When Jothipala died somewhere in 1987, people wept. His funeral, like the funeral of Rukmani Devi years earlier, was attended by thousands of fans, who braved the soon-to-erupt JVP-UNP bheeshanaya. If we are to assess the worth of a singer on the basis of how prabuddha (highbrow) he is, then there’s nothing to help us rationalise why so many could ...
At first glance, the sights, the sounds, the flavours, and even the people appear like a poor reflection of their counterparts from Galle. First you come across the Star Fort, which resembles a bared down version of the more famous Fort from that other part of the South. Then you come across the beaches, which resemble and remind you of ...
Is the conflict between art and non-art, so much a staple of contemporary society, really beyond resolving today? To answer this question is to ask another: who decides on, and thereby sustains, the separation between art and non-art, and what are the yardsticks to be used when deciding on what is the one and what is the other? If one ...
In 2012, a boy who would dabble in basketball, volleyball, and badminton, and also get involved with several clubs and societies he hadn’t even dreamt of joining before, at his second school, was asked to come over by a bunch of friends to watch a boxing match. He would have been in Grade Seven at the time. Or Grade Six. ...
There are songs that remain etched in our minds long after we listen to them and long, long after we forget the first time we came across them. They bring to mind certain experiences that we like to forget but for some inscrutable reason don’t want to forget. Like schooldays. First crushes. Unfulfilled romances. Friendships that sour into enmities. And ...
Somewhere in the middle of the last century, Marxist scholars, disillusioned by the sanguine hopes they had placed on the public, began writing negatively of the working class. This grim assessment of the proletariat and the peasantry was the basis for some of the monumental works of post-Nazi Germany social theory: Richard Hofstadter’s thesis that the masses were anti-intellectual, C. ...
In his landmark essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, Clement Greenberg discusses the evolution of art in terms of its separation into two broad cultures: the highbrow and the popular. The progression or regression (depending on how you see it) from the one to the other was facilitated by the transition from feudalism, with its repressive structures enabling a separation of art ...
If there’s really nothing “new” to be “discerned” in the recent popular culture here, it’s not because the artists don’t want to try out something new, but because audiences are so easily captivated by the familiar details and the technical veneers of their work. In Sri Lanka, for the most that is, once you come up with something that directly ...
From Piliyandala (where I live) to Matara, there are about 130 kilometres, the fastest route to take being the Southern Expressway (which will take you about two hours, or even less). But the Expressway has its limits: it hasn’t been built beyond Matara, not properly anyway, and in those two hours, the only sights you’re exposed to on either side ...
When you listen to “Saragaye”, and watch the video online, you get enveloped in complete happiness. In some vague, indefinable, almost magical way, Sanuka Wickramasinghe has given a form to our collective experience of one night stands and crushes and unrequited romances. And yet the elders don’t like him: they lambast him over every little detail. Even the choice of ...
I still remember that day I entered that house. It was somewhere in mid-2013, back when I had given up on my father’s and mother’s dreams and decided I wasn’t going to be an accountant. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, much less what I wanted to be. Though I wasn’t a big fan of Sinhala movies, I ...
When icons pass away, there is hysteria and there is adulation. To the same degree, there is also censure. After Rukmani Devi’s death, for instance, that wave of hysteria did not preclude critics like Regi Siriwardena on passing judgment. Regi identified, correctly I believe, that Rukmani’s overwhelming tragedy was the fact that her legacy was sealed by her reputation as ...
The young of today are caught up, I think, in a curious contradiction. They want to rebel, to let the world know they are not satisfied, but they also want to hide behind a certain welter of security. Their heroes are the singers and the actors who adorn the recent popular culture: heroes shirked as outsiders, who indulge in the ...
A reply of sorts to Mr Suren Raghavan.There are two versions of Golu Hadawatha that I have seen until now. The first, broadcast on television, ends with Sugath returning to his sister-in-law, Champa, after reaching a reconciliation of sorts with his lover-turned-tormentor, Dhammi. This final sequence, which brings about a happy ending for Sugath, was to me contrived, and for ...
It is fashionable now and then to associate a particular movement with a particular ideology. What is forgotten there, sadly, is that movements and ideologies are hardly monolithic and are almost always the products of collective imaginations, obsessions, and beliefs, which are as subject to change as the personalities of those who breed and perpetuate them. Human beings are rarely ...
“I can't make movies for any purpose other than entertainment.” (Chandran Rutnam)In Janelaya, which has just about the finest performances that a cast including Tony Ranasinghe and Swineetha Weerasinghe on one hand and Ravindra Randeniya and Anoja Weerasinghe on the other could have had, the director, Chandran Rutnam, doesn’t try to hide his inspirations: he practically shows them off for ...
At the end of Akkara Paha, the film of the Madawala Ratnayake novel, we see the protagonist, Sena, and his lover, Sandawathi, run off to catch sight of his sister, who has just married. The two of them look on, from one side, as they wave at the newlyweds on the other, and contemplate on their own lives; Sena, the ...
Sanura Kulanaka had an idea. He wanted the students to read. He also wanted them to write. So he organised class libraries, appointed library readers, got junior members to sketch out, in drawings, what they felt about what they read, and got more senior members to write down capsule reviews regarding the same. Time usually spent playing cricket, having brawls, ...
“It must be seen today, by the young of today,” Ranjith Rubasinghe told me over lunch. He was talking about Sagara Jalaya, Sumitra Peries’s fifth film, which I think is one of the three or four most perfectly constructed films ever made here, and which I believe is Sumitra’s masterpiece. Those who watch it today are often overwhelmed by the ...
“It must be seen today, by the young of today,” Ranjith Rubasinghe told me over lunch. He was talking about Sagara Jalaya, Sumitra Peries’s fifth film, which I think is one of the three or four most perfectly constructed films ever made here, and which I believe is Sumitra’s masterpiece. Those who watch it today are often overwhelmed by the ...
