[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":223},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-en-surangani":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":221,"translated":198,"url":205,"__hash__":222},"storiesEn\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fsurangani.md","Surangani: The Baila That Colonised Tamil Nadu",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":179},"minimark",[9,23,26,31,34,37,41,55,67,73,76,80,87,106,117,131,134,138,144,154,157,161,176],[10,11,12,13,17,18,22],"p",{},"A man arrives with fish. He is pleased with himself and wants a young woman named Surangani to know about it. That is the whole of the chorus: ",[14,15,16],"strong",{},"සුරංගනී"," (",[19,20,21],"em",{},"Surangani",") — \"Surangani, Surangani, I have brought Surangani fish. Fish, fish, fish. The fish I have just brought.\"",[10,24,25],{},"It is sung at weddings in Colombo, at college festivals in Chennai, on buses, at cricket grounds and in Sri Lankan restaurants in six countries. It has been recorded in Sinhala, Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam, Konkani and English. And after all that, nobody can say with confidence who wrote it. Three separate origin stories are in circulation, and they cannot all be true.",[27,28,30],"h2",{"id":29},"a-song-about-nothing-very-much","A song about nothing very much",[10,32,33],{},"The words are almost deliberately trivial. Beyond the fish there is a verse or two of flirtation — aren't you ashamed, is this how you behave — and then the chorus comes back. The tune sits in 6\u002F8, the compound duple lilt that baila took from the kaffrinha dance music of the coast, and it is built to be sung by a room rather than by a soloist.",[10,35,36],{},"That triviality is part of why the song travels. There is nothing in it that has to be translated. A listener in Madurai who understands not one word of Sinhala can still hear that the song is a joke, that the joke is about showing off, and that the rhythm wants dancing. When the song crossed the Palk Strait, the words were thrown away and the chorus kept.",[27,38,40],{"id":39},"three-claims-none-of-which-fit-the-others","Three claims, none of which fit the others",[10,42,43,46,47,50,51,54],{},[14,44,45],{},"The first claim is that A. E. Manoharan wrote it."," Anthonypillai Emmanuel Manoharan — Ceylon Manohar to Tamil cinema, \"Surangani Manohar\" to everyone else — was a Jaffna Tamil, a choirboy whose mother led the church group and whose father played the organ. He recorded a bilingual Sinhala and Tamil version in 1972 on the Surya label. Writing his obituary in ",[19,48,49],{},"The Times of India"," in 2018, the film-music historian Vamanan called him the man who \"wrote and sang a Sinhala number in the island's signature Baila genre.\" ",[19,52,53],{},"The Nation","'s Arthur Wamanan said the same in 2014: \"The song was composed by AE Manoharan.\" Wikipedia hedges: the song was \"originally a Sinhalese baila song,\" with Manoharan's rendition the one that carried it.",[10,56,57,60,61,63,64,66],{},[14,58,59],{},"The second claim is that nobody wrote it."," When the Sri Lankan band the Gypsies played ",[19,62,21],{}," at the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery in Washington, the programme note credited the song to no one at all. It is listed there as \"traditional kaffringna\" — that is, as an anonymous piece of the old Afro-Portuguese dance repertoire of the Sri Lankan coast, of the kind that circulated for a century before anyone thought to write a composer's name on a label. On this account Manoharan did not write ",[19,65,21],{},"; he was simply the first person to put it on a record that travelled.",[10,68,69,72],{},[14,70,71],{},"The third claim is that it came from somewhere else entirely."," A Konkani version exists, and it convinced a great many people in India that the song was Goan in origin. There is a further story, repeated in online argument for decades, that the song is really Tamil and that Sinhala musicians borrowed it without credit. Roar Media collected this version in 2017 and was honest about where it had found it — a comment thread — which is more than most retellings of it manage.",[10,74,75],{},"Those three positions are irreconcilable. An anonymous coastal folk tune cannot also be a 1972 composition by a named man; a Goan Konkani original cannot also be a Sri Lankan one. What can be said is that no printed source predating the 1970s recordings has been produced by anybody, in any of the three camps.",[27,77,79],{"id":78},"how-a-colombo-record-reached-a-chennai-campus","How a Colombo record reached a Chennai campus",[10,81,82,83,86],{},"What happened next is much better documented. Manoharan's record went out over the Colombo station — Radio Ceylon, renamed the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation in May 1972 — which at that time still had an enormous, devoted audience across South India. In 1973 he was given the title ",[19,84,85],{},"Pop Chakravarthi"," at a music festival in the open-air stadium at Jaffna.",[10,88,89,90,93,94,97,98,101,102,105],{},"Then the South Indian film industry took it. In 1977 Ilaiyaraaja, fresh from his debut on ",[19,91,92],{},"Annakili",", built a Tamil version for the film ",[19,95,96],{},"Avar Enakke Sontham",", sung by Malaysia Vasudevan and Renuka. The lyrics have nothing to do with the Sinhala song except for the refrain — ",[19,99,100],{},"Suranganita maalu genawa"," survives intact, meaningless and irresistible. Tamil Nadu's college students took it up; students carried it to campuses in other states. The following year Asha Bhosle sang a Hindi version, \"Surangani Kamaal Karegi,\" in ",[19,103,104],{},"Parmatma"," (1978), again with nothing of the original but the chorus.",[10,107,108,109,112,113,116],{},"Manoharan himself followed the song to Madras. He acted in more than two hundred films in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi, usually as the villain — long curly hair, moustache, heavy build. In 1978 he sang a baila duet with L. R. Eswari, under M. S. Viswanathan, for ",[19,110,111],{},"Pilot Premnath",", an Indo-Sri Lankan production starring Sivaji Ganesan and Malini Fonseka. He also made a bilingual Sinhala–Malayalam record about ",[19,114,115],{},"Sundaram Keralam",", beautiful Kerala.",[10,118,119,120,123,124,127,128,130],{},"The song refused to stop. The refrain turns up inside \"Kokkarako\" in the 2004 Tamil hit ",[19,121,122],{},"Ghilli",". Vijay Antony remixed it outright for ",[19,125,126],{},"Pandhayam"," in 2008 — a film that failed, while its ",[19,129,21],{}," did not. That same year Dinesh Kanagaratnam cut a trilingual Sinhala, Tamil and English remake with a different tune, produced by Pasan Liyanage, which was a hit in Sri Lanka.",[10,132,133],{},"Manoharan left Colombo after the anti-Tamil violence of July 1983, spent time in India and then in London, where he worked for the BBC's Tamil service. He died in the suburbs of Chennai on 22 January 2018, in his seventies.",[27,135,137],{"id":136},"what-the-argument-is-really-about","What the argument is really about",[10,139,140,141,143],{},"It is tempting to read the fight over ",[19,142,21],{}," as a fight about national pride, and some of it is. But the more interesting explanation is that the song comes from a musical culture that never kept the kind of records that settle such questions.",[10,145,146,147,150,151,153],{},"Baila's home was the competitive, improvised, live end of Sri Lankan music: ",[19,148,149],{},"vaada baila"," contests where verses were made up on the spot and nobody wrote them down, coastal dance bands with a guitar, a rabana and a triangle, songs handed on by ear across Sinhala, Tamil, Burgher and Afro-Sri Lankan players who mixed freely and did not think of authorship as a legal matter. Sri Lanka had no functioning apparatus for registering musical ownership until the Code of Intellectual Property Act of 1979 — by which time ",[19,152,21],{}," had already been a hit in three languages.",[10,155,156],{},"So the song did what songs do when nothing is holding them down. It was picked up, put on a record, broadcast across a strait, stripped of its words, refitted with new ones, sold in a film, mistaken for a local product on the far shore, and sung back at its own country by people who had learned it somewhere else. The disputed origin is not a flaw in the story. It is the story.",[27,158,160],{"id":159},"what-we-know-and-how-we-know-it","What we know, and how we know it",[10,162,163,164,166,167,169,170,172,173,175],{},"The 1972 bilingual recording on the Surya label, the Radio Ceylon broadcasts into South India, the 1977 Ilaiyaraaja version for ",[19,165,96],{}," and the 1978 Asha Bhosle version in ",[19,168,104],{}," are documented in Vamanan's 2018 obituary of Manoharan in ",[19,171,49],{},", in Arthur Wamanan's 2014 piece for ",[19,174,53],{},", and in the Wikipedia articles on the song and the singer. The attribution of the song to \"traditional kaffringna\" comes from the Smithsonian's own programme note for the Gypsies' concert at the Freer Gallery.",[10,177,178],{},"What is not known is who made the song. The claim that Manoharan composed it rests on newspaper assertion rather than on any contract, label credit or dated manuscript; the claim that it is anonymous coastal folk music rests on a concert programme; the Konkani and Tamil-origin claims rest on nothing more than versions that exist and arguments that circulate. No source older than the 1970s recordings has been produced for any of them, and unless one turns up in a discography or a record company's ledger, the question is likely to stay open.",{"title":180,"searchDepth":181,"depth":181,"links":182},"",2,[183,184,185,186,187],{"id":29,"depth":181,"text":30},{"id":39,"depth":181,"text":40},{"id":78,"depth":181,"text":79},{"id":136,"depth":181,"text":137},{"id":159,"depth":181,"text":160},"song-story","Everyone in South Asia can sing the chorus. Nobody can say with confidence who wrote it — and the three surviving origin stories cannot all be true at once.","1970s-present","md",false,"\u002Fimages\u002Fstories\u002Fsurangani.webp","Torana Music Box","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fmusic.apple.com\u002Fus\u002Falbum\u002Fsuranganee\u002F1567939835",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fsurangani",1972,{"title":5,"description":189},[203,206,209,212,215,218],{"title":204,"url":205},"Surangani (song) — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FSurangani_(song)",{"title":207,"url":208},"Vamanan, 'His Surangani ferried Baila tunes from Lankan shores' — The Times of India, 6 February 2018","https:\u002F\u002Ftimesofindia.indiatimes.com\u002Fcity\u002Fchennai\u002Fhis-surangani-ferried-baila-tunes-from-lankan-shores\u002Farticleshow\u002F62795609.cms",{"title":210,"url":211},"Arthur Wamanan, 'Surangani's little known secret' — The Nation, 7 October 2014","https:\u002F\u002Farthurwamanan.wordpress.com\u002F2014\u002F10\u002F07\u002Fsuranganis-little-known-secret\u002F",{"title":213,"url":214},"'Baila Music from Sri Lanka: The Gypsies' — Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, concert programme","https:\u002F\u002Fasia-archive.si.edu\u002Fpodcast\u002Fbaila-music-from-sri-lanka-the-gypsies\u002F",{"title":216,"url":217},"Ceylon Manohar — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FCeylon_Manohar",{"title":219,"url":220},"Himal Kotelawala, 'Classic Lankan Party Hits: An Origins Story' — Roar Media, 16 January 2017","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.roar.media\u002Fenglish\u002Flife\u002Fculture-identities\u002Fclassic-lankan-party-hits-an-origin-story","en\u002Fstories\u002Fsurangani","kJqoB4gJL63IPNZ6l9nRSsXvczljPF4h13VKzz6XWao",1787999338197]