[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":220},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-en-shapmochan-in-ceylon-1934":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"category":188,"description":189,"era":190,"extension":191,"featured":192,"heroImage":193,"imageCredit":194,"imageLicense":195,"imageSource":196,"meta":197,"navigation":198,"path":199,"rawYear":200,"seo":201,"sources":202,"stem":218,"translated":198,"url":205,"__hash__":219},"storiesEn\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fshapmochan-in-ceylon-1934.md","Shapmochan in Ceylon: Tagore's Visit and the Santiniketan Generation",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":179},"minimark",[9,13,28,33,36,51,54,57,61,64,75,78,81,85,112,130,140,144,147,157,160,163,167,173],[10,11,12],"p",{},"In May 1934 a seventy-three-year-old Bengali poet stepped out of a car in Horana, thirty miles inland from Colombo, and was greeted by a young rubber planter named Wilmot A. Perera. There is a photograph of the moment. Perera had made a fortune from his father's estates, had written a book about rural poverty, and had decided to build a school in the middle of his own district modelled on Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan in Bengal. He had asked Tagore to lay the foundation stone and to name the place. Tagore named it Sri Palee — the dwelling of the goddess of the arts.",[10,14,15,16,20,21,20,24,27],{},"It was Tagore's third and last visit to the island. He had come in 1922 and again in 1930, and Sinhala poets had been reading his English-language books — ",[17,18,19],"em",{},"Gitanjali",", ",[17,22,23],{},"Fruit Gathering",[17,25,26],{},"Stray Birds"," — for a decade. But 1934 is the visit that changed Sinhala music, because of who was sitting in the audience.",[29,30,32],"h2",{"id":31},"what-was-actually-performed","What was actually performed",[10,34,35],{},"Here the record splits, and it is worth being honest about it.",[10,37,38,39,42,43,46,47,50],{},"Garrett Field, whose ",[17,40,41],{},"Modernizing Composition"," is the most carefully footnoted English account of this period, states twice that in 1934 Tagore \"staged his opera ",[17,44,45],{},"Shapmochan","\" — \"Curse Redeemed\" — in Sri Lanka, to critical acclaim, and that this performance is what set two young Sinhalese men on the road to Bengal. Other Sri Lankan accounts of the same tour describe something else: a touring company of dancers and musicians presenting ballets drawn from episodes of the Ramayana. A 1998 ",[17,48,49],{},"Sunday Times"," recollection by Gerald Wickramasuriya, who was a student of the period, remembers only that \"about 1933 Rabindranath Tagore came to Ceylon and gave a series of recitals,\" and credits those recitals with sharpening the Ceylonese upper class's interest in Oriental music and with leading directly to Wilmot Perera's founding of Sri Palee.",[10,52,53],{},"The date of the Horana ceremony is also unsettled. Wikipedia's articles on Sri Palee College and on Wilmot A. Perera both give 20 May 1934, as does the caption written by Perera's son on the family photograph; other accounts place it on 9 May. Tagore's party is generally described as some forty artistes who performed in Panadura, Colombo and Kandy as well as at Horana.",[10,55,56],{},"What nobody disputes is the effect. A large Bengali company performed music, dance and theatre in front of Ceylonese audiences who had been taught to think of Sinhala performance as the entertainment of servants, and it was unmistakably serious art.",[29,58,60],{"id":59},"the-two-men-in-the-audience","The two men in the audience",[10,62,63],{},"One of them was a music teacher named George Wilfred Samarakoon, then twenty-three, a Roman Catholic by birth. In 1936 he left for Bengal to study music and art at Santiniketan. He studied painting under Nandalal Bose and music under Shanti Dev Ghosh. He came home after six months, converted from Catholicism to Buddhism, and changed his first name to Ananda.",[10,65,66,67,70,71,74],{},"The other was a Catholic teacher of music and drama from Ja-Ela named Baddeliyanage Joseph John. He persuaded his brother to lend him money for the fare, raised the rest by staging a Sinhala adaptation of Shakespeare's ",[17,68,69],{},"Hamlet",", and reached Bengal in 1939. He spent a year on North Indian classical voice, sitar and orchestration, and on ",[17,72,73],{},"rabindrasangit",", Tagore's own song genre — then decided he wanted a harder training, got a Ceylon government grant, and went on to the Marris College of Music in Lucknow. Around 1940 he took the stage name that everyone now knows: Sunil Santha.",[10,76,77],{},"They were not the first. Field notes that Sri Lankan composers and artists had been travelling to Bengal to study at Santiniketan since 1928. The 1934 visit did not open the route; it crowded it. Lionel Edirisinghe, later the founding principal of the government College of Fine Arts, studied at Santiniketan — where he was a classmate of Indira Gandhi — before going on to Lucknow. Devar Surya Sena, W. B. Makuloluwa and others belong to the same broad cohort of Ceylonese artists who went looking for a serious musical education and mostly found it in India.",[10,79,80],{},"Changing one's name was part of the pattern rather than a private quirk. Samarakoon became Ananda; Joseph John became Sunil Santha; W. D. Albert Perera became W. D. Amaradeva; Eustace Reginald de Silva became Ediriweera Sarachchandra. Four of the most consequential figures in twentieth-century Sinhala culture shed anglicised Christian names within roughly a decade of each other.",[29,82,84],{"id":83},"what-tagore-actually-gave-them","What Tagore actually gave them",[10,86,87,88,91,92,96,97,100,101,104,105,96,108,111],{},"Samarakoon said outright that in the realm of song his true ",[17,89,90],{},"guru"," was Tagore, and his first two gramophone records show it. In 1939 he signed a two-year contract with HMV; his ",[93,94,95],"strong",{},"ජන සම මන"," ",[17,98,99],{},"Jana Sama Mana"," (\"all the minds of the people\") is set to the melody and the pattern of short and long ",[17,102,103],{},"matra"," of Tagore's \"Jana Gana Mana\" of 1911, the song that became India's national anthem. His ",[93,106,107],{},"බලන්න සොහොයුරියේ",[17,109,110],{},"Balanna Sohoyuriye"," (\"look, my sister\") is set to Tagore's \"Jodi Tor Dak Shune Keu Na Ase Tobe Ekla Cholo Re\" of 1905.",[10,113,114,96,117,96,120,123,124,126,127,129],{},[93,115,116],{},"This is where one of the most repeated errors in Sri Lankan music history comes from, and it needs stating plainly: those two songs are the Tagore settings. The national anthem is not.",[93,118,119],{},"නමෝ නමෝ මාතා",[17,121,122],{},"Namo Namo Matha",", which Samarakoon wrote and composed and which became the national anthem in 1951, is a separate and original composition. The widespread claim that Sri Lanka's anthem is a Tagore tune is a conflation of ",[17,125,122],{}," with ",[17,128,99],{}," — two different songs by the same man.",[10,131,132,133,96,136,139],{},"What Tagore gave Samarakoon that mattered far more than any melody was a working model: one person who writes the words, composes the tune, and sings it. In Ceylon in the 1930s those were three jobs held by three people, and most Sinhalese songwriters had no musical training at all — which is precisely why the borrowed-tune trade flourished. From 1939 Samarakoon began composing his own songs; in 1941 HMV released ",[93,134,135],{},"එන්දද මැණිකේ",[17,137,138],{},"Endada Manike",", a dialogue song about romance at a time when most gramophone songs praised the Buddha or dispensed advice.",[29,141,143],{"id":142},"the-turn-against-bengal","The turn against Bengal",[10,145,146],{},"The strangest part of the story is what the pilgrims did next.",[10,148,149,150,96,153,156],{},"Sunil Santha came home from Lucknow in 1944 having, by his own later account, become a North Indian: \"While in North India I transformed into a North Indian in my dress, language, customs, ideas, and every other facet… When singing Sinhala songs, I would pronounce the words as though they were Hindi words. I considered the Hindi accenting of Sinhala words to be a great thing.\" His uncle, Father Moses Perera, was a member of Munidasa Cumaratunga's Hela Havula and put Cumaratunga's writings in his hands — and within two years Santha had recorded ",[93,151,152],{},"ඔලු පිපිලා",[17,154,155],{},"Olu Pipila",", a song stripped of every Hindustani ornament he had been trained to use.",[10,158,159],{},"Cumaratunga himself had no patience for the Tagore enthusiasm at all. He wrote that composers who imitated Tagore committed a \"shameful thing\": \"They listen to this type of song and imitate its meter and words and then trick all the foolish people who swoon.\"",[10,161,162],{},"So the tour that sent a generation to Bengal also seeded the movement that would spend the next thirty years trying to get Bengal, and North India generally, back out of Sinhala music. Both things are true, and they happened to the same people.",[29,164,166],{"id":165},"what-we-know-and-how-we-know-it","What we know, and how we know it",[10,168,169,170,172],{},"The Santiniketan journeys, the name changes, the two Tagore settings and the quotations from Samarakoon, Santha and Cumaratunga all come from Garrett Field's open-access ",[17,171,41],{}," (2017), which cites Sinhala-language sources including Sunil Ariyaratne's study of Ananda Samarakoon. The Sri Palee foundation and Wilmot Perera's role are documented on Wikipedia and in the family photograph reproduced above.",[10,174,175,176,178],{},"Two things remain genuinely unsettled. First, what Tagore's company actually performed in 1934: Field names the opera ",[17,177,45],{},", while Sri Lankan accounts of the tour describe Ramayana-based ballets and a series of recitals, and no programme has been reproduced in any source reachable here. Second, the date of the Horana ceremony, given as 20 May in some sources and 9 May in others. On the substantive point there is no dispute at all: the visit happened, and the careers that followed from it are documented in detail.",{"title":180,"searchDepth":181,"depth":181,"links":182},"",2,[183,184,185,186,187],{"id":31,"depth":181,"text":32},{"id":59,"depth":181,"text":60},{"id":83,"depth":181,"text":84},{"id":142,"depth":181,"text":143},{"id":165,"depth":181,"text":166},"movement","In 1934 Rabindranath Tagore came to Ceylon for the last time. Two young men in the audience went to Bengal because of it — and between them produced the national anthem and the movement that would turn against India.","1930s-1940s","md",false,"\u002Fimages\u002Fstories\u002Fshapmochan-in-ceylon-1934.webp","Ajit Perera — Wilmot A. Perera greeting Rabindranath Tagore at the Sri Palee foundation stone ceremony, Horana, 1934","CC BY-SA 3.0","https:\u002F\u002Fcommons.wikimedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FFile:Wilmot_A_Perera_%26_Rabindranath_Tagore.jpg",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fshapmochan-in-ceylon-1934",1934,{"title":5,"description":189},[203,206,209,212,215],{"title":204,"url":205},"Garrett Field, Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Sri Lanka (UC Press, 2017) — full text","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.org\u002Fdetails\u002Fdli.doa.211",{"title":207,"url":208},"Gerald Wickramasuriya, 'Dancing to our own tune' — Sunday Times, 18 October 1998","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F981018\u002Fplus5.html",{"title":210,"url":211},"Sri Palee College — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FSri_Palee_College",{"title":213,"url":214},"Wilmot A. Perera — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FWilmot_A._Perera",{"title":216,"url":217},"Tony Donaldson, 'There will never be another Olu Pipila' — Sunday Times, 12 April 2015","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F150412\u002Fplus\u002Fthere-will-never-be-another-olu-pipila-143895.html","en\u002Fstories\u002Fshapmochan-in-ceylon-1934","D9jcBl87mB97x5xxlVH_xauB-0IVUhbTY9c4KbMWUdA",1787999338148]