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Tony Ranasinghe,in full flow

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By Uditha Devapriya

This is the third and final in a series of candid vignettes about Tony Ranasinghe.

Pauline Kael once observed of Marlon Brando that his characters suggested tragic force. Comparable as he would have been to Brando, Gamini Fonseka never epitomised this kind of force: the closest he ever came to embodying it in Parasathumal, as the well-meaning but wayward nobleman who thinks he can do and get away with anything. In that sense Tony Ranasinghe was closer to Brando than he may have realised: the romantic heroes he played clamoured after women they could never have. This was same of the husbands he played too. Filled with jealousy, Ranasinghe’s characters never fulfilled their hopes. And yet they didn’t lack the looks: there was nothing in their appearance that debarred them from their lovers. Due to some issue or the other, however, they remained frustrated.

By the end of the 1970s he had changed completely. Having played the lover for a decade, he had now played the husband for another decade. His profile and outline had altered, considerably: his face had wizened, his frown had sharpened, and his figure, which had once suggested youth if not fragility, now suggested a father-figure. In Ahasin Polawata in 1979, opposite Vasanthi Chathurani, he had played the brother-in-law. Barely a year later he was playing her father in Ganga Addara. The latter role is significant because it marks a turning point in his career: he had evolved, and at a time when the two biggest stars of the screen, Vijaya and Gamini, did all they could to remain young, he had let go.

Even as the lover and husband, Ranasinghe’s characters could barely conceal their rage: in the morning after the accident in Delovak Athara, he shouts at his servant-boy for asking him for the family car. In Maya, he is gentle and pliable at first with the journalist who wants to know about his wife’s and daughter’s murders. The very next moment, he is raising his voice, and screaming at the reporter to get out. In Ganga Addara he is friendly enough with his poor nephew; when he finds out his affair with his daughter, he hollers at him to move away. The thread that runs through all these characters is their lack of refinement and polished elegance: if they feel intimidated, they lose all sense of decorum. They may look dapper and polite, but they are incapable of controlling their anger.

Curiously enough, however, he never found a home in the New Wave that swept across the local cinema in the 1970s. In Walmath wuwo he is out of place as an unemployed graduate, opposing Cyril Wickramage. Not unlike Gamini Fonseka, he never found a part for himself in Dharmasena Pathiraja’s films. Dharmasena Pathiraja’s world is full of outcasts and outsiders, and neither Fonseka nor Ranasinghe found their calling in such roles: that was left to Vijaya Kumaratunga, who epitomised the kind of freewheeling youthful idealism that Ranasinghe had long forsaken. When Ranasinghe did play prominent parts in the films of the new wave directors, it was later, in more cynical roles: as the corrupt inspector in Sisila Gini Gani, the cynical prosecutor in Anantha Rathriya, and the father in Salelu Warama.

In the 1980s Ranasinghe began writing screenplays. Tony was a literary man, a thespian: unlike Gamini Fonseka and Vijaya Kumaratunga, he spent his time in the theatre before entering the cinema. Some of the screenplays he worked on at this time suggest the themes he wanted to explore – many of them have to do with familial relations – and the source material he preferred. Most of these screenplays were adaptations of contemporary Sinhala literature: both Awaragira and Duwata Mawaka Misa, for instance, are based on novels by G. B. Senananayake. These adaptations are interesting if not intriguing because they suggest a deeply literary sensibility. Moreover, adaptations though they are, there is a consistent attempt in them to translate the plot in its entirety to the screen. That is why Awaragira, and Duwata Mawaka Misa, looks and feels long. It bears out what Lester Peries observed of Awaragira: that it could have worked better as a television serial than a film.

The point I am trying to make or imply here is that Ranasinghe’s attitude to adaptations of literary texts and plays reflected his notions about acting. His critique of Marlon Brando’s performance as Mark Antony was essentially that Brando went beyond what he saw as permissible limits: he didn’t act, he “mumbled.” This was his critique of Richard Burton too: “as an actor he stood out in a way few among his generation did,” he told me. “But in later years he collapsed and deteriorated, to a point where, like Brando, he lost all sense of discipline.” In other words, an actor’s talent depends on his fidelity to his craft, just as his performance depends on its fidelity to the source. This attitude colours his screenplays as well: long as they are, they are marked out by their fidelity to the original text. They are, for the lack of a better way of putting it, quite literary in their conception.

An often-underrated aspect to Ranasinghe’s career, as a screenwriter, was his penchant for comedy. Every other person I know here has watched or at least heard of Nonawarune Mahathwarune, but few among them know that Ranasinghe wrote the series. In his tribute to Ranasinghe after his death in 2015, Chandran Rutnam remembered an aborted project for a comedy they had worked on: it was to star Joe Abeywickrema and it would have been set during the Japanese raid on Sri Lanka in World War II. Curiously enough, however, he never played a comic role: his temperament was obviously much too cynical and hardened for him to do so. His looks suggested a man capable of great refinement, but also insatiable anger: a quality he made much use of in one of his finest performances, cast against type, as Dabare the gang leader in H. D. Premaratne’s Saptha Kanya – a role for which he bagged top honours from the Sarasaviya, Swarna Sanka, and OCIC Awards.

In Saptha Kanya Ranasinghe loosens himself so well that when we see Gamini Fonseka in Loku Duwa we are immediately reminded of this earlier performance. He never lets out his anger: he keeps it in, preferring to draw the protagonist into a cat-and-mouse game that the ending refuses to resolve. This was a performance the likes of which Ranasinghe never got again, just as Fonseka never got a role like the one he played in Loku Duwa again. In it he reaches out as far as he can, outside his zone, and does wonders. It goes without saying that like Fonseka’s mudalali, Dabare suggests Ranasinghe’s comic potential: something he had only lightly touched in his earlier incarnation as a lover and a husband. Never again was he to replicate this comic finesse: he ended up playing the wise but often flawed grandfatherly or fatherly figure in subsequent roles, right until his passing away.

Tony Ranasinghe’s career, for me at least, represents the peak of the Sinhalese cinema. A product of a middle-class suburban Catholic family, Ranasinghe emerged in the immediate aftermath of 1956 and Sinhala Only. An admirer of Arisen Ahubudu, he was, not unlike Henry Jayasena and even Gamini Fonseka, well-read and quite literary. His contribution to the Sinhala theatre has not been as appreciated as his work in the cinema, partly because while he made the waves as a member of Sugathapala de Silva’s acting troupe in his early years, his later career in the theatre was as a translator: he never achieved the status that the likes of Dharmasiri Bandaranayake did. Yet these figure in as the most definitive Sinhala translations of the Bard’s plays, faithful as they are to the spirit of the original.

Not surprisingly, it is his acting career that has garnered and continues to garner interest. As a performer he stood away and apart from the trends that made up his day and age: as he himself told me in our interview, he found Method Acting too intellectualised, and he point-blank rejected any notion of acting that emphasised a separation between the cinema and the theatre. For him, no actor could emerge in film without having gone through the stage. Whether or not one agreed with this perspective, it is clear that to the best of his abilities, Ranasinghe stood by the principle underlying it. As an actor, a dramatist, and a screenwriter, he valued fidelity to the source text and material above almost everything else. This was his aesthetic, one he adhered to right until his last days. One can say that the Sinhalese cinema profited much from his elan and his attitude. The Sinhalese theatre, too.

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



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Virulence of identity politics underscored by rising India-Pakistan tensions

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Injured tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir. (AP Photo)

In the wake of the ‘leave India’ order issued to all Pakistani nationals in India by the Indian centre, the authorities in India’s Madhya Pradesh are reportedly up against a troubling dilemma with regard to what they must do with the offspring of Pakistani fathers and Indian mothers. In other words, of what nationality are they: Indian or Pakistani?

Such challenges could be confronting quite a few states in India in view of the likely widespread presence of mixed origin children in the country but the tangle helps to also highlight the harmful impact identity politics are continuing to wield on India, South Asia’s most successful democracy. Given its official democratic and secular identity, India would need to steer a policy course on this question that would indicate a rising above narrow nationalistic politics by the centre.

It is in fact a testing time for India. Given its democratic credentials the observer would expect the Indian centre to take a broad, humane view of the matter and allow the children to stay on in India, since the situation is not of the children’s making. If eviction orders are issued on the children as well narrow identity politics could be said to have won in India. However, this is entirely a matter for the central government and would be resolved by it in keeping with what it sees as its national interest currently. Hopefully, India’s enlightened national interest would be heeded.

Such policy dilemmas over a person’s true national identity, decades into India’s ‘political independence’, point to the persistence of challenges central to nation-making in the country. But such challenges are continuing to be faced by the entirety of South Asia as well.

All over the region, divisive identity politics are continuing to challenge the credentials of those states that are claiming to be democratic. Would they say ‘no’ emphatically to those political forces that are championing narrow ethnic, religious and language identities, for example, and steer a policy course that would be faithful to secularism and equity in all its dimensions?

This is the question and it could be of course posed to Sri Lanka as well, whose current government is claiming to work towards the establishment of a polity that is free of ethnic and religious nationalism. Democratic opinion in Sri Lanka would like to have concrete evidence that it is genuinely committed to these ideals.

Thus is a re-visit of the founding ideals of India and other democracies of the region being prompted by the current crisis in India-Pakistan relations. The conflict ideally ought to prompt democracies to question to what degree they are truly democratic and take the necessary measures to put things right on that score.

If nation-making in the truest sense has occurred in South Asia we of the region would not be having on our hands the currently endemic and wasting identity-based conflicts and wars. Nation-making is rendered possible when equity in all its respects is practised by states. It is the surest means to national integration and unity. The majority of states of South Asia are nowhere near these goals.

The fillip it may provide identity based discord in the region could be counted as one of the relatively slow-acting but dangerously insidious effects of the present India-Pakistan confrontation. The current, dangerous war of words between the sides, for instance, would only serve to intensify the populist perception that the region is seeing a vastly invigorated Hindu India versus Islamic Pakistan polarity. However, in the immediate term, it is a hot war that ought to be guarded against.

As mentioned in this column last week, a regional initiative towards resolving the conflict would prove ideal but since SAARC is currently in a state of virtual paralysis, Commonwealth mediation emerges as the next best option to explore in working out a negotiated solution.

Unfortunately, UN mediation, although desirable in this crisis is unlikely to prove entirely effective in view of the possibility of the major powers using such intermediation to further their partisan interests. Going forward, the UN General Assembly would need to take note of these considerations and figure out as to how it could play a constructive role in peace-making and insulate itself against interference by major powers.

Comparatively, the Commonwealth of Nations could prove more balanced in its managing of the confrontation. This is on account of the formation being widely representative of the developing world and its main interests. However, well-meaning groupings and individual states that have generally insulated themselves to big power manipulations could prove effective in these peace-making efforts as well. The need is for an in-gathering of countries that place peace in South Asia above partisan, divisive interests.

Given India’s major power status and its crucial economic interests worldwide it could be justifiably surmised that the April 22nd terror attack on civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir was deliberately planned to cause the greatest harm to India. The setback India’s tourism industry may suffer, for instance, should be taken cognizance of.

Besides, the strategy was also to ignite another round of religious riots in India and outside. Given these considerations it should not come as a surprise if the Indian political leadership sees it to be in India’s interests to initiate a tough response to the attack.

However, a military response could prove extremely costly for India and the region, as pointed out in this column last week. The negative economic fallout from a new India-Pakistan war for the region and the world could be staggering. The disruptions to the supply chains of the countries of the region from such an outbreak of hostilities, for instance, could be prohibitive and bring the countries of the region to their knees.

A crucial need is for politicians in both India and Pakistan to think beyond their short term interests. Quick military action could yield some perceived short term gains for these politicians but in the long run the South Asian region would be reverted to the position that it was in, in the mid- forties of the last century: a region dismembered and divided against itself.

Stepped-up peace efforts by civilian publics on both sides of the divide could prove enormously beneficial. Besides other things, these civilian groupings need to work tirelessly to curb the fatal influence identity politics wield on politicians and publics.

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The Broken Promise of the Lankan Cinema: Asoka & Swarna’s Thrilling-Melodrama – Part IV

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Swarna / Manorani

“‘Dr. Ranee Sridharan,’ you say. ‘Nice to see you again.’

The woman in the white sari places a thumb in her ledger book, adjusts her spectacles and smiles up at you. ‘You may call me Ranee. Helping you is what I am assigned to do,’ she says. ‘You have seven moons. And you have already waisted one.’”

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

by Shehan Karunatilaka (London: Sort of Books, 2022. p84)

(Continued from yesterday)

Swarna’s Obsession with Manorani

Swarna was clearly fascinated by Manorani Sarwanamuttu. She has noted the striking, angled close-up photograph of Manorani’s face, eyes closed, head thrown back, dressed in a black sari with a large white print and her hair held in place as usual with a spray of Jasmine, at the public cremation of Richard’s body on an open pyre. A brilliant public theatrical riposte, fearless. I think Lucien de Zoysa was standing beside her.

Swarna mentions a detail she observed during one of her four visits to meet Manorani, beginning in 1996, dressed with her hair tied in a low knot adorned with Jasmine flowers as Manorani usually did, as some Tamil women do. She said that she saw Manorani ‘gulp down her tears (kandulu gilagatta).’ Her response to what she saw clearly puzzled her as a Sinhala mother. So, her response in enacting her as Rani was to offer the opposite in her portrayal of Manorani. In her rendition of Asoka’s Rani (Queen) she indulged in a limited melodramatic gestural repertoire, perhaps imagining that Manorani had ‘repressed’ her sorrow. Therefore, she, Swarna, was doing her a favour by finally enabling the ‘return of the repressed,’ through her Melodramatic rendition of her Rani.

A Cosmetic Tamilness

The red pottu functioned as the seal for the white scroll invitation to the premier and in the advertisement to dot the ‘I’, in Rani. As well, a close-up of Rani pasting on a red pottu after having delivered a baby, emphasises it as a marker of difference. This is a cosmetic use of Tamilness without any idea of the multi-ethnic Ceylonese social milieu in which she grew up.

Used adjectively,Cosmetic’ implies superficial measures to make something appear better, more attractive, or more impressive but doesn’t change anything structurally.

The saris worn by Swarna as Rani and her styling are clearly chosen by her as she has a professional knowledge of Indian handloom cotton saris which she once sold at an exclusive boutique in Colombo. Interestingly, young women emulated Swarna’s excellent taste in a certain Indian look which is very flattering too. There is a lovely photograph of her with a pottu and draped in Indian cotton sari with a choker necklace, a low-key elegance. It is also the look that Shyam Benegal, coming to film from advertising, popularised with Shabana Azmi in their films together; a ‘Festival of India’ look. This styling was part of the ‘fiction’ determined by Swarna and her tastes and had no relationship to Manorani and her tastes. It’s the marketability of a rather exotic and strange (aganthuka she said) upper-class woman, dressed up as a ‘Tamil,’ that appears to have been the main ‘design objective’ in choosing costumes and accessories.

al Melodramatic Scene Construction

Asoka’s ‘fictional’ (Prabandhaya) scenes and narration are composed using melodramatic devices; coincidences, sub-plots, climaxes, sudden reversals, revelations and the like. Here I am engaging Asoka on his own terms, arguing that his ‘fiction’ as fiction, has not been constructed well. That is to say, that the ‘fictional world’ Asoka has constructed is not believable, feels false in the way many of our early melodramatic genre films felt artificial. It is wholly inadequate to create the violent political context for the main story.

But those simple films never claimed the status of art, their simplicity, their sarala gee, their naive characters, part of their faded charm. There are Sinhala film fans who are professional journalists I have listened to online, who still express their deep love of those films, the song sheets, hearing them on radio and records, that whole cinematic experience.

Rani with its orchestral score for solemn moments, Rani pacing up and down, smoking furiously at troubled moments, framed at the window with smoky mood lighting, are all hackneyed devices which fail to express a sense of interiority, they are just ‘cosmetic’ superficial, cliched gestures of a hundred melodramas globally. Swarna’s Rani’s drunken dance scene with Richard and his friends has a forced quality, stagy. Rani’s driving scene looked like a drive in a studio with a projected white wall as the outside, again felt unreal and pointless except to show that she dared to go into a kade to buy cigarettes. The play within the film of Asoka’s much-loved Magatha felt very clunky, therefore for specific melodramatic plot points; ‘Rani’s irritation with Sinhala theatre and the opportunity to see Gayan being assaulted without stopping to help as mother and son drove back home. Then the same moral is underscored, as simplistic melodramas always do, when her own neighbours also don’t do anything when they see Richard being abducted.

This kind of melodramatic moralism does a disservice to the intelligence and sophistication of those Lankans who created the multi-ethnic Aragalaya/Porattam/Struggle in 2022, who have appreciated immensely Manuwarna’s film Rahas Kiyana Kandu both in Lanka and here in Australia. Rani’s Christianity is used again to stage a symbolic scene with the stained-glass window image of ‘the sorrowful mother Mary holding her son’s body’, and to recite the famous biblical lines which are quite inappropriate for the context. Absalom was a traitor to his father King David and fought against him and died in battle. King David spoke those lines when his son died. It has no connection with a mother’s relationship to her murdered son who wasn’t guilty of anything. It’s just a cheap ‘poetic’ touch that sounds solemn, a ‘cosmetic’ use of the Hebrew Bible.

Sinhala cinema time and time again makes a female character Christian when she behaves ‘badly’ that is, sexually promiscuous, takes an independent initiative, as though Christianity with its ‘western values’ are the cause of behaviour considered immoral from the point of view of the good Sinhala Buddhist girl. A popular male critic went so far as to say that Rani shows Lankan men that there is nothing wrong with women drinking and smoking.

Talking of girls, the sub-plot line with the sweet and innocent young girl whose child is delivered by Rani is straight out of Melodrama which often needs an ‘innocent girl stereotype’ to contrast her with another kind of femininity, worldly, lax. The orchestration of the coincidence of a birth with Richard’ death through ‘parallel montage’ is one of the staple editing devices of Melodrama and police thrillers. The innocent young mother’s sentimental story about the crush she has on Richard and the relationship between Rani (who has been friendless) and her over time feels tacked on, artificial, to find a ‘bitter-sweet’ melodramatic narrative resolution on the beach, with ‘HOPE’, writ large.

Perhaps this is why when a well-prepared young Lankan Australian podcaster with a special interest in acting, interviewing Swarna, attempted to ask her about the criticism back home about the construction of the character of Rani, she sharply interrupted him in mid-sentence, to say, ‘those things are not worth talking about, a waste of time … we have made a good film, well directed, edited…’.

Swarna’s normally affable manner changed, and the interviewer politely agreed with her and she went on to conduct the interview herself, informing us of screening several of her films at a festival in Calcutta. The implication of this arrogant move is that an actor with that record couldn’t possibly have made a dud.

It’s just not cool for actors to praise their own films. Let the public, critics, academics and cinephiles make their judgements which are their democratic prerogative, pleasure and professional work. The critical reception has been unprecedented and the Social Science Journal, Polity’s special Issue on Rani is essential reading.

I do wish Swarna Mallawarachchi many more moons (than the 7 Moons destined for Maali Almeida), to explore what Eugenio Barba called The Secret Art of the Performer. In Shehan Karunathilaka’s The 7 Moons of Maali Almaida (which provided the epigraph for my piece), this phantom figure Maali plays multiple roles of the actor called Richard de Zoysa. Notably, that of Malinda Albert Kabalana, in the ‘In-between Worlds’ haunted by the phantoms of Rajani Thiranagama and the multitude of anonymous victims of that era of political terror in Lanka.

Shehan had clearly read Martin Wickramasinghe’s Yuganthaya and seen Lester’s film, where Richard de Zoysa played the idealist son Malinda Albert Kabalana to Gamini Fonseka’s conservative, capitalist father. He has also done a formidable amount of research into recent Lankan political history and then transformed that History into an Allegory. Melodrama as a genre structurally, simply does not have the formal power that inheres in Allegory to represent History in ruins, unless one has been able to create, as Fassbinder did, a Brechtian Melodramatic Cinema. If not, one ends up exploiting political histories of violence and suffering, to create thrillingly sensational Melodramas that play well to the box office but are freighted with emptiness. It is Frederick Jameson, the highly influential Marxist Literary critic, who once said that the best of ‘Third World Literature’ was allegorical, thinking of Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude and closer to home, Rushdi’s Midnight’s Children.

I hope Swarna will allow herself some time to reflect on the Dr Manorani Sarwanamuttu that her own phantasy-Rani has suppressed. Perhaps she has played the formidable roles of the angry and the furious, ‘avenging women’ for too long. Vasantha who studied ‘true crime’ deeply, also astutely showed us through Swarna as a mature woman in Kadapathaka Chaya, where the relentless pursuit of ‘REVENGE’ can lead an individual. And we see its results at a national scale in these eras of terror. In this process of taking stock, Swarna might also think a little about Rukmani Devi and perhaps hunt down the booklet she had written called Mage Jivitha Vitti. ‘Vitti is different from ‘Jivitha Kathava’. In this way she just might begin to understand deeply, affectively, as only an actor worthy of that name can, the reserve, dignity, grace, lightness, joy and yes, the sense of theatre, with which Dr Manorani Saravanmuttu and Rukmani Devi faced the many ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ as professional women of Lanka who were also Tamil. (Concluded)

by Laleen Jayamanne

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A piece of home at Sri Lankan Musical Night in Dubai

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The much-anticipated Sri Lankan Musical Night was held recently in the heart of Downtown Dubai, at the Millennium Plaza Hotel.

Reports indicate that the venue was transformed into a vibrant enclave of Sri Lankan culture, unifying the power of music and the enduring spirit of the Sri Lankan diaspora.

The band DOCTOR, from Sri Lanka, was very much in the spotlight, blending traditional Sri Lankan melodies with contemporary rhythms, evoking nostalgia and delight among the audience.

In addition to Lanthra Perera’s vibrant performance, the supporting artiste, too, made it a happening scene with their energetic and exciting vocals; Sajitha Anthony, I’m told, mesmerised the audience with his soulful voice; Rajiv Sebastian, a crowd favourite, both here and abroad, displayed his professionalism and energetic presence on stage; Nushika Fernando’s captivating act was widely applauded. Sudewa Hettiarachchi did the needful as compere.

Sri Lankan Musical Night was organised by DJMC Events in collaboration with Event partners Chaminda De Silva and Romesh Ramachandran.

The band DOCTOR

DJMC Events Chairman Dunstan Rozario’s vision and dedication were vividly evident in every aspect of this show. His passion for creating cultural platforms that unite communities through entertainment resonated throughout the evening, setting the tone for an event dedicated to unity and celebration.

Beyond the musical performances, the occasion served as a dynamic gathering for the Sri Lankan community in the UAE. Attendees, from long-time expatriates to recent arrivals, found common ground in shared songs and stories, creating an atmosphere imbued with warmth and belonging.

Feedback from attendees was overwhelmingly positive, with widespread enthusiasm for more culturally enriching events in the future. One attendee aptly captured the essence of the evening, stating, “Tonight, we didn’t just listen to music; we felt a piece of home.”

DJMC Events plans to build on this momentum, further promoting Sri Lankan culture in the UAE and internationally.

Plans are already being laid out for future happenings to celebrate and preserve Sri Lanka’s rich cultural heritage.

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