[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":246},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-en-violin-on-the-temple-wall":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"category":218,"description":219,"era":220,"extension":221,"featured":222,"heroImage":223,"imageCredit":224,"imageLicense":225,"imageSource":226,"meta":227,"navigation":222,"path":228,"rawYear":229,"seo":230,"sources":231,"stem":244,"translated":222,"url":234,"__hash__":245},"storiesEn\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fviolin-on-the-temple-wall.md","The Violin on the Temple Wall",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":209},"minimark",[9,13,16,21,55,62,68,82,86,89,95,105,112,116,119,134,153,159,163,166,172,175,186,189,193,203],[10,11,12],"p",{},"On a wall at Subodharamaya in Karagampitiya, just inland from Dehiwala, somebody painted a violin around the 1850s. It is recognisably a violin — you can see what the painter was aiming at, the waisted body, the scroll, the bow. But the proportions are wrong, and the instrument is being played upside down.",[10,14,15],{},"That single mistake is one of the most useful pieces of evidence in the history of Sinhala music, because a painter who gets an instrument wrong has almost certainly never held one. He is copying a copy, or working from a description, or remembering something glimpsed at a distance. Track the moment the mistakes stop, and you have dated the violin's arrival in Sri Lankan life more precisely than any written record does.",[17,18,20],"h2",{"id":19},"why-there-were-so-few-strings-to-paint","Why there were so few strings to paint",[10,22,23,24,28,29,28,32,28,35,38,39,42,43,46,47,50,51,54],{},"Sri Lankan temple painters had been putting musicians on walls since long before the Portuguese arrived, and they were extremely good at it. Drums especially: ",[25,26,27],"em",{},"geta bera",", ",[25,30,31],{},"yak bera",[25,33,34],{},"davula",[25,36,37],{},"thammattama",", the hourglass ",[25,40,41],{},"udekki",", the ",[25,44,45],{},"raban"," frame drums, the ",[25,48,49],{},"thalampota"," cymbals, the conch and the ",[25,52,53],{},"horanewa"," reed pipe. Scholars have counted eleven kinds of drum in the fourteenth-century carvings at Gadaladeniya alone.",[10,56,57,58,61],{},"String instruments are almost entirely missing. Across centuries of murals and reliefs there is a scattering — a harp among the dwarf musicians at Lovamahapaya, a lute at Embekke, two lute-playing women on an ivory casket sent to the King of Portugal — and then in the Kandyan painting tradition one recurring instrument, the ",[25,59,60],{},"vina",": a bowed thing with one or two strings, a mid-length neck, a rounded resonator, and a crescent-shaped bow with the hair tied to both ends of the stick.",[10,63,64,65,67],{},"By the early nineteenth century even that was rare. The British official John Davy, writing in 1821, noted that the ",[25,66,60],{}," was seldom seen, and mostly in the hands of disabled men who made a living singing for ordinary people. That is close to the bottom of the social ladder.",[10,69,70,71,74,75,77,78,81],{},"There is a reason strings were scarce, and it is doctrinal rather than technical. A fifteenth-century Sri Lankan Buddhist commentary, the ",[25,72,73],{},"Samantapasadika",", warns specifically against instruments like the ",[25,76,60],{}," on the grounds that they can kindle sexual desire — and notes that Mara, the personification of temptation, used exactly such an instrument as a weapon against the Buddha. Melody was suspect. Drumming was not: the ",[25,79,80],{},"panchathurya"," categories of drum, wind and struck metal are part of Buddhist ritual, and they are painted in almost every temple. Even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when violins turn up all over these walls, they never once appear in a painted Buddhist ritual. That line was never crossed.",[17,83,85],{"id":84},"the-date-the-painters-caught-up","The date the painters caught up",[10,87,88],{},"So the violin walks into a painting tradition with no vocabulary for it, and you can watch the vocabulary being built.",[10,90,91,92,94],{},"At Karagampitiya in the 1850s, it is upside down. At Kataluwa Purwaramaya near Koggala, painted in the early 1880s, the body of the instrument is a decent attempt at a violin — but the bow still has the curved stick of a ",[25,93,60],{},", and it too is being played upside down. The painter has seen a picture of a violin and reached for the nearest thing he knew for the rest.",[10,96,97,98,101,102,104],{},"Then the errors stop, and they stop in a particular place. The murals in the preaching hall completed at Karagampitiya in 1894 show violins with nothing much wrong with them. The most accurate of all are at Rankoth Vihara in Panadura and at Gangaramaya in Mahawadduwa — Colombo and Kalutara districts, the belt where British residents and the newly rich Sinhalese merchant class actually lived, and where notices for violin and piano concerts had been running in the ",[25,99,100],{},"Ceylon Times"," since around 1870. Further out the corrections are patchier: at Warapalana Sri Jinendrarama the neck is far too long, and at Olaboduwa in Horana about ten violinists are painted, all slightly off. At Diparamaduwa in Kalutara there is a hybrid — the god Sakra playing something with the round body and long neck of a ",[25,103,60],{}," but the bow, strings, scroll and pegs of a violin, held the way a violinist holds it.",[10,106,107,108,111],{},"The contexts are as telling as the drawing. Violins appear at weddings, in royal and festive processions, in the pleasure-scenes of Prince Siddhartha's palace, and in the hands of Mara's daughters as they try to distract him from enlightenment. Lutes and lyres appear only in the heavens, played by ",[25,109,110],{},"apsaras",". This is not sacred music. It is the sound of a good time.",[17,113,115],{"id":114},"two-roads-in","Two roads in",[10,117,118],{},"The violin reached ordinary Sinhalese listeners by two routes, and neither of them ran through the temple.",[10,120,121,122,125,126,129,130,133],{},"The first was kaffringha, the Afro-Portuguese dance music of the coast. The Dutch traveller Jacob Haafner described an early form of it in 1826 with violin and ",[25,123,124],{},"rabana","; in 1894 the advocate C. M. Fernando described the full ensemble in a paper for the Royal Asiatic Society's Ceylon branch — printed in its proceedings the following year — illustrating two more strings, the ",[25,127,128],{},"bandarinha"," and the ",[25,131,132],{},"viaule",". Travelling Portuguese Burgher entertainers played it in wealthy houses in Colombo and Galle, so a great many people who did not own a violin heard one regularly.",[10,135,136,137,140,141,143,144,148,149,152],{},"The second was the stage. From 1877, when a Parsi theatre company from Bombay brought Urdu musical drama to Colombo, the Sinhala ",[25,138,139],{},"nurthi"," theatre grew up in imitation of it — and ",[25,142,139],{}," put the violin, the harmonium and the tabla in front of urban working-class audiences night after night. John de Silva's ",[145,146,147],"strong",{},"දන්නෝ බුදුන්ගේ"," (",[25,150,151],{},"Danno Budunge",", \"those who know the Buddha\"), written in 1903 with melodies by the Bombay musician Visvanath Lawjee, was the kind of song those instruments carried.",[10,154,155,156,158],{},"Both routes had the same social property: they were entertainment for people who were not aristocrats. That is what made a violin something an ordinary man might realistically own. A photograph taken at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition shows an all-male Sinhalese group holding eight instruments between them — seven of them percussion or the ",[25,157,53],{},", and one violin.",[17,160,162],{"id":161},"what-the-musicians-are-wearing","What the musicians are wearing",[10,164,165],{},"Here the murals say something no instrument catalogue could.",[10,167,168,169,171],{},"In every painted Buddhist ritual, the drummers and ",[25,170,53],{}," players are shirtless. That is not a stylistic choice; it is a caste marker. Ritual drumming was the hereditary obligation of the Berava, and under the traditional order Berava men and women were forbidden to cover the upper body. The men whose skill held every ritual in the country together were identifiable at a glance by what they were not allowed to wear.",[10,173,174],{},"Not one of the painted violinists carries that marker. The male violinists at Panadura Rankoth Vihara wear a sarong, a shirt, a coat, a scarf tied round the forehead, and fabrics with stripes and dots; at Karagampitiya they wear patterned shirts and sarongs and the curved comb in the hair. Coats and combs were precisely the privileges the Dutch had granted to the Karava, Durava and Salagama communities, and which British-era trade had turned into badges of arrival. The female violinists are more varied still — Indian saris, silk gowns, in two temples full Victorian hoop skirts and pearls.",[10,176,177,178,181,182,185],{},"But the researcher who assembled this evidence, Uthpala Herath, is careful about how far it goes. None of the male violinists wear the silver-buttoned silk overcoat, or the ",[25,179,180],{},"sarama yata kalisama"," — the trouser under the sarong — of the genuinely rich Karava. None of the women wear the ",[25,183,184],{},"osari"," of the Radala aristocracy; in these murals only queens wear that. The violinist is painted above the drummer and below the gentry.",[10,187,188],{},"Which is the finding, put plainly: the violin gave a man a way to be a musician without being a drummer. That was a real opening, and for the Berava it was no relief at all — the prohibition that marked them stayed exactly where it was while a second, unencumbered class of musician was invented alongside them.",[17,190,192],{"id":191},"what-we-know-and-how-we-know-it","What we know, and how we know it",[10,194,195,196,199,200,202],{},"Nearly all of the mural evidence here comes from one recent piece of fieldwork: Uthpala Herath's \"Strings on Temple Walls\" in ",[25,197,198],{},"Intonations",", published by the University of Alberta, based on visits to temples in the Galle, Kalutara, Colombo and Gampaha districts, with her own photographs of each painting described. The dating of the murals — the 1850s at Karagampitiya, the early 1880s at Kataluwa, 1894 for the Karagampitiya preaching hall — is hers and rests on the temples' own building histories. The two routes of arrival, kaffringha and ",[25,201,139],{},", are documented separately in Garrett Field's work on Sinhala song and in nineteenth-century Royal Asiatic Society papers.",[10,204,205,206,208],{},"What nobody can yet supply is a name. We do not know who any of these painted violinists were, whether the painters were portraying people they had met or filling a space with a fashionable object, or what the violins sounded like when played by hands trained on a ",[25,207,60],{},". The walls record that it happened, and roughly when. They do not record who did it.",{"title":210,"searchDepth":211,"depth":211,"links":212},"",2,[213,214,215,216,217],{"id":19,"depth":211,"text":20},{"id":84,"depth":211,"text":85},{"id":114,"depth":211,"text":115},{"id":161,"depth":211,"text":162},{"id":191,"depth":211,"text":192},"technology","A Buddhist muralist near Colombo painted a violin around 1850 — upside down, with the wrong bow. Where and when painters got it right tells us how the instrument actually arrived.","1850s-1900s","md",true,"\u002Fimages\u002Fstories\u002Fviolin-on-the-temple-wall.webp","L Manju — the image house at Subodharamaya, Karagampitiya, whose murals include the island's earliest painted violin","CC BY-SA 4.0","https:\u002F\u002Fcommons.wikimedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FFile:Subodharama_Vihara_3.jpg",{},"\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fviolin-on-the-temple-wall",1850,{"title":5,"description":219},[232,235,238,241],{"title":233,"url":234},"Uthpala Herath, 'Strings on Temple Walls: A Music Iconographical Analysis of the non-native String Instruments…' — Intonations (University of Alberta)","https:\u002F\u002Fintonationsjournal.ca\u002Findex.php\u002Fintonations\u002Farticle\u002Fdownload\u002F101\u002F139",{"title":236,"url":237},"Garrett Field, Modernizing Composition — full text","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.org\u002Fdetails\u002Fdli.doa.211",{"title":239,"url":240},"Tony Donaldson, 'Stepping back in time with Baila' — Sunday Times, 16 April 2006","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F060416\u002Fplus\u002F1.html",{"title":242,"url":243},"Journal of Ravibandhu Music (SLJOL) — Sri Lankan music scholarship","https:\u002F\u002Fjrm.sljol.info\u002Farticles\u002F82\u002F","en\u002Fstories\u002Fviolin-on-the-temple-wall","YBLmyWoTQiIYL2OIMGFjn4b3ujGzsYJ_GuJAh_qbhVk",1787999338312]