Country in Asia. It is an island in the Indian Ocean, roughly 38 km from the southern tip of India and 960 km north of the Equator. With an area of approximately 65,610 km2, it has a population of around 18·8 million (2000 estimate).
2. Tamil music and the music of Islam.
4. Music in the older religious networks.
ANNE SHEERAN
From the standpoint of music and musical performance practice, one of the most significant features of Sri Lanka is its long involvement in the political and commercial life of the region. Situated with the Arabian Sea to the west and the Bay of Bengal to the east, Sri Lanka has since ancient times participated in an intricate East-West economy, negotiating the sale of its sought-after natural resources (pearls, spices and elephants). The destinies of three important kingdoms in Sri Lanka – Anuradhapura (137–1000), Polonnaruva (1055–1255) and Kotte (1371–1597) – were tied to shifting centres of trade between the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. Anuradhapura remained the capital until the 12th century, when trading networks in south India shifted trade from the west to the east coast of India, more strategically located for Polonnaruva. The south-western kingdom of Kotte became dominant during the 14th century, when the centre of trade moved back to the western coastal areas in response to the international demand for commodities associated with the southwest (pearls and gems). Strategic alliances between influential families in India and Sri Lanka were not uncommon. In the 16th century Sri Lanka’s strategic location and its natural resources became a focus of European imperial expansion. The Portuguese colonized parts of the south and south-west in 1505, the Dutch took over in 1658 and the British in 1796. Ceylon achieved independence in 1948 and became the Republic of Sri Lanka in 1972.
These extensive regional and international connections gave rise to several diasporic groups. About 74% of Sri Lankans are Sinhala, 18% are Tamil, and 7% are Muslim. Burghers (a census category for Sri Lankans who married into Portuguese or Dutch communities) constitute about 1% of the population. Statistically smaller groups are Chetties, Parsi, Eurasians and the descendants of African peoples brought first as slaves by the Portuguese, and later as soldiers by the British. Although numerically small, their performance genres are a rich source of information on the African diaspora in South Asia as well as on the forging of creole cultures – Iberian, African, Asian and Euorpean – in the shadow of colonial occupation.
In the 1990s roughly 15% of the population (mostly Tamil) practised Hinduism; almost 70% (mainly Sinhala) practised Theravada Buddhism. 7% of Sri Lankans practised some form of Christianity, another 7% practised Islam. Sinhala people also recognize another network of religious practices and ideologies. Characterized as the ‘older religion’, it includes elements found throughout South Asia, such as worship of local deities, popular Hinduism and astrology.
The biases of colonial scholars and travellers, for example their narrow focus upon Sanskrit texts on music in India, have diverted attention from the vibrant spectrum of music and musical practices in Sri Lanka. Colonial prejudices against non-‘classical’ music and against music of diasporic communities has endured. The impact of these biases has been to create an incomplete body of scholarly research in all languages about Sri Lanka’s performance traditions and to stereotype Sri Lanka as an area of derivative, uninteresting music.
Little research has been carried out on the Tamil and Muslim communities. In the Muslim community Qu r’anic recitation styles remain to be studied, as does the inclusion of characteristically West Asian instruments (oboe and kettledrum) in the Buddhist temple ensemble, hēvisi. Similarly, the social history and structure of Tamil prosody bears directly on the genesis of traditional and religious musical forms now thought of as Sinhala. The Hindu temple ensemble, consisting of the tavil and double-reed nāgasvaram, is ubiquitous in Sri Lanka. It appears that the great cultural capital of northern Sri Lanka, Jaffna, occupies a position of some prominence in the southern Indian region for its nāgasvaram players. It would also appear that the Sinhala folk opera, nādagama, was greatly influenced by the Tamil folk opera, Natukūttk.
Musical genres and performance practices in Sinhala Sri Lanka are generally divided into three cultural areas, distinguished by region: ‘low-country’ refers to music and performance practices of the southern areas; ‘up-country’ refers to the interior north-central regions; and Sabaragamuwa, probably the least studied, between the two. An important feature of musical forms and practices in these regions is their development more or less outside of the homogenizing influences of centralized state or court networks. Instead, localized teacher lineages (guru paramparā) retain proprietary rights to repertories and styles that, in turn, are related not to any particular school or system of music, but to particular practices. A unifying feature of these fairly localized repertories and practices is the use of intoned recitation and chanted prose. In Sinhala chanted verse and sung prose (kavi), prescribed sequences of long and short syllables (mātra) structure the melodic rhythm. These sequences and metres are influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, by an older language in Sri Lanka, Arthuva, and given the vital political, musical, religious and military exchanges in the region over time, by regional languages such as Telugu and Tamil as well. The vocal range of Sinhala prosody is typically narrow, generally involving three to four semitones in chanted verse of the older religion, and three semitones in Theravada Buddhist recitation. Intoned recitation and chanted prose in the repertories of the old religion, Buddhist chant and Sinhala traditional music are formulaic in nature and reflect a broader, older musical history of the South Asian region, for the practice of chanting protective formulae has been known in South Asia since pre-Buddhist times (de Silva, 1981).
The diversity of Buddhist musical offerings includes chanted recitation of religious texts by monks (bhikkus) and instrumental musical offerings by lay people. Temple processions (perahēras) often include a snare drum and trumpet ensemble, pappara. At the Daladā Māligawa, the main Buddhist temple in Kandy, a group of praise singers (kavikāra maduva) sing eulogies (praśasti) to Buddha using melodies from 18th-century South India (Seneviratna, 1975). A temple band of musicians, hēvisi, plays musical offerings three times daily. A Buddhist system of instrument classification, pañcatūrya nāda, involves five categories of instruments: idiophones, aerophones and three types of membranophone (Seneviratna, 1979). Pirit (paritta, Pali: ‘protection’), Buddhist chant, is a style of intoned recitation (sarabhanna) based on phonological properties of Pali, restricted melodically to a three-tone scale. Nowadays, pirit ceremonies may be conducted on any auspicious occasion, religious or secular, and can last anywhere from one hour to seven days (Sheeran, 1995).
Drumming in Sri Lanka also remains a topic for further research: while as many as 90% of Sinhala drum repertories are named for specific dance sequences in the practices of the older religions, there is some debate as to whether they can be consolidated into any single, overarching theoretical system (Makulloluwa, 1962; Kulatillake, 1980).
Formally, these systems recognize four major guardian deities. Buddhist temples contain a special shrine, or dēvālē, for the deities; lay Buddhist religious specialists, kapurāla, preside over them. There are also secondary spirit beings whose spheres of influence tend to be rooted in specific locales, as well as malevolent and beneficent planetary entities. The social history and present practice of dēvālē ceremonies constitute an especially rich topic for further research (Kariyawassam, 1990). Scholars have long recognized the complexity of the interaction between Buddhism and the old religion, including the eventual consolidation of the old religion within an overall Buddhist framework (Obeyeskere, 1963). A genealogy of the musical styles in dēvālē ceremonies would illuminate the multiple forces that flowed through this interaction and that continue to make them vibrant forums of social, political and religious commentary.
Tovil refers to a cluster of practices that involve control and expulsion of malignant influences. They became a focus of missionaries and colonial administrators during the British colonial era as examples of ‘heathenism’ in the colonies and gave rise subsquently to a number of studies about dance, exorcism, religion and healing (e.g. Wirz, 1954; Kapferer, 1983). Tovil practices usually involve possession, as well as appearances of various spirit entities in masked form. Religious specialists (ādurā, yakādurā) intone verses in the gi metre (a quatrain with the first and third lines of equal length, the second and fourth lines of unequal length), which Kulatillake (1991) asserts is the oldest form of song in Sri Lanka. Pitch ranges are generally narrow: three to four semitones are common in the low-country, while a slightly broader range is used in the up-country. A popular secular genre, kōlam, a masked theatre of south-western Sri Lanka, may have roots in tovil, though kōlam is also thought to be influenced by the South Indian nātukkūttu.
Bali śanti karma (śanti, ‘peace’; karma, ‘action’) refers to a cluster of practices involving offerings to planetary deities that are thought to bring peace and good health and to restore equanimity. Low-country bali tends towards gentleness, up-county bali incorporates slightly more athleticism. Drummer-dancers use hand-bells to create an encompassing sonic envelope.
A now rarely performed set of practices is the kohomba kankāriya, ceremonies of supplication to spirit beings, including the powerful up-country god Kohomba. Kankāriya practices may contain the entire repertory of drum music for the main up-country drum, the gāta bēra (Kulatillake, 1980). Walcott (1978) suggests that the presentation of the gods’ stories through song is at the heart of the offering’s efficacy.
Other genres incorporating elements of prosody such as narrow vocal ranges, intoned recitation and sung verse are the puppet theatre of south-western Sri Lanka, rukkada, and a high-spirited dramatic genre of the up-country that involves mime and impersonation, sokari (Sarachchandra, 1966).
A range of popular musical styles has flourished as a result of Sri Lanka’s long history of inter- and intra-regional contact. Nrtya is associated with the Sinhala music theatre of the early 20th century, with probable roots in the music of Parsi and Marathi theatre troupes from North India (see India, §IX, 1(i)). Nrtya music dominated urban popular music in Sri Lanka until the 1930s, when Indian film music entered the scene. Bailā is a popular music and dance genre with probable roots in Afro-Portuguese performance traditions in Sri Lanka. Whether amplified or acoustic, bailā music characteristically uses instrumental combinations that include the banjo or mandolin, violin, guitar, rabāna (hand-held frame drum) and a pair of congas. When it involves a solo singer and a chorus, it is known as chorus bailā, a genre brought into prominence via radio by Wally Bastiansz (1913–85). Vāde (‘debate’) bailā, less common than chorus bailā, calls on performers to extemporize on themes and melodies set by a panel of judges or by the audience.
Sinhala pop, a genre that has been developing since the 1960s, combines influences from Indian film to Western pop, including reggae. The typical set-up consists of a solo singer and electronic drum sets, synthesizers and electric guitars. In the capital city, Colombo, a thriving English-language popular music scene may include cover tunes as well as originals ‘in the Western popular idiom’. Sarala gī, ‘light-classical’ music, involves a solo singer and, usually, an ‘oriental orchestra’ (sitār, violins, tablā, flute and sarod). Sarala gī came of age more or less during a time of rapid expansion in radio transmissions throughout South Asia, when the demand for music programming grew and when Indian cinema music easily dominated popular tastes. In reaction, cultural nationalists in India and in Sri Lanka began advocating the incorporation of classical and folk music into popular styles. Some Sri Lankan exponents, including the folk musicians Nelum Devi and Devar Surya Sena, Ananda Samarakoon (1911–62) and Sunil Shanta (1915–81), travelled to Rabindranath Tagore’s arts institute in Bengal, Santiniketan, to join others in this process of musical experimentation.
The ‘southern drum’, yak bera, is a long (roughly 67 cm), double-headed cylindrical drum that is suspended from a player’s waist with a rope and played with two hands. The body is usually made from coconut tree wood. Cow intestines are a common material for the drum head. The up-country gāta bēre is a double-headed barrel drum. Like the yak bera it is played with both hands and suspended from the player’s waist with a rope. It measures roughly 67 cm in length and 85 cm in diameter at the widest part. Cow intestines are the preferred materials for the drum heads in order to produce a louder sound. The double-headed barrel drum daule is 45 cm long and has large drum heads 34 cm in diameter. It hangs suspended from the drummer’s waist and is played with a stick in the right hand and bare left hand. The tammātta (pokuru) bera is a pair of kettledrums tied together, characterized erroneously by colonial writers as ‘tom-toms’. It is played suspended from a player’s waist and beaten with two supple, spring-loaded sticks (kaduppu) that are partially covered in cloth. The tammātta elaborates on the rhythmic cycle given by the daule. The horanāva is a conical-bore, quadruple-reed oboe. It can vary in size, anywhere from 20 to 35 cm in length, and have six to eight finger holes. In the hēvisi ensemble the horanāva player embellishes a series of set, skeletal melody patterns. Diverse social histories are inscribed in the music of the kavikāra maduva musical performance: the udākki hourglass drum and the pantaru reflect the broad religious and musical influences operating within Theravada Buddhist contexts. The udākki (also damaru) is an hourglass drum identified both with Śiva and with Buddhist Tantric practice. The pantaru is an idiophone, a metal-framed instrument with jingles that are thought to signify the circle of planets.
Grove6 (K.S. Atwood)
P. Wirz: Exorcism and the Art of Healing in Ceylon (Leyden, 1954)
B. de Zoete: Dance and Magic Drama in Ceylon (London, 1957)
G. Obeyesekere: ‘The Great Tradition and the Little in the Perspective of Sinhalese Buddhism’, Journal of Asian Studies, xxii/2 (1963), 139–53
J.E. Sederaman: Lamkāwē bali upata [Origin of planet exorcism in Sri Lanka] (Colombo, 1964)
E.R. Sarachchandra: The Folk Drama of Ceylon (Colombo, 1966)
J.E. Sederaman: Bali yāga vicharaya [Study of planet exorcism rituals] (Colombo, 1967)
O. Pertold: The Ceremonial Dances of the Sinhalese: an Inquiry into Sinhalese Folk Religion (Dehiwara, 1973)
F. Berberich: The Tavil Construction, Technique, and Context in Present-Day Jaffna (thesis, U. of Hawaii, 1974)
A. Seneviratna: ‘Musical Rituals of the Dalada Maligawa Pertaining to the Temple of the Sacred Tooth’, Sangeet Natak, xxxvi (1975), 21–42
M.M. Ames: Tovil: the Ritual Chanting, Dance and Drumming of Exorcism in Sri Lanka (New York, 1977)
R. Walcott: Khomoba Kankariya: an Ethnomusicological Study (diss., U. of Sri Lanka, 1978)
A. Seneviratna: ‘Pañcaturya Nada and the Hewisi Puja’, EthM, xxiii (1979), 49–56
C. de S. Kulatillake: Metre, Melody and Rhythm in Sinhala Music (Colombo, 1980)
L. de Silva: ‘Paritta: a Historical and Religious Study of the Buddhist Ceremony for Peace and Prosperity in Sri Lanka’, Spolia Zeylanica, xxxvi/1 (1981)
B. Kapferer: A Celebration of Demons (Bloomington, IN, 1983)
S. Ariyaratne: Gramafōn gī yugaya [The gramophone songs era] (Colombo, 1986)
T. Kariyawassam: Bali yāga piliwela [The order of planet exorcism rituals] (Colombo, 1986)
S. Ariyaratne: Ananda Samarakoon adhayanaya [Ananda Samarakoon: a critical study] (Colombo, 1988)
T. Kariyawassam: Gam madu purānaya [Village thanksgiving ritual of olden times] (Colombo, 1990)
C. de. S. Kulatillake: Ethnomusicology: its Content and Growth and Ethnomusicological Aspects of Sri Lanka (Colombo, 1991)
C. de S. Kulatillake: ‘Sri Lanka’, Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies, ed. H. Myers (1993), 297–9 [incl. bibliography]
D. Scott: Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropoligical Discourses on the Senhalu Yaktovil (Minneapolis, 1994)
A. Sheeran: White Noise: European Modernity, Sinhala Musical Nationalism and the Practice of a Creole Popular Music in Modern Sri Lanka (diss., U. of Washington, 1997)