Death Anniversary on April 27:

Sunil Shantha: the singer who salvaged Sinhala music

Vimal WAIDYASEKERA

MUSIC: Twenty-seventh April marked the 15th death anniversary of that versatile Sinhala musician Sunil Shantha who passed away a highly dejected and bitter person soon after the tragic death of his engineer son Jagath Shantha.

Sunil Shantha's intense fascination for music took him to the hallowed portals of the Ragadhara Sangeeth, the University of Bathkanda, Lucknow, India, where he graduated in both vocal and instrumental music and returned to his motherland, a musician with a mission, a vision to create a musical tradition that would be light and elegant, avoiding the exuberance and rhetoric of the Ragadhara Sangeeth and breaking the shackles of our dependence and influence of the Ragadhara Sangeeth and setting free the genius of composers.

For a little over two decades the excellent musical virtuosity of this gifted musician enthralled millions of Sri Lankans where unlimited possibilities burst open for other musicians like C.T. Fernando, Chitra and Somapala to emulate and a wholesome genre of refreshing Sinhala songs were created.

Whilst Sunil Shantha was away at Bathkanda another pioneer, the composer of our National Anthem, Ananda Samarakoon who had gone to Shantiniketan to further his knowledge of painting under the famed Nandalal Bose, had returned to Lanka in the early forties and made a valiant attempt to infuse new blood into an existing stale plagiarised music, with a modicum of success.

His melodies were a very pleasant departure from the music that exited, simple lyrics and easy to sing melodies like "Podimal Ethano", "Ase Madhura Gee". Sunil Shantha took over from here and created a treasury of simple elegant melodies that still reverberates fifteen years after his demise, a lasting contribution to our musical history.

With the phenomenal success of Sunil Shantha's melodies the followers of the Ragadhara Sangeeth with their strict observance of its formal rules and details found Sunil Shantha, a product of the very institution they were striving to set up for the teaching of the Ragadhara Sangeeth, infuriating and very dangerous because he stood like a colossus challenging the very musical tradition they worshipped.

Thus incessant and effectual attacks occurred that ultimately sent this creative and gifted musician into exile. His entry into the Education Department was blatantly stopped.

In spite of this setback Sunil Shantha continued to prosper till Radio Ceylon decided to addition its artistes and brought down Sunil Shantha's mentor Prof. Rathanjanker. Sunil Shantha refused to appear for the audition on the premise that he was the most qualified being the only Visharada.

Thus his radio recitals came to an abrupt end. To add insult to injury his Radio Ceylon recordings were gradually vandalised till they were unplayable. Such was the ruthless attitude of a hypocritical world in a barbaric age.

I had the good fortune to meet Sunil Shantha, the musician whose titling melodies had a profound influence on me.

I went to meet him in the company of film maker G.D.L. Perera and music director Shelton Premaratne. G.D.L. Perera, a versatile film director in his own right wanted him to sing an English song for his "Romeo Juliet Kathawak". He sang "My dreams are roses for my love".

Lester James Peries had Sunil Shantha composing the melodies for his "Rekhawa" and "Sandhesaya".

During the SLFP regime of the sixties he was brought back to Radio Ceylon with a weekly Sunday morning programme "Ridhiewalaway" but with a change of government Sunil Shantha faded from limelight.

He was the first musician to compose melodies to the lyrics of reputed poets like Jayantha Weerasekera, Hubert Dissanayake, Arisen Ahubudu and Jayadev.

Sunil Shantha paved the way for talented and creative musicians to salvage the Sinhala music from its heavy leaving on Ragadhara Sangeeth and left an indelible imprint in the hearts of his many fans. May you attain a state of everlasting peace and total wisdom.

How humanity can move beyond the 'isms' and 'ologies'

Laknath JAYASINGHE

HUMANITY: On Easter Sunday, as many Melbournians gobbled down as many gooey globs of chocolate as possible, I saw Deepa Mehta's recent cinema release Water, a film partly shot in Sri Lanka.

In spite of her self-conscious direction, I find Mehta's oeuvre - which includes the sublime Fire and the equally seductive Earth - profoundly inspiring and at times intellectually challenging.

I gain pleasure from Mehta's films, mainly because they render seemingly safe social categories difficult; and here the controversial director's latest effort certainly did not disappoint.

The India-born Mehta, now a Canadian resident, carefully crafts a dizzy, exhausting but ultimately hopeful story whose plot circles the correlates of social stigma and economic poverty. Even now, some of the traces of the film deeply sadden me and haunt my mind.

The broad political and social issues that Mehta's direction so earnestly works to attenuate emerge mainly through the actions of those who seek to restrain and regulate readings of traditional Hindu texts, the often faceless men who manoeuvre and foreclose scriptural meaning to suit their own authoritarian ends.

Despite the film's roots in a specific North Indian cultural context, its echo has much wider ramification and relevance, and not just for those living in contemporary multi-religious Sri Lanka; there are, indeed, great parallels to be found within the Australia where I am located.

The film, a fictional narrative based on historical, social and cultural mores, concerns the plight of a group of Hindu widows forced to live in isolation and socially-sanctioned self-restraint in an ashram in Varanasi, northeast India.

Though it is set in the late 1930s, many of the horrific events that occur and some of the sickening attitudes represented in the film are occasionally reproduced these days.

Some widows were pre-pubescent when married - a few of these to much older men, and all in the film experience severe social and economic privation after the deaths of their respective husbands.

It remains a sad fact that many communities in India are highly caste-conscious, and large numbers of widows join the abject - the untouchables and the hirjas - on the margins of society; impelled by a swirl of religious dogmatism, cultural chauvinism and political apathy, they furtively, desperately, eke out a living through prostitution, petty crime or other forms of dehumanising work.

These social stratifications, though collapsing and dissolving, are still routinely and assiduously policed in many communities in India, usually but not always in rural districts.

The long-prohibited practice of sati, or scripturally-sanctioned widow burning, has its corollary in the honorific view of the Brahmin widow as a chaste and spiritually devoted wife, religiously indoctrinated as a willing participant.

Since the outcry over the burning of Roop Kanwar in Rajasthan in 1987, Indian authorities are now more forceful in clamping down on the practice.

Nonetheless sati occasionally smoulders and reignites, even if its official elision is smothered under the guise of less politically sensitive terms. In this, we see that deeply ingrained traditions and customs often die a long and suffering death.

Sati attests to the powerful ideological work that is circumscribed by the fundamental and closed interpretation of religious texts; here, it is the regulation of sections of Indian society through a delimited translation and a blanket, uniform reading of sacred Hindu scripture.

It is, furthermore, a reading that is ultimately canonised and widely disseminated as naturalised and orthodox thought. At one level Water confronts, critiques, and cautions against the indigenous Hindu traditions and cultural attitudes it delicately invokes, especially the socially-inscribed vectors that curb the basic human dignities and freedoms of many Indian women.

Indeed the delegitimation of these women's right to live a decent, purposive life after the deaths of their husbands could be read as a peculiarly perverse, if now uncommon, Indian - moreover Hindu - cultural phenomenon.

The film is viewed in this instance as an isolated - perhaps exotic - glimpse into an arcane and awkwardly masculine, strangely phallopian and ultimately distant and hierarchic social order, one that is beyond the reach and comprehension of many in Sri Lanka.

Anchoring the meaning of Water with this reading enables "us" to assert the blind folly of "them", the adherents of the strict teachings of Hindu scripture, as another instance of how our lives are much freer from the constraints of the invisible hand of "false consciousness" than others elsewhere.

But reducing Water's meaning solely to this base narrative is clearly unwise, for it precludes us from realising that we, too, may be and often are enslaved by some of the same ideological processes that we witness at work in the film.

It is, after all, much easier to project onto others than to internalise. Pertinently, perhaps, at another level it reminds us - its mainly non-Hindu audience - of the dangers inherent in appropriating and adhering to religious and ideological fundamentalisms, especially considering the broad sweep of cultural expression we enjoy and take for granted in our communities.

Though there are many shades of relevance in the film for those currently living in Australia, Water's lessons are particularly pertinent in contemporary Sri Lanka, where the labels "Buddhist", "Hindu", "Muslim" and "Christian" often signify much more than just spiritual affiliation.

In our age of closeted thought, the freedom to think is indeed a rare privilege; even though we are far from existential enlightenment, thinking openly and with clarity about metaphysics allows us access to some sense of truth about our own humanness. This is something we should, as caring communities, aspire toward.

On Easter Sunday, of all days, this idea was stirred in me by the sentiment expressed in a closing epigraph to Mehta's Water, a sentiment made most famous by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: "I used to believe that God is Truth; now I believe that Truth is God".