|
|
 |
 |
| Sunday, 15 August 2004 |
 |
|
 |
Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
|
Revisiting an old debate Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake
The news that Gration Ananda is planning to hold his annual musical recital 'Ananda Rathriya' next month at the BMICH revives memories of the famous debate on 'Kanatte Culture' as Lucien Rajakarunanayake dubbed it 17 years ago. For those who might wonder about the connection, a prefatory note would not be out of place. The debate was sparked off by a comment made by Dr. Sarath Amunugama (the present Minister of Finance) on the death of H.R. Jothipala, the most renowned and popular singer of his time. It was Amunugama's opinion that the large number of mourners at Jothipala's funeral was testimony to the fact that a basic cultural shift had taken place in Sri Lankan social life. The heroes of Sri Lankan society, he contended, were no longer lay or clerical dignitaries, writers, intellectuals or artists as in the past, but singers, film stars and other such votaries of popular culture. But to cut back to the present, how does Gration Ananda come in? Gration would be the last to pretend or contend that the mantle of the great Jothipala has fallen on him, but the fact is that though the void created by Jothipala cannot be easily filled, it is Gration who has had to step into the breach and lend his voice to the leading male stars of the post-Jothipala Sinhala cinema. In that sense, Gration is today's leading male playback singer. Now for another longer flashback. Amunugama's pronouncement created consternation among the intelligentsia which had hitherto treated him as part of itself, a staid CCS mandarin trained in sociology by the great guru Ralph Pieris himself. I myself played a not inconsequential role in this affair for it was in a column I was then writing to The Island that I gave a summary of Amunugama's heretical opinion after he had given me a copy of a tabloid Sinhala film newspaper Vichitra in which he had first aired them. The first to respond to my column was the great mandarin Ediriweera Sarchchandra himself. The father of the modern cultural renaissance expressed dismay that a pupil of his at Peradeniya should have thus deserted the cause and joined forces with the enemy. Raging battle Soon the battle was raging with other such formidable figures as Regi Siriwardena and A.J. Gunawardena joining the fray. The battle was by no means uneven for while Sarachchandra derisively dismissed the Amunugama thesis (with some little support from me), both Siriwardena and Gunawardena were at least ready to take it seriously though arguing for a kind of cultural middle-ground. I shall return to the Amunugama thesis with 17 years of hindsight, but we should not detain our hero any longer from taking his bow. If anybody should qualify as a popular cultural hero in the Amunugama mould, it is indubitably Gration Ananda. Since 1978 he has sung over 550 songs and has lent his voice to every hero in Sinhala films. Starting with the great Gamini Fonseka and Joe Abeywickrema, he has passed through the Ravindra Randeniya - Vijaya Kumaratunga line and now sings playback to Sanath Gunatilleke and Jeevan Kumaratunga. Apprenticeship Like many singers, Gration's initial apprenticeship was as a chorister at the All Saint's Church, Borella where he talks fondly of the support given to him by the parish priest Fr. John Herath. He has not looked back since his mother gifted him a mouth organ. From then onwards, his life reads like a page from the history of contemporary popular culture. As a teenager, he was the lead guitarist of the Fortunes in that heady era of Sinhala 'pop' music initiated by the likes of Clarence Wijewardene and Milton Mallawarachchi. Since then he has worked with music directors as diverse as the late Stanley Pieris and Amaradeva and was an indispensable part of the popular cinema mills presided over by Yasapalitha Nanayakkara and Sena Samarasinghe, the two great magicians of the popular Sinhala cinema. In fact Gration Ananda today seems like the last great figure of what steadily seems to be a receding era in Sinhala popular music. Today we live in an era of instant music where anybody who can command the money can produce a cassette and give it to the many mushrooming FM radio stations whether he has the musical talent or the singing ability or not. Most of these singers with nondescript names are crooners of an androgynous kind. There is no robustness or distinction in their voices. By contrast, the likes of Milton Mallawarachchi, Clarence Wijewardene, M.S. Fernando and Jothipala to name a few had a distinctive quality to their singing. With all these towering figures gone, Gration alone remains as a reminder of a more decent time in Sinhala popular music whatever artistic or cultural shortcomings it might have suffered from due to the very nature of popular culture itself. However, in a perverse way, the very hold which the new kind of instant music has on the growing radio and television audiences seems to have vindicated Dr. Sarath Amunugama's thesis, though one doubts whether he will be happy with the result. There is no doubt that the 17 years which have passed since he first propounded it has produced a generation of young people who hanker after instant titillation and cheap thrills., They do not have the patience to study a subject in depth or the intellectual or moral discipline to immerse themselves deeply in intellectual or cultural interests. The steadily mounting school drop-out rate ensures that hordes of half-baked young men and women are being thrown into the labour market. If they are women, they are absorbed by the garment industry: if they are men, they might become lottery sellers, trishaw drivers or employees of the so-called tourist hotels at the lower end of the hospitality industry. Products of an education system which has not stimulated them in any serious intellectual sense, their mental horizons invariably do not extend beyond the songs churned out by the cassette merchants and aired by the new tribe of FM disc jockeys. This is in contrast to the 1970s or even the 1980s when even students in the higher forms of the secondary schools read Sinhala novels (although of a romantic kind) and enjoyed the more romantic music of singers such as Victor Ratnayake, Sanath Nandasiri and T.M. Jayaratne. Since then there has been a steady scaling down and an adulteration until the new generation of this century seems to have lost any notion of culture or the arts. They are a generation of cultural zombies solely hooked on the electronic media which has drugged them into apathy. They are deaf to the world since their ears are plugged with earphones. Older cultural heroes In another perverse way, the Amunugama prophecy of older cultural heroes being dethroned has come to pass. In the intervening 17 years, the older cultural icons such as the clergy, the intelligentsia and the creative artists have been discredited by the vulgar values of the market place if these sections have not discredited themselves by surrendering to the values of consumerism themselves. But what has happened as Amunugama predicted is not that singers or film stars have taken their place, but that we have become a social desert without any heroes or idols whom we can venerate. Whether in politics or the arts, those who hold sway today are pygmies when compared to the giants of yester-year. We are living in a land of the Lilliputians. Is all lost then? While making predictions is a risky business, dare one hope that there is still a glimmer of hope, that we have not been over-run completely by the forces of darkness? It appears that the only hope of a cultural revival is not in the direction of the older classical culture, but in the direction of a kind of cultural middle-ground. It is in re-orienting the new generation with all their limitations in the direction of a middle-brow culture which would straddle both the decencies of the older classical or high culture and the better elements of the popular or mass culture particularly as rooted in the kind of communal or folk culture of both the town and the countryside. Admittedly, this is a daunting task in the face of the onslaughts launched by the vulgar sections of the electronic media, but paradoxically enough, it is a task which should be undertaken by the more literate sections of that media itself rather than the high priests of the older high culture. |
|
News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
