Candy Hunt

Setting meaningful trends

My visit to Kolkata (formally Calcutta) was a life changing one. Firstly it was my first overseas trip alone, and pretty much excited as I had to present a paper at a conference held in Calcutta University. Kolkata has contributed enormously in India' freedom struggle. It is a place which depicts much of a positive colonial influence as well as a very authentic Bangali culture.

Rabindranath Tagore

At the opening ceremony of the conference, two university students sang the university anthem composed by Rabindranath Tagore. Although I did not get the meaning, I was able to absorb every musical note from it as that music was very familiar to me. I heard that music back in Sri Lanka, from the voices of Sunil Santha and Ananda Samarakoon. This was that positive, innovative and calming music experience we used to get long before this noisy FM culture began. It was a gift to us from Rabindranath Tagore.

City of education

Gurudev Tagore (that is how Indians call him) has made Kolkata a city of Education. We, Sri Lankans had the opportunity to be in the shadow of this great man as he had a huge influence on our music and art. It is a shame that since Ananda Samarakoon, Sunil Santha and another few people, there was not anyone to continue that in Sri Lanka.

Tagore had a unique combination of talent as a poet, novelist, painter, playwright and educationist who reshaped Bengali literature and music in India, and brought honour to us all as the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his great work Gitanjali in 1913.

As the founder of Santiniketan, for research and teaching in India, he also made an immense contribution to the development of a musical tradition that was rooted in the land and its people. He had the unique honour of being the composer and writer of Jana Gana Mana the Indian National Anthem. It is wonderful to see how 1.2 billion sing their national anthem which is written in Bengali, a tiny minority language in India.

I thought this would be the ideal time to write about that 'authentic' genre of music as we commemorate Sunil Santha's 97th birthday in this April. Rabindra Sangeeth is a very simple yet beautiful music which soothes common people's mind.

Folk arts

There is a discourse to figure out who are the pioneers of Sri Lankan music. Sri Lanka has a mix of everything including folk music, Hindustani and Western genres. I find this touch of Bengali or Rabindra music adds the spice to Sri Lankan music. That is why our people still enjoy Sunil Santha's music and sing whenever they get a chance.

I often ask myself a question that why the most of the new songs slip out of our minds so quickly. I feel that they lack something which is essential to capture one's heart and soul eternally.

As I mentioned earlier, Rabindranath Tagore had a faith in education. Education and knowledge are always involved in trend setting. I would not get surprised about the current fragile trends of Sri Lankan music as they have not been set upon a firm structure. I just feel lost in past and cravingly nostalgic.

Most of our new comers to the industry seem following world music trends superficially. They are not seen studying or researching, I wonder whether they have freethinking as they are involved in a fierce race.

I think I must conclude this with lines of Gitanjali which express about building new traditions in education and thinking that are free from fear. 'Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.'