[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":222},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-en-wally-bastiansz-baila":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"category":187,"description":188,"era":189,"extension":190,"featured":191,"heroImage":192,"imageCredit":193,"imageLicense":194,"imageSource":195,"meta":196,"navigation":197,"path":198,"rawYear":199,"seo":200,"sources":201,"stem":220,"translated":197,"url":204,"__hash__":221},"storiesEn\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fwally-bastiansz-baila.md","The Traffic Policeman Who Made Baila Respectable",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":178},"minimark",[9,13,21,26,29,56,73,76,80,83,86,106,109,113,116,123,126,134,138,141,148,151,154,157,161,175],[10,11,12],"p",{},"A nurse walks down a hospital corridor and a man watches her go. That is the whole subject of one of the most famous Sri Lankan songs of the twentieth century. The nurse was real. She was Felicia Florence Bastiansz, who worked as a nurse in the early 1940s and gave it up in 1944 when her first child was born, and the man watching was her brother.",[10,14,15,16,20],{},"It is very hard to think of a nineteenth-century ",[17,18,19],"em",{},"vannam"," or a mid-century radio song that would take a working woman in a hospital as its subject. That is more or less the point. What Wally Bastiansz did to Sinhala popular music was not primarily musical. He changed what a song was allowed to be about.",[22,23,25],"h2",{"id":24},"what-he-was-working-with","What he was working with",[10,27,28],{},"The rhythm was already here and had been for a very long time.",[10,30,31,32,35,36,39,40,43,44,47,48,51,52,55],{},"Africans were brought to the island from at least 1630, under the Portuguese and later the Dutch and British, as slaves and as soldiers. Out of the meeting of their music with Portuguese song came two named forms. Writing in 1894, the advocate C. M. Fernando described ",[17,33,34],{},"chicote"," as \"slow and stately\" and ",[17,37,38],{},"kafrinha"," as \"faster and more boisterous,\" with \"a peculiar jerky movement.\" The word itself is a compound: ",[17,41,42],{},"kaf",", from Kaffir, plus the Portuguese diminutive ",[17,45,46],{},"-inha",". A kafrinha band meant singers, guitar, ",[17,49,50],{},"banderinha",", ",[17,53,54],{},"rabana"," and triangle, sometimes a violin.",[10,57,58,59,61,62,64,65,68,69,72],{},"By the twentieth century ",[17,60,34],{}," and ",[17,63,38],{}," had both been folded into a single word, ",[17,66,67],{},"baila",", from the Portuguese ",[17,70,71],{},"bailar",", to dance. It was folk music of the coasts — Negombo, Moratuwa, Batticaloa, Puttalam, Trincomalee, Chilaw, Galle — carried by Kaffir and Burgher communities, often sung in Portuguese creole, and, crucially, never quite treated as Sinhala music by the people who decided what Sinhala music was.",[10,74,75],{},"Its rhythm is 6\u002F8, heavily syncopated, three against two. What strikes a listener first is that apart from the language there is almost nothing South Asian in it at all: the melodies and harmonies sit on the Western major scale.",[22,77,79],{"id":78},"the-chorus-and-the-crime-pages","The chorus, and the crime pages",[10,81,82],{},"Bastiansz was born on 9 June 1914 at Piyadigama, a village a couple of kilometres inland from the coast between Galle and Gintota, one of nine children. Sources describe him variously as a Burgher and as of mixed Sinhala and Dutch Burgher descent. He became a police officer attached to the traffic division in Colombo, and he could play guitar, banjo and violin.",[10,84,85],{},"His technical contribution is easy to state and easy to underrate. He put Sinhala words to the 6\u002F8 kaffrinha rhythm, and he introduced the chorus. That second thing is what turned a party music into a popular music: a chorus is what a room full of people who do not know the verse can sing.",[10,87,88,89,92,93,51,96,51,99,51,102,105],{},"His material came from wherever material comes from when nobody has told you what is beneath your dignity. There is the nurse — his sister — in ",[17,90,91],{},"Nona Mage Nurse Nona",". There is a song about the trial of a jilted lover, Eric Bacho. There is ",[17,94,95],{},"Irene Josephine",[17,97,98],{},"Nondi Simaiyya",[17,100,101],{},"Yaman Bando",[17,103,104],{},"Muhude Yamu Masun Maranna",". There are songs in English, and songs whose Sinhala is spliced with colloquial English in a way no respectable lyricist of the period would have permitted himself. He also took melodies from wherever he found them, including military standards — \"The Battle Hymn of the Republic\" and \"Mademoiselle from Armentières\" both went into baila songs — which is unsurprising in a man who spent his working life around a police band and its march-past repertoire.",[10,107,108],{},"The researcher Shihan de Silva has made the point that the timing was not accidental. Baila arrived in the Sinhala mainstream around independence, when, as she put it, \"people want to throw away everything that's Western but they realise that they can't do that.\" Four and a half centuries of Westernisation do not come off. What Bastiansz offered was a way of being modern and coastal and Sri Lankan at once — African rhythm, European harmony, Sinhala words.",[22,110,112],{"id":111},"condemnation-not-censorship","Condemnation, not censorship",[10,114,115],{},"The music establishment did not thank him.",[10,117,118,119,122],{},"For decades baila was treated, in the words of one Sri Lankan writer, with \"implied condemnation.\" The ",[17,120,121],{},"Sinhala Vishwakoshaya"," — the national encyclopaedia — defined the baila-kaffrinha form as a type of fast musical dance that stimulates intoxicated men and women. That is a dictionary entry, not a tabloid line.",[10,124,125],{},"The objections were partly snobbery about origins: this was music that came from enslaved Africans and Portuguese soldiers, and therefore, as one critic put it plainly, \"failed to match up to the expectations by elite masses of music.\" Partly they were literary. Sinhala musical culture in the twentieth century placed enormous weight on the text — the American musicologist Ronald Walcott, in a 1978 thesis at Sri Jayewardenepura, observed that Sri Lankan performers \"think primarily of the words, the weight of syllable and poetic meter of the lines.\" By that standard baila's lyrics, written to serve the beat first, were held to be no literature at all. And partly the complaint was musical: everything in 6\u002F8 and nothing else, which critics called monotonous.",[10,127,128,129,133],{},"One thing that never happened is the thing most often asserted. ",[130,131,132],"strong",{},"Baila was never formally banned."," No gazette, no directive, no prohibition. What existed was something less dramatic and more effective: broadcasters who could not be bothered to programme it, an encyclopaedia that defined it as drunkenness, and a scholarly world that did not consider it a subject. Contempt does not need a law.",[22,135,137],{"id":136},"peace-by-way-of-a-footnote","Peace, by way of a footnote",[10,139,140],{},"The thing that changed it was, of all things, a book.",[10,142,143,144,147],{},"Sunil Ariyaratne — professor, poet, lyricist and film director, and among the most decorated figures in Sinhala letters — wrote a scholarly study of baila and kaffrinha, and won a State Literary Award for it. Writing in 2010, Amal Hewavissenti described him as the one scholar who had \"successfully coped with the mammoth challenge\" of exploring the form seriously. The book is also where much of what is now known about ",[17,145,146],{},"vaada baila"," — the improvised sung debate — was first set down: the ticket-buying, the vote-fixing, the occasional stabbing.",[10,149,150],{},"An award to a professor is a small event. But once the form had a monograph and a state prize attached to it, the encyclopaedia's definition stopped being the last word, and baila's status shifted from vice to heritage.",[10,152,153],{},"Bastiansz himself did not see much of that. He died on 10 January 1985. By then the succession was secure: M. S. Fernando, \"Baila Chakrawarthi,\" carried the style through the 1950s to the 1980s and put organs and surf-rock guitars into it; Nithi Kanagaratnam began singing baila in Tamil in 1967; Gerald Wickremesooriya's Sooriya Records recorded a great deal of it; Sunil Perera and the Gypsies made it a national institution and a running satirical commentary. Moratuwa is now unofficially the home of the form, and papare bands play its melodies at every cricket ground in the country.",[10,155,156],{},"The music that a national encyclopaedia once defined by the drunkenness of its dancers is now what the country plays at weddings, at school reunions and when it wins a match.",[22,158,160],{"id":159},"what-we-know-and-how-we-know-it","What we know, and how we know it",[10,162,163,164,167,168,170,171,174],{},"The kaffrinha background, the 1894 C. M. Fernando description and the instrumentation come from Tony Donaldson's ",[17,165,166],{},"Sunday Times"," essay of 16 April 2006; the \"implied condemnation,\" the ",[17,169,121],{}," definition and the note on Sunil Ariyaratne's work are from Amal Hewavissenti's ",[17,172,173],{},"Sunday Observer"," article of 31 October 2010. Bastiansz's dates, birthplace, police posting and the identification of \"Nurse Nona\" as his sister Florence are from Wikipedia; Shihan de Silva's reading of baila and independence is quoted in Afropop Worldwide's 2013 guide.",[10,176,177],{},"The soft ground is his biography. His own Wikipedia article carries warnings for original research and thin sourcing, sources disagree about his ancestry, and even his name is unsettled — baptised Ogustus Martalanus, known at home as Olie or Olinton, professionally Wally, officially Olinton Mervin. Dates for individual songs are almost entirely absent from the record. The claim that baila was banned, which surfaces regularly, has no source behind it at all.",{"title":179,"searchDepth":180,"depth":180,"links":181},"",2,[182,183,184,185,186],{"id":24,"depth":180,"text":25},{"id":78,"depth":180,"text":79},{"id":111,"depth":180,"text":112},{"id":136,"depth":180,"text":137},{"id":159,"depth":180,"text":160},"genre","Sinhala baila was built by a policeman out of a 6\u002F8 dance rhythm, a chorus and the contents of the crime pages. It took the music establishment half a century to stop sneering.","1940s-2000s","md",false,"\u002Fimages\u002Fstories\u002Fwally-bastiansz-baila.webp","wallybastiansz.com — Bastiansz family archive","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fwallybastiansz.com\u002Fabout-wally-bastiansz\u002F",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fwally-bastiansz-baila",1940,{"title":5,"description":188},[202,205,208,211,214,217],{"title":203,"url":204},"Amal Hewavissenti, 'Kaffirinha — the spurned folk art' — Sunday Observer, 31 October 2010","https:\u002F\u002Farchives.sundayobserver.lk\u002F2010\u002F10\u002F31\u002Fimp03.asp",{"title":206,"url":207},"Marlon Bishop, 'Baila for Dummies' — Afropop Worldwide, 2 May 2013","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.afropop.org\u002Farticles\u002Fbaila-for-dummies-a-quick-guide-to-sri-lankas-afro-portuguese-pop-music",{"title":209,"url":210},"Baila music — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FBaila_music",{"title":212,"url":213},"Wally Bastiansz — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FWally_Bastiansz",{"title":215,"url":216},"Tony Donaldson, 'Stepping back in time with Baila' — Sunday Times, 16 April 2006","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F060416\u002Fplus\u002F1.html",{"title":218,"url":219},"Sunil Ariyaratne — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FSunil_Ariyaratne","en\u002Fstories\u002Fwally-bastiansz-baila","d9_O5cJaQroYZuDvrVHY5C9e1nPoftg4Wu-410_AhbM",1787999338323]