Ananda Samarakoon

Ananda Samarakoon is remembered first as the composer of the national anthem, yet he was a serious painter as well, and it is as a painter that he belongs here. Born in 1911 near Colombo, he went in the 1930s to Rabindranath Tagore’s school at Santiniketan in Bengal, where he studied under Nandalal Bose and took in the Bengal school’s gentle, symbolist orientalism. Out of it he made a body of painting, lyrical and inward, that stands a little apart from both the academic realists and the ’43 Group, and that helped keep a symbolist current alive in Sri Lankan art.

His life was bound up with the anthem he wrote, first sung in 1940 and adopted by the new nation in 1951. After the death of his young son in 1945 he left for India for some years, where he painted and exhibited; grief, and later distress over changes made to the anthem’s words, darkened his last years, and he died in 1962. His painting has been overshadowed by the song, yet the two came from one source, a wish to give the island a modern art and a modern voice that were its own.