted the 1952 auditions and quit his A grade, writing in ",[19,38,39],{},"Lankadipa"," that a foreigner should not be brought in to advise Sri Lanka on how to create a national music. That quarrel is told elsewhere on this site. The lecture is the other half of the same visit — and while the argument was making headlines, the lecture was quietly being taken up.",[24,42,44],{"id":43},"what-he-actually-recommended","What he actually recommended",[10,46,47],{},"Ratanjankar's argument was not original, and he would not have claimed it was. It is the standard programme of musical nationalism, the same one Bartók pursued in Hungary and Vaughan Williams in England: go to the villages, collect what is sung there, and build an art music on top of it that a nation can recognise as its own.",[10,49,50,51,54,55,58,59,54,62,65,66,54,69,72,73,54,76,79,80,83],{},"What made it consequential in Ceylon was the specificity. He did not say \"folk music\" and leave it there. He named forms: the ",[19,52,53],{},"වන්නම්"," (",[19,56,57],{},"vannam","), the ",[19,60,61],{},"සිවුපද",[19,63,64],{},"sivupada",", four-line verse), the ",[19,67,68],{},"ස්තෝත්‍ර",[19,70,71],{},"stotra",", panegyric), the ",[19,74,75],{},"අෂ්ටක",[19,77,78],{},"astaka","), the chanted ",[19,81,82],{},"pirit",". Those are catalogue entries. A composer could go and find them.",[10,85,86,87,89],{},"The ",[19,88,57],{}," in particular carried a history that suited the argument. The corpus was commissioned under Narendrasinghe, the last Sinhalese king of Kandy, who ruled from 1707 to 1737: he asked a Buddhist monk to compose the verses and hired a Tamil musician to set them to South Indian raga-based melodies. Many of the texts describe the movements of animals; others tell stories of deities. They were old, they were courtly, and they were unmistakably local.",[24,91,93],{"id":92},"two-men-took-it-as-instructions","Two men took it as instructions",[10,95,96,97,100,101,104],{},"The lyricist Madawala S. Ratnayake was hired by Radio Ceylon in 1954 as one of its first scriptwriters. He had been publishing poems in journals like ",[19,98,99],{},"Dedunna"," (\"the rainbow\") and ",[19,102,103],{},"Mivadaya"," (\"beehive\") since 1948, and his job at the station was double-edged: he composed songs, and he reviewed every song text before it was broadcast, sending back anything he judged unsuitable. He was, in other words, both an author of the new genre and its gatekeeper.",[10,106,107],{},"Ratnayake had heard the lecture and was scathing about those who had not understood it. \"A few people understood the importance of Ratanjankar's speech,\" he wrote. \"In them, a desire was born to create compositions that preserve national traits of the Sinhalese. Others blindly lost their way. We wonder whether that was because they did not have the capacity to carry out a systematic research into the syllables of folk poetry.\"",[10,109,110,111,54,114,117,118,121,122,54,125,128],{},"His first radio programme, ",[19,112,113],{},"ජන ගායන",[19,115,116],{},"Jana Gayana",", \"folk singing\"), went on air in 1955 — five programmes built on Sinhala folk song, joined into a story in the manner of a ",[19,119,120],{},"churnika",", the prose commentary on a Pali verse. The first show in the series was called ",[19,123,124],{},"ටිකිරි ලිය",[19,126,127],{},"Tikiri Liya",", \"village damsel\"). The Sinhala press attacked it for destroying folk music, and Ratnayake stopped the programme.",[10,130,131],{},"In 1957 he restarted it with a young composer back from training in North India, W. D. Amaradeva, and this time it was acclaimed. Amaradeva, remembering the lecture decades later, gave the reason it had struck him: \"We possess a folk music that possesses native features that ought to be fused into Sinhala music... There is no other form of music as suitable as folk song to please our people who have grown up in the Buddhist religion and are used to a more moderate way of life.\"",[10,133,134,135,137,138,54,142,145,146,149,150,153,154,157,158,161,162,165],{},"You can hear the method in the first song they made for ",[19,136,127],{},": ",[139,140,141],"strong",{},"රන් වන් කරල් සැලෙයි",[19,143,144],{},"Ran Van Karal Saleyi",", \"the golden paddy sways\"). Ratnayake built it out of the ",[19,147,148],{},"Turanga Vannama",", the Vannama of the Horse, whose original text tells how Prince Siddhartha rode Kanthaka out of the palace, leapt the Anoma river and renounced the world. He kept none of that story. What he kept was the ",[19,151,152],{},"tanama"," — the spoken rhythmic pattern ",[19,155,156],{},"tat tat ta nat ta ne na",", repeated three times and closed with ",[19,159,160],{},"ta na",", a ten-beat figure — and wrote the new lyric to that rhythm, so that a listener who knew the vannama would feel it underneath. The song itself is about a village at harvest, the ripe paddy swaying as steadily as the mind of a woman observing the precepts. Amaradeva scored it for a chorus, to sound like villagers, and put an ",[19,163,164],{},"udakki"," drum in the orchestra.",[24,167,169],{"id":168},"where-the-name-came-from","Where the name came from",[10,171,172,173,54,176,179],{},"The genre those songs belong to is called ",[19,174,175],{},"සරල ගී",[19,177,178],{},"sarala gi","), \"light song\" — usually rendered in English as \"light-classical\", because the radio orchestra behind it ran to sitars, violins, tablas, flutes, sarods and guitars.",[10,181,182,183,186],{},"The word looks like a modest, home-grown description. It is more probably an import, and from a surprising direction. Field's judgement is that ",[19,184,185],{},"sarala"," most likely stems from the category of \"light music\" created by B. V. Keskar at All India Radio. Keskar was India's Minister of Information and Broadcasting from 1952 to 1962, the man who banned film songs from AIR — and having banned them, he needed something to put in their place. In 1953 he set up light-music units at AIR stations, hiring classical musicians and poets to produce two radio songs a week.",[10,188,189,190,193],{},"So the two great forces of the period turn out to be the same force. Keskar's ban on film music sent India's listeners to Radio Ceylon and made it the most popular station in the subcontinent. Keskar's replacement category gave Radio Ceylon's own commissioned Sinhala genre its name. ",[19,191,192],{},"Sarala gi"," was not the spontaneous flowering of village song. It was a genre invented at two national radio stations, in two countries, for the same reason: to give a broadcaster something respectable to play instead of the film hits.",[24,195,197],{"id":196},"what-we-know-and-how-we-know-it","What we know, and how we know it",[10,199,200,201,204,205,207,208,210,211,213],{},"The lecture, its title, the quoted passage, the 716 auditions and M. J. Perera's invitation all come from Garrett Field's ",[19,202,203],{},"Modernizing Composition",", an open-access study footnoted to Sinhala primary sources, which also supplies the Ratnayake and Amaradeva quotations in translation and the ",[19,206,148],{}," analysis behind ",[19,209,144],{},". Keskar's light-music units are documented independently in Indian sources. Two cautions. The derivation of ",[19,212,185],{}," from Keskar's \"light music\" is Field's careful inference — \"most likely stemmed from\" — and not a documented borrowing, so it should be read as the best available explanation rather than a settled fact. And a lecture is not a cause: what the sources show is that two influential men said the speech mattered to them, not that the genre would have been impossible without it.",{"title":215,"searchDepth":216,"depth":216,"links":217},"",2,[218,219,220,221,222],{"id":26,"depth":216,"text":27},{"id":43,"depth":216,"text":44},{"id":92,"depth":216,"text":93},{"id":168,"depth":216,"text":169},{"id":196,"depth":216,"text":197},"movement","An Indian musicologist told a Colombo audience in 1952 that Lanka's real music was in its villages. Two men treated the speech as a set of instructions, and a genre came out of it.","1950s-1960s","md",false,"\u002Fimages\u002Fstories\u002Fplace-of-folk-songs-lecture.webp","Shehal Joseph — Pandit W. D. Amaradeva","CC BY 2.0","https:\u002F\u002Fcommons.wikimedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FFile:Pandit_Dr.W._D._Amaradeva.jpg",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fplace-of-folk-songs-lecture",1952,{"title":5,"description":224},[238,241,244,247],{"title":239,"url":240},"Garrett Field, Modernizing Composition (UC Press Luminos, 2017) — full text","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.org\u002Fdetails\u002Fdli.doa.211",{"title":242,"url":243},"Modernizing Composition — publisher's page","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.ucpress.edu\u002Fbooks\u002Fmodernizing-composition\u002Fpaper",{"title":245,"url":246},"W. D. Amaradeva — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FW._D._Amaradeva",{"title":248,"url":249},"B. V. Keskar — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FB._V._Keskar","en\u002Fstories\u002Fplace-of-folk-songs-lecture","BZVqnYEd7pKOvRIqjlhS-FWi5NdJ6Y04IG2pK74lmv4",1787999338072]