By Uditha Devapriya

I first encountered T. M. Jayaratne through the films of K. A. W. Perera. Most of them were scored by Premasiri Khemadasa, who, in more than one sense, introduced Jayaratne to popular audiences. Together with Sanath Nandasiri, Sunil Edirisinghe, Mervin Perera, and of course Victor Ratnayake, Jayaratne belongs to a third generation, the successors of a long line of vocalists that begins with Rukmani Devi and flows over to Amaradeva. Quoting Ajith Samaranayake, it is rather difficult to locate them on the social map, because they touch it at several points. The biographer hence confronts an impossible task.

Jayaratne emerges from roughly the same milieu as Amaradeva, a bilingual Sinhala middle-class. It would be wrong, however, to situate them in the same social environment. While Amaradeva’s emergence as an artiste coincided with the bureaucratisation of the arts, in particular music, Jayaratne’s generation emerged at a time when that process had reached its fruition. A number of factors, prominently free education, but also the conversion of two pirivenas to State universities, had laid the groundwork for these developments. Jayaratne and his colleagues figured in an interregnum of sorts: free education and the nationalisation of the arts had emancipated swabasha speaking folk, but these artistes hailed from a social and cultural environment partly moored in the pre-swabasha era.

This was true particularly of Jayaratne. Born in the village of Dodanwala, Kandy, in 1944, he was first sent to St Anthony’s College in Katugastota. At St Anthony’s, he forayed into Western music. “What we did in our music class,” he told me, “was to gather around our teacher and her piano and sing ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’ and ‘Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree’.” Eventually, he admitted, “we became more inclined towards Western music, even Western culture.” It hardly needs adding that, as with all missionary schools, St Anthony’s taught in the English medium. Of the teachers at school, Jayaratne remembered the Rector, Reverend Father Rosati, the best. A graduate of the University of London, Father Rosati epitomised an education system that was soon to pass.

“We adored him,” Jayaratne recalled. ‘It was hard to escape him. He used to visit our classes and ask questions, out of the blue. If we answered correctly, he would praise us and give us lozenges. After handing them, he’d turn around to those who hadn’t answered rightly and say, ‘And for those who didn’t get the correct answer, don’t be annoyed with me, I have lozenges for you as well.’ It was impossible not to like the man.”

A key motif that runs through the careers of Jayaratne’s contemporaries is their middle-class origins. While cut off from the Westernised bourgeoisie, they were nevertheless part of an emerging, articulate Sinhala middle-class. Their financial status, not surprisingly, depended on the careers of their fathers and forebearers. This was true of Jayaratne as well: his father worked as a government servant. As with almost all government servants, he was prone to being transferred from one region to another. Barely two years after his son had been enrolled to St Anthony’s, he was requested to leave for Nuwara Eliya.

Jayaratne remembers this as the beginning of a particularly hectic period. “Father would leave for work on Monday morning and come back on Friday evening to spend the weekend with us. He endured this routine for two years, after which he got another transfer, this time to Anuradhapura. He pushed for a delay. He got it delayed for two years.” Once those two years were up, Jayaratne recalls, the transfer request was renewed. “We obviously needed to act fast. I had an aunt who lived in Kurunegala. So father quickly got himself a transfer to Kurunegala. This meant enrolling at and attending another school. I was thus taken out of St Anthony’s and introduced to Maliyadeva Vidyalaya. I started at Grade Seven.”

Started in 1888 at the heyday of the Buddhist Revival, Maliyadeva Vidyalaya stood out as a leading boys’ school in not just Kurunegala and the North-Western Province, but the whole country as well. While a far cry from St Anthony’s, it retained the curriculum in operation at Christian schools. However, its social and cultural environment differed considerably from missionary schools: students spoke in Sinhala and most of them professed Buddhism. By Jayaratne’s own confession, “it was difficult to get used to this shift. English was limited to one subject, and in every respect the subjects we learnt were indigenised, more in tune with Sinhala and Buddhist culture. I noticed this during our music classes too. We no longer sang English nursery rhymes, we only performed ragas and Hindustani melodies.”

What is fascinating here is that, despite these shifts, Maliyadeva failed to nativize Jayaratne or his friends. It in fact made them more cosmopolitan. “What I came to appreciate more than

anything else at Maliyadeva was that there was no essential difference between the music I had learnt and the music I was being taught now. I saw no wide chasm between the ‘Do Re Mi’ I had sung with relish at St Anthony’s and the ‘Sa Ri Ga Ma Pa’ I had to imbibe at Maliyadeva.” In other words, the new learning environment failed to inhibit him or to make him more insular. It merely made him dig deeper, in search of his roots.

The senior music master at Maliyadeva, K. M. Dayapala, noticed Jayaratne’s penchant for singing earlier on. He encouraged him to sit the music exams while pursuing their studies. “He was a persistent teacher and a persistent man. He strived to keep us a cut above the rest. Eventually he managed to get us through all three stages of the music exams conducted by the Gandharva Sabhawa and held in Kandy. The exams were based on two categories: vocal and instrumental. I passed in both categories and at all three stages.”

Dayapala’s endeavours did not end there. While the university entrance exams were around the corner, the government published a Gazette Notification calling for applications from those who aspired to teach music. “Mr Dayapala asked us to sit the entrance exams and apply for music teaching vacancies after them. By some stroke of luck, I was called to the Education Department at Kollupitiya, where some officials interviewed me. Initially I felt I had not been selected, so I soon abandoned all hopes I had of teaching music. But then, not long afterwards, the Director of Education personally informed me that I had been selected. I would be posted to a school near Colombo. I was obviously overwhelmed.”

Through the Department of Education, Jayaratne entered a new world and a new environment, one moulded by new values. Interestingly, his appointment to his first school – Hewawitharana Maha Vidyalaya in Rajagiriya – was made on the same day (September 7) that five other aspiring teachers were given their first appointments: Victor Ratnayake (Aththalapitiya Maha Vidyalaya in Bandarawela), Sanath Nandasiri (Uhana Maha Vidyalaya in Ampara), Mervin Perera (Kohombara Maha Vidyalaya in Ampara), Shelton Perera (Sri Pada Maha Vidyalaya in Hatton), and Sarath Dassanayake (Niwaththakachethiya Maha Vidyalaya in Anuradhapura). These were to be his contemporaries in a few years time, and as he himself put it to me, “our careers converged frequently thereafter.”

While engaged in his job, Jayaratne got involved with various stage dramas and concerts, supplementing his income. “I would get up to Rs. 20 a show. It was not much by today’s standards, but a lot back then, considering my monthly rent was Rs. 55.”

Those shows eventually got him into a vivida prasangaya organised at the Teachers’ Training College in Maharagama, where he once had to perform in place of a singer who hadn’t turned up. The organiser of that prasangaya, C. de S. Kulathilaka, was subsequently appointed as the Head of the Folk Music Research Unit at the SLBC. He had been impressed with Jayaratne’s voice, and soon afterwards, he took him into the unit to perform refined, accompanied versions of various folk songs he was tasked with recording from across the country. “One of the songs I performed, Badda Watata, was heard by a man who called the SLBC. He got to know that I taught at a school located near his house. I started working with him soon after.” That man was Premasiri Khemadasa.

Jayaratne’s collaboration with Khemadasa has been charted many times before. Suffice it to say that Khemadasa opened him up to popular audiences, thereby establishing him at the centre of the country’s musical landscape. Of his erstwhile colleague, Jayaratne remembers that he was “quite a mercurial man, prone to losing his temper if he didn’t and couldn’t get what he wanted out of you.” Despite this, two of us got on very well with each other, even as Jayaratne continued to work at the Education Ministry and, later, at Sacred Heart College in Rajagiriya, where he taught for five years before retiring.

Retirement has not, of course, hindered Jayaratne from singing. He still sings, and occasionally, performs. “One of the last from his generation” comes nowhere close to describing the worth and merit of this man, but for now, it will do. What more can one say, or choose to say, about such personalities, when all one can do is borrow the cliches of the newspaper tribute and cultural essay when dwelling on them?

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist
who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.