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Ethno-politics : the Sinhala Pop version

Observations by LAKSHMAN GUNASEKERA

"Let us have many more years of negotiations!" declared Sinhala pop idol and Gypsies band leader Sunil Perera as the audience of western music industry personalities, film stars, musicians and fans wowed him at last Thursday's Sunday Observer Golden Clef Music Awards 2002 presentation ceremony. Who would have thought that a gala pop show at the BMICH, especially one patronised by the anglicised, politically coy elite, would generate political statements?

Gypsies There they were, in the middle of their hit song on ethnic harmony, and trying to get some audience participation. It was not easy among those anglicised, colonially conservative and repressed souls. But eventually, with the support from the young fans in the balcony, he and brother Piyal did get a response, even if it was nervous laughter initially.

There they were, in the middle of their hit song on ethnic harmony, and trying to get some audience participation. It was not easy among those anglicised, colonially conservative and repressed souls. But eventually, with the support from the young fans in the balcony, he and brother Piyal did get a response, even if it was nervous laughter initially.

Sunil Perera is deservedly a Sinhala popular music icon, notwithstanding the aesthetically Victorian (yes, colonially Victorian), Sinhala bourgeoisie's rejection of baila as 'low brow' and 'thuppahi'.

In my view, the Gypsies led the way (thanks to their parental capital resources) in establishing Sinhala baila and related pop music as a fully-fledged industry. And Sunil Perera himself, has been the leading personality in Sinhala popular music as a mass phenomenon.

So who else could articulate Sinhala mass feeling more accurately and more powerfully, in terms of mass communication? After all, industry relies on the market, in this case, the Sinhala pop audience, which is unquestionably the largest single cultural mass audience in the country of any media. So a Sinhala pop musician, especially someone so mass market oriented as the Gypsies leader, who additionally serves the advertising industry as well, can afford to alienate himself/herself from that audience.

Mood of audience

Is that why Sunil Perera chose to publicly support 'negotiations' today and not twenty years ago before so much death and destruction had taken place and before the country had been militarily partitioned in war between an ethnic hegemonic State and an ethnic secessionist movement led by an authoritarian war lord?

Was it because, as an excellent, culturally sensitive communicator (singer-musician), Sunil Perera sensed that the mood of his Sinhala audience was not in favour of 'negotiations' at that time? And was Sunil Perera himself (and his fellow musicians), also in the same mood as his audience? Otherwise, they will stand accused of knowing the need for 'negotiations' twenty years ago but doing nothing simply because they feared losing their market.

After all, it is not as if the idea of 'negotiations' and the recognition of complete equality of all ethnic communities is something very new that emerged only recently. Calls for a negotiated settlement of the ethnic conflict have been made by various Sri Lankans, including whole political parties and social movements, long before the conflict became outright insurgency and war in the early 1980s. This writer, who is younger than the Gypsies, has been active on this issue (despite the bulk of his fellow Sinhalas not agreeing at the time) for over twenty five years.

What that delightfully entertaining political declaration by the Gypsies band leader last week articulates is nothing less than the Sinhala mass mood. The momentary breathless hesitation with which his very bourgeois and petit-bourgeois audience responded to his categorical political statement on the ethnic conflict articulates an ancillary feeling.

The hesitation is a reluctance to acknowledge the realities of an end to the fantasy of ethnic hegemony; the breathlessness is over the audacity of someone daring to vocalise that seeming 'capitulation' by the Sinhalas. And Sunil was musically celebrating that capitulation!

At least now, Sinhala culture and society, is redeeming itself, thanks to the Gypsies. Perhaps they are not so 'low brow' after all! Does it mean that the 'high brow' musicians STILL have not acknowledged political realities and their community's burning need to rid itself of vain fantasies and the tragic repercussions of such fantasizing?

Think of all those Sinhalas, Tamils, Muslims and other Sri Lankans who have died, been maimed, traumatised, deprived of sons and daughters and other kin, deprived of homes and livelihoods, and the destruction of social and economic infrastructure, the loss of national economic opportunities, all because of the failure of people to realise the need for 'negotiations' all those years past. That perspective is important if we are to realise the significance of what we think and do today and what we thought and did in the past, before and during this death and destruction.

If successive elections have indicated the swing of popular Sinhala mood, at last, in favour of 'negotiations' these past several years, that tumultuous declaration (the audience finally did loudly cheer Sunil) at the BMICH last week reflected the cultural endorsement of this new consciousness.

It is not that Sinhala cultural workers and artistes have not backed campaigns for ethnic equality in the past. There are cultural personalities who have always bravely adopted this stand even in the face of ruling political party harassment, popular derision, and cynical misinterpretation. But it is only now that 'negotiations' has become a mass sentiment.

The Sinhalas must now acknowledge that where insight and depth of collective vision failed them, it has been the ferocious militant resistance of the Tamil armed movement (in the face of massive State repression) that has brought the majority race to its senses.

More importantly, it is incumbent on cultural figures, such as the Gypsies and other artistes with mass appeal that join the lesser cultural figures already active in promoting the ways and means in which 'negotiations' can be sustained and, finally, succeed.

Social relevance

This happy (in my view) injection of the Political into the Golden Clef Award programme also endows the western music industry in this country with a certain degree of social relevance that it has always lacked.

Interestingly, it is in the genre of the cross-over or fusion music that we have seen this social-political relevance.

It is the cross-over musicians, like the Gypsies and more recently Jayashree, or the fusion artistes like Harsha Makalanda and Bhathiya and Santhush, who have infused this sense of the local and the immediately 'real' into the aesthetic of the western music scene here.

That is why it is crucial that any standard-setting music award scheme, such as the Golden Clef continues to include the 'Fusion' music category. Geniune originality is not so much a matter of individual creativity but of relevance to one's immediate experience, at both the individual and collective level.

In fact it is possible to argue that it is only on the basis of relevance to the collective whole that a creative work can successfully have an audience. Hence the greater mass appeal of Bhathiya and Santhush as compared with the success of original compositions by other western genre Sri Lankan musicians. Just a couple of months ago, the State music award programme was held and it was in stark contrast to the pluralism of the Golden Clef.

The State music awards programme totally ignored not only modern fusion music but also baila as well. Whether that State programme has any relevance at all to the Sinhala music industry, leave aside the setting of standards, is a question that Sinhala musicians and music critics must ask. Issues of ethnic politics, of course remained quite remote from the wave-length of that awards event and related conference held at the John de Silva Theatre.

Xenophobia

Does the fact that the Golden Clef is providing a platform of recognition to these cross-over and fusion musicians while the Sinhala music industry's sole, State-sponsored standard-setting award scheme continues to ignore this genre indicate the State's insensitivity to the significance of this and other excluded genres? Or, does it reflect the complicity of the dominant Sinhala musical elite in this State xenophobia? If so, that indicates a tragic aesthetic sterility that Sunil Perera and others must strive to end.

It also indicates the burning need for Sinhala music to free itself of the State and for the industry itself to general its own standard-setting programmes. In my view such an exercise will see far more creative results than does the Golden Clef simply because the Sinhala (and Tamil) music industry is not only much larger in terms of market and economic capacity (i.e. richer), but is also more deeply embedded in local culture and society. Relevance is, after all, the key to both market and audience.

But marketing is the means by which to reach the audience. What the peace process badly needs is the enthusiastic and creative marketing initiatives of artistes like Sunil Perera and everyone else in the music world of all genres to promote 'negotiations'.

Many years ago, as a rock music fan, I used to say: "Let the shattering of your eardrums be music to your heart". After two decades of bomb blasts and shell-shock, I hesitate to say that nowadays. Neither would I dare claim that music is something 'universal'.

But the desire for music of various kinds is part of the psychic unity of humankind, even though Chinese music may sound like the tuning of instruments to people like Zakir Hussain (as he once jokingly told a bemused audience in Colombo). So is the desire for peace, especially after being battered by war. What is needed in this country is more music that promotes peace.

And the opening up of the mass media and the rapid growth of radio and television is creating the environment and the market for this multiplicity of music.

Every radio and TV station now seeks new market segments. Every search for market requires new products: cultural and commercial. Here lies the basic dynamic for the expansion of musical creativity in this capitalist industrial age. If Hindi pop and baila was once adequate, today it is not. Reggae, rock-raga fusion, baila-reggae fusion and other cross-over styles are now all useful products to attract audiences and markets.

Today I hear Sinhalas phone in and request Tamil and Hindi pop songs. Similarly I have heard Tamil listeners request Sinhala pop (less frequently).

No ethno-centric and xenophobic State can easily muffle such a cacophony of sound. A thousand Sunil Pereras will be born. The only way they can be heard is if the thunder of their sound drowns out the crack of high explosive.

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