Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth- Century Sri Lanka by Garrett M. Field

Abstract

Reviewed by: Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth- Century Sri Lanka by Garrett M. Field Eshantha Peiris (bio) Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth- Century Sri Lanka. Garrett M. Field. South Asia across the Disciplines. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. xii + 213 pp., b&w illustrations, music, bibliography, index. ISBN: 9780520294714 (paperback), $34.95. Garrett Field’s monograph Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth- Century Sri Lanka is a study of Sinhala- language song and poetry from 1900 to 1964 that examines how male songwriters and poets of Sinhalese ethnicity modernized their creative output in response to colonial and postcolonial formations. This broad focus constitutes an attempt to bridge the artificial compartmentalization in Western academia that relegates the study of South Asian musics to ethnomusicology and the study of texts to South Asian studies. While many Sinhala speakers will be familiar with the examples and narratives discussed in the book—given their inclusion in the Sri Lankan national secondary- school curriculum—Field moves beyond the isolationist tendencies common in Sri Lanka studies to consider the implications of these cultural histories for interpretating the historical rise of nation- states around the world. The arguments made in this book also serve to nuance some of the foundational theories of postcolonial studies and to bring Western academic insights into dialogue with Sinhala scholarly exegeses. Field’s fluency in spoken and written Sinhala makes his textual analyses rich for both specialists and general readers. Prior to the twentieth century, Sinhala poetry in Sri Lanka was presented to the public through sung performance, similar to other poetic/literary traditions found across the premodern world. Memorization of Sinhala verses was enabled by standard poetic meters and rhyme schemes, which in different eras responded to a variety of poetic conventions rooted in the scriptural language traditions of Sanskrit and Pali (Kulatillake 1976). Among the many labels associated with historical Sinhala poetry, the terms gī and sindu are still used today, referring to what we might now call “song.” As noted in Modernizing Composition, practical distinctions between song (as something sung and heard) and poetry (as something written and silently read) can be traced to the global onset of recorded gramophone song at the turn of the twentieth century (2017, 6). [End Page 144] Modernizing Composition progresses chronologically, with part 1 covering the end of the colonial period (1900–1948) and part 2 the years following political independence (1948–64). Although the analyzed texts are contextualized within the broader contexts of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist movements in Sri Lanka, Field is careful not to attribute or reduce the motivations of songwriters and poets to a linear evolution of nationalist discourses, instead considering (in addition to nationalism) the impact of other factors that might have inspired composition—for example, commercialism, cosmopolitan connections within South Asia and the British Empire, the growth of the recording and film industries, and biographical details of social actors. Chapter 1 discusses theater songs, gramophone songs, and moralistic poetry from the early twentieth century, framing them in terms of Partha Chatterjee’s three- stage theory of anticolonial nationalist thought (1986)—departure, maneuver, and arrival—and contextualizing them as part of the Aryan- Sinhalese movement of Buddhist revivalism that had roots in nineteenth- century Orientalist ideologies. Chapter 2 examines radio songs and social commentary poems from the 1940s that were informed by the nationalist movement of Sinhala linguistic purism known as the Hela Havula. This history is framed in terms of Chatterjee’s theory of the “inner domain” (1993), which refers to the cultural reform movements that preceded anticolonial political action. In contrast to Chatterjee, Field tries in chapter 1 to account more for the relationship between cultural nationalism and cultural commodities, and in chapter 2 argues that “inner domains” are not always created in relation to Western hegemony, using the example of how the Hela Havula movement arose in opposition to the cultural dominance of North India. Chatterjee is admittedly a slippery target given how his own ideas have evolved in the decades since his pioneering theories of postcolonialism. But Field’s argument that postcolonial studies needs to account for social phenomena beyond the India- Britain...