Bandula Nanayakkarawasam opens up a new vista
Tissa Abeysekara once called Bandula Nanayakkarawasam “the brightest spark in the fifth generation of contemporary Sinhala songwriters”. He didn’t name the five generations, but he did observe that their ancestry began with Ananda Samarakoon. With this we can try to chart, and periodise, the evolution of 20th century Sinhala songwriters in terms of the singers who embodied those five eras: Samarakoon, Sunil Shantha, Amaradeva, Victor Ratnayake, and T. M. Jayaratne, Sanath Nandasiri, and Neela Wickramasinghe among others.
By doing so we can also discern the cultural, social, and political impulses that distinguished each of these periods and made them so unique: Samarakoon by the gramophone Tower Hall culture; Shantha by the Hela Havula, led by its two chief heralds Munidasa Cumaratunga and Raphael Tennakoon; Amaradeva by the post-war generation of lyricists, Mahagama Sekara, Madawala S. Ratnayake, and Chandrarathna Manawasinghe being the definitive trio; Victor by the first post-1956 generation wave, as epitomised by Premakeerthi de Alwis, K. D. K. Dharmawardena, Sunil Ariyaratne, and Ajantha Ranasinghe; and those who followed them among the second post-1956 generation, among whom stands Bandula Nanayakkarawasam, Lucian Bulathsinghala, Buddhadasa Galappaththy, and Ratna Sri Wijesinghe. I see Jackson Anthony has described
Nanayakkarawasam as the last of his kind. If he’s not the last of his kind, he’s certainly the last anyone will be able to equal.
It’s important to try and locate Nanayakkarawasam in the wider social and cultural landscape of the country. The generation that followed Sunil Ariyaratne and Ajantha Ranasinghe were witnesses to some of the most widely felt changes in the economy: the adoption of free market policies, the privatisation of the cinema and the introduction of television. While earlier generations had found employment in the public sector, the new artists were forced to seek refuge in the private sector; the State could no longer insure them.
In fact most of these artists, working nine to five – freelancing then was limited to pursuits like scriptwriting and announcing – found that they had to prioritise their employment over the artistic bug in them. Nanayakkarawasam was no exception. Palitha Perera, reflecting on his days in the SLBC, remembers trying to get the man “to do his own programme in Colombo” and failing to entice him to leave his fulltime job. The biggest irony was when Madawala S. Ratnayake decided to take Nanayakkarawasam to his programme Yawwana Samajaya; as with other attempts, this too failed to get the man to leave his banking career. For Palitha though, it was more a fortunate coincidence than a chance missed: “Given what happened to the SLBC later, it was Bandula’s luck that he stayed away.”
It was in these circumstances that Nanayakkarawasam began what would become one of the most popular radio programmes from that time, in 2011. Rae Ira Pana was so popular it defied the findings of the ratings agencies, which consistently demeaned it. Having shifted from one channel to another, it ended in 2015 and transformed into its own show on March 10, 2017 at Nelum Pokuna, followed by a second show in November at the Polgolla Mahinda Rajapaksa Auditorium; on March 10, 2019, Bandula hosted a third show at the Karapitiya Auditorium in Galle, and on October 12 that year he organised a fourth at the BMICH.
The latest show will unfold tomorrow, March 9 at the Rabindranath Tagore Memorial Ceremony Hall in Matara (See TV Times ). Joining hands with the Matara Dahara Cricket Society, of which Bandula is the Chairman, the Rae Ira Pana team will this year donate proceeds to a fund reserved for 15 orphans, “whose benefactors, most of whom are their relatives, can’t look after or provide for them properly.” Surprisingly for an aesthete like Bandula, whose time would have been consumed at the peak of his career by his job at the bank, “I was always a cricket fan”, which explains the Matara Dahara connection.