Features

Listening to Songs about Bees in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon: Hugh Nevill and the Hugh Nevill Collection

Published

2 years ago

2024/04/21

by Tom Peterson
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Univesity of London

It is fairly well known that, in London, there is a major collection of Sinhala olas. To be more precise, within The Hugh Nevill Collection of Sinhalese Manuscripts at the British Library, there are 2,224 of them. They have been in London since 1897, the year that Hugh Nevill (1847–1897), a British Civil Servant, collector, and scholar in Ceylon, returned to Europe. Today, most of Nevill’s objects and manuscripts are split between the British Museum and the British Library.

The manuscripts in the collection are all at least 120 years old, but many of them are significantly older. They are also incredibly rare, and some are unique. The Nevill Collection is the largest archive of Sinhala manuscripts anywhere in the world outside of Sri Lanka, and it presents us with a critical and unmatched archive for studying the social histories of the country.

Because of the incredible number of incredibly old and rare olas, perhaps understandably, people generally focus on the olas in Nevill’s collection: so much so that it is usually thought of as being a collection of Sinhala olas. But, as an ethnomusicologist, of particular interest to me are the lyrical texts in the collection, of which there are several thousand. These texts tell a more complicated story. Aside from the lyrics in his remarkable ola collection, the British Library holds reems of Nevill’s paper folios, often neglected, and many of these also contain songs.

These tend to relate to Nevill’s studies of folklore and devotional practice in Ceylon, two major and often overlapping themes of his scholarship and collection. In order to collect his lyrics, Nevill and his associates journeyed to meet with people who knew the songs they sought, listened to them sing, and transcribed what they heard onto paper, sometimes with transliterations and descriptions of the songs and their performance practices.

These transcriptions offer us a chance to listen in to an echo of Sri Lanka’s past, a moment of musical aurality transcribed and recorded with the technology available at the time. While the value of Nevill’s olas is well known, we are only just starting to use Nevill’s paper folios for studying Sri Lanka’s history; and the number, rarity, and formation of these transcriptions present a source of enormous potential for such a study.

The songs that Nevill transcribed himself draw us to another misconception about the Nevill Collection: that it is ‘Sinhalese’. True, the vast, vast majority of Nevill’s olas are written in Sinhala script (two are written in Telugu, while one is written in Tamil). But there is no such imbalance in Nevill’s paper folios. In fact, there is a more-or-less equal representation of Ceylon’s population among his own transcriptions.

Why would the compositions of his ola and paper collections be so different? My forthcoming thesis addresses this question in detail. But, for now, we can say that this equality broadly reflects Nevill’s interests and opinions. Unlike many of his peers in the colonial administration, Nevill was not interested in discursively distinguishing Ceylon from India (in fact, he is known to have drawn connections between the two, particularly with South India).

Nor was he more interested in Sinhala culture than any other. Instead, Nevill was of the opinion that all of Ceylon’s population were ‘Dravidian’ and had arrived in Ceylon from a progenitive community in ‘Dravida’, which he equated to Chaldea, a region in the south of modern-day Iraq.

However doubtful the Chaldean origins of Sri Lanka’s population may be, Nevill’s Dravida theory informed much of his scholarship and is revealed in the title of his journal: The Taprobanian: A Dravidian Journal of Oriental Studies in and around Ceylon, in Natural History, Archæology, Philology, History, &c. It therefore follows that he did not distinguish which community was ‘more’ or ‘less’ Sri Lankan, or which community was ‘more’ or ‘less’ interesting or worthy of study, but instead paid equal attention to Ceylon’s population, an approach that is reflected in his paper folios and scholarship.

In this spirit, I want to briefly draw your attention to some of the Vedda songs in the Nevill Collection, as well as how Nevill collected and theorised them. In an article on the Veddas, Nevill included a short subsection titled “Bee-hunters’ songs”, in which he gave two songs “sung by Vaeddas when collecting the combs of the large black “bambara“ or “bumbeli” bee, from the cliffs against which they attach their hives”. While on vacation in 1887, Nevill visited Vedda communities in Walimbe Hela, or ‘Friar’s Hood’, and transcribed, translated, and described one of their songs as follows:

Raja Omangaliya

Me guruwara ammâ mô

Kâpana yanyâyi

Rang kende elannyâyi

Rang kâdu elannyâyi

Bâlanno tawa duwagana

Warêwu mâge kuda nangimô

Rang kenden bassalâ

Me guru hela ammâ mô

Dun pallayen pannâla

Rang kaduwen kapâla

Hang pallaye damâla

Me mullen iyôden genôden

Rang kusayen niwara yanamo

Wara nangi!

Oh Omangali Raja!

These venerable mothers

I am going to eat;

I will suspend the gold ladder,

I will suspend the gold sword,

The youngsters too hastening,

Come my little sweetheart!

Having descended by the gold ladder,

These venerable hill mothers

Having driven off with the incense pail,

Having cut with the gold sword,

Having put into the leather pail,

When all these are brought up,

Finishing (what is) in the golden pot,

Let us go,

Come sweetheart.

I have here translated nangi “sweetheart,” as this is the exact sense. It is here used to indicate the bee-hunter’s young wife, or the cousin he is entitled to marry on her reaching the right age. It means “younger sister” [in Sinhala], but has no such sense to the Vaedda. The Omangali Raja probably alludes to Omanegala of Lower Bintenne, especially sacred to Gale Bandára or the Rock God. The bees are alluded to with excessive respect as the venerable mothers.

Nevill’s transcription of these lyrics encapsulates not only the devotional cosmology associated by nineteenth-century Veddas between honey collection and singing, but also a moment of song and listening shared between Nevill and a Vedda who was willing to share the song with him.

During his 1887 vacation, Nevill also visited Veddas in Omane Gala and collected another Bee-hunters’ song:

Maehi-keli Waniyâ

Gal naewili Waniyâ

Maehi kelanne mahi urâl

Hinâ-maten keli kôpayen

Oppu ganawâ tobâ deyiyen…

Oh Lord of the Bees!

Oh Lord of the Rock!

Honeycombs of honey bee,

With laughter and with merriness,

I offer them to Thee…

After each line [the singer] threw a little honey, the first cut from the cliff, to the Spirit of the Rock, and then proceeded to take the rest of the combs. He told me that it was an ancient custom his ancestors followed, called “paeni adina yádinda,” or to “charm the drawing of honey.”

Nevill’s bee-hunters’ songs show how, for Veddas in Omane Gala and Walimbe Hela, singing, metaphysics, and gathering honey formed part of a single act. This is also how Nevill theorised and presented their songs: as sources for understanding peoples’ lives and devotional worlds in nineteenth-century Ceylon, the study of which drove much of his collection. Such insights are littered throughout Nevill’s collection and scholarship, which provide us with fascinating and unique opportunities to learn about musical practices in Sri Lanka’s past, about how song was entangled in people’s lives. These opportunities are not limited to the olas and Sinhala texts in the Nevill Collection, but instead cover a whole range of the island’s social history.

The Nevill Collection is remarkable and exciting from the perspective of studying Sri Lanka’s past. This is particularly true because of how musical the collection is, a reading that stands in sharp contrast against the myth that Sri Lankan musical culture is somehow lacking. This aspect also illustrates how Nevill’s scholarship and collection can nuance how we think about musical interactions between colonial administrators and Ceylon’s population in the nineteenth century: interactions that scholars have shown to be overwhelmingly biased against music in Ceylon and yet instrumental for modern readings of Sri Lanka’s musical histories and cultures.

My thesis, which will be submitted this summer, considers at length the Nevill Collection as an archive of Sri Lanka’s musical history, exploring the musical qualities of its contents, Nevill’s theoretical framework, his collecting practices and associates, the internal logic of the collection, and the afterlives of its songs, revealing a rich musical history in Sri Lanka and a critical source for its study (as well as some nice songs about bees).

(tompeterson.ethnomusicology@gmail.com)

All News Advertisement

Features

Recruiting academics to state universities – beset by archaic selection processes?

Published

24 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

by Kaushalya Perera

Time has, by and large, stood still in the business of academic staff recruitment to state universities. Qualifications have proliferated and evolved to be more interdisciplinary, but our selection processes and evaluation criteria are unchanged since at least the late 1990s. But before I delve into the problems, I will describe the existing processes and schemes of recruitment. The discussion is limited to UGC-governed state universities (and does not include recruitment to medical and engineering sectors) though the problems may be relevant to other higher education institutions (HEIs).

How recruitment happens currently in SL state universities

Academic ranks in Sri Lankan state universities can be divided into three tiers (subdivisions are not discussed).

* Lecturer (Probationary)

– recruited with a four-year undergraduate degree. A tiny step higher is the Lecturer (Unconfirmed), recruited with a postgraduate degree but no teaching experience.

* A Senior Lecturer can be recruited with certain postgraduate qualifications and some number of years of teaching and research.

* Above this is the professor (of four types), which can be left out of this discussion since only one of those (Chair Professor) is by application.

State universities cannot hire permanent academic staff as and when they wish. Prior to advertising a vacancy, approval to recruit is obtained through a mind-numbing and time-consuming process (months!) ending at the Department of Management Services. The call for applications must list all ranks up to Senior Lecturer. All eligible candidates for Probationary to Senior Lecturer are interviewed, e.g., if a Department wants someone with a doctoral degree, they must still advertise for and interview candidates for all ranks, not only candidates with a doctoral degree. In the evaluation criteria, the first degree is more important than the doctoral degree (more on this strange phenomenon later). All of this is only possible when universities are not under a ‘hiring freeze’, which governments declare regularly and generally lasts several years.

Problem type 1

– Archaic processes and evaluation criteria

Twenty-five years ago, as a probationary lecturer with a first degree, I was a typical hire. We would be recruited, work some years and obtain postgraduate degrees (ideally using the privilege of paid study leave to attend a reputed university in the first world). State universities are primarily undergraduate teaching spaces, and when doctoral degrees were scarce, hiring probationary lecturers may have been a practical solution. The path to a higher degree was through the academic job. Now, due to availability of candidates with postgraduate qualifications and the problems of retaining academics who find foreign postgraduate opportunities, preference for candidates applying with a postgraduate qualification is growing. The evaluation scheme, however, prioritises the first degree over the candidate’s postgraduate education. Were I to apply to a Faculty of Education, despite a PhD on language teaching and research in education, I may not even be interviewed since my undergraduate degree is not in education. The ‘first degree first’ phenomenon shows that universities essentially ignore the intellectual development of a person beyond their early twenties. It also ignores the breadth of disciplines and their overlap with other fields.

This can be helped (not solved) by a simple fix, which can also reduce brain drain: give precedence to the doctoral degree in the required field, regardless of the candidate’s first degree, effected by a UGC circular. The suggestion is not fool-proof. It is a first step, and offered with the understanding that any selection process, however well the evaluation criteria are articulated, will be beset by multiple issues, including that of bias. Like other Sri Lankan institutions, universities, too, have tribal tendencies, surfacing in the form of a preference for one’s own alumni. Nevertheless, there are other problems that are, arguably, more pressing as I discuss next. In relation to the evaluation criteria, a problem is the narrow interpretation of any regulation, e.g., deciding the degree’s suitability based on the title rather than considering courses in the transcript. Despite rhetoric promoting internationalising and inter-disciplinarity, decision-making administrative and academic bodies have very literal expectations of candidates’ qualifications, e.g., a candidate with knowledge of digital literacy should show this through the title of the degree!

Problem type 2 – The mess of badly regulated higher education

A direct consequence of the contemporary expansion of higher education is a large number of applicants with myriad qualifications. The diversity of degree programmes cited makes the responsibility of selecting a suitable candidate for the job a challenging but very important one. After all, the job is for life – it is very difficult to fire a permanent employer in the state sector.

Widely varying undergraduate degree programmes.

At present, Sri Lankan undergraduates bring qualifications (at times more than one) from multiple types of higher education institutions: a degree from a UGC-affiliated state university, a state university external to the UGC, a state institution that is not a university, a foreign university, or a private HEI aka ‘private university’. It could be a degree received by attending on-site, in Sri Lanka or abroad. It could be from a private HEI’s affiliated foreign university or an external degree from a state university or an online only degree from a private HEI that is ‘UGC-approved’ or ‘Ministry of Education approved’, i.e., never studied in a university setting. Needless to say, the diversity (and their differences in quality) are dizzying. Unfortunately, under the evaluation scheme all degrees ‘recognised’ by the UGC are assigned the same marks. The same goes for the candidates’ merits or distinctions, first classes, etc., regardless of how difficult or easy the degree programme may be and even when capabilities, exposure, input, etc are obviously different.

Similar issues are faced when we consider postgraduate qualifications, though to a lesser degree. In my discipline(s), at least, a postgraduate degree obtained on-site from a first-world university is preferable to one from a local university (which usually have weekend or evening classes similar to part-time study) or online from a foreign university. Elitist this may be, but even the best local postgraduate degrees cannot provide the experience and intellectual growth gained by being in a university that gives you access to six million books and teaching and supervision by internationally-recognised scholars. Unfortunately, in the evaluation schemes for recruitment, the worst postgraduate qualification you know of will receive the same marks as one from NUS, Harvard or Leiden.

The problem is clear but what about a solution?

Recruitment to state universities needs to change to meet contemporary needs. We need evaluation criteria that allows us to get rid of the dross as well as a more sophisticated institutional understanding of using them. Recruitment is key if we want our institutions (and our country) to progress. I reiterate here the recommendations proposed in ‘Considerations for Higher Education Reform’ circulated previously by Kuppi Collective:

* Change bond regulations to be more just, in order to retain better qualified academics.

* Update the schemes of recruitment to reflect present-day realities of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary training in order to recruit suitably qualified candidates.

* Ensure recruitment processes are made transparent by university administrations.

Kaushalya Perera is a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo.

(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.)

Features

Talento … oozing with talent

Published

24 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Talento: Gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band

This week, too, the spotlight is on an outfit that has gained popularity, mainly through social media.

Last week we had MISTER Band in our scene, and on 10th February, Yellow Beatz – both social media favourites.

Talento is a seven-piece band that plays all types of music, from the ‘60s to the modern tracks of today.

The band has reached many heights, since its inception in 2012, and has gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band in the scene here.

The members that makeup the outfit have a solid musical background, which comes through years of hard work and dedication

Their portfolio of music contains a mix of both western and eastern songs and are carefully selected, they say, to match the requirements of the intended audience, occasion, or event.

Although the baila is a specialty, which is inherent to this group, that originates from Moratuwa, their repertoire is made up of a vast collection of love, classic, oldies and modern-day hits.

The musicians, who make up Talento, are:

Prabuddha Geetharuchi:

Geilee Fonseka: Dynamic and charismatic vocalist

Prabuddha Geetharuchi: The main man behind the band Talento

(Vocalist/ Frontman). He is an avid music enthusiast and was mentored by a lot of famous musicians, and trainers, since he was a child. Growing up with them influenced him to take on western songs, as well as other music styles. A Peterite, he is the main man behind the band Talento and is a versatile singer/entertainer who never fails to get the crowd going.

Geilee Fonseka (Vocals):

A dynamic and charismatic vocalist whose vibrant stage presence, and powerful voice, bring a fresh spark to every performance. Young, energetic, and musically refined, she is an artiste who effortlessly blends passion with precision – captivating audiences from the very first note. Blessed with an immense vocal range, Geilee is a truly versatile singer, confidently delivering Western and Eastern music across multiple languages and genres.

Chandana Perera (Drummer):

His expertise and exceptional skills have earned him recognition as one of the finest acoustic drummers in Sri Lanka. With over 40 tours under his belt, Chandana has demonstrated his dedication and passion for music, embodying the essential role of a drummer as the heartbeat of any band.

Harsha Soysa:

(Bassist/Vocalist). He a chorister of the western choir of St. Sebastian’s College, Moratuwa, who began his musical education under famous voice trainers, as well as bass guitar trainers in Sri Lanka. He has also performed at events overseas. He acts as the second singer of the band

Udara Jayakody:

(Keyboardist). He is also a qualified pianist, adding technical flavour to Talento’s music. His singing and harmonising skills are an extra asset to the band. From his childhood he has been a part of a number of orchestras as a pianist. He has also previously performed with several famous western bands.

Aruna Madushanka:

(Saxophonist). His proficiciency in playing various instruments, including the saxophone, soprano saxophone, and western flute, showcases his versatility as a musician, and his musical repertoire is further enhanced by his remarkable singing ability.

Prashan Pramuditha:

(Lead guitar). He has the ability to play different styles, both oriental and western music, and he also creates unique tones and patterns with the guitar..

Features

Special milestone for JJ Twins

Published

24 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Twin brothers Julian and Jason Prins

The JJ Twins, the Sri Lankan musical duo, performing in the Maldives, and known for blending R&B, Hip Hop, and Sri Lankan rhythms, thereby creating a unique sound, have come out with a brand-new single ‘Me Mawathe.’

In fact, it’s a very special milestone for the twin brothers, Julian and Jason Prins, as ‘Me Mawathe’ is their first ever Sinhala song!

‘Me Mawathe’ showcases a fresh new sound, while staying true to the signature harmony and emotion that their fans love.

This heartfelt track captures the beauty of love, journey, and connection, brought to life through powerful vocals and captivating melodies.

It marks an exciting new chapter for the JJ Twins as they expand their musical journey and connect with audiences in a whole new way.

Their recent album, ‘CONCLUDED,’ explores themes of love, heartbreak, and healing, and include hits like ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind’ and ‘You Left Me Here to Die’ which showcase their emotional intensity.

Readers could stay connected and follow JJ Twins on social media for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and upcoming releases:

Instagram: http://instagram.com/jjtwinsofficial

TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@jjtwinsmusic

Facebook: http://facebook.com/jjtwinssingers

YouTube: http://youtube.com/jjtwins