Premasiri Khemadasa - BIO

Premasiri Khemadasa - BIO

The thirteenth child born into a poor village family is not often noticed. Khemadasa Perera (later to choose his own artistic name of Premasiri Khemadasa) was no ordinary thirteenth child. He started making himself noticed at age 6, in 1943, when he walked many miles alone to enroll himself in school; all the other children came with their parents. Not Khemadasa, for his parents did not support his desire for an education they could not afford. This all happened in Wadduwa, on the coast 20 miles south of Colombo, the capital of Ceylon, still five years before it gained independence from the British Empire.
From the Perera’s small sliver of land, in Talpitiya, Wadduwa, it is still possible to hear and smell the sea. Khemadasa always loved eating fish, meeting with simple fishermen and hearing about their lives at sea. He never lost his roots.

When he was 7, Khemadasa lost his father, Simon, who died after a fall from a palm tree, where he had been tapping toddy. The family survived because Alan Perera, the mother, sold milk from her cow to other villagers, and his older sisters wove mats and baskets for small change. Khemadasa started playing the flute, the cheapest instrument you could buy in Ceylon. No one knows where this fascination came from, since the Perera family, for generations as far back as anyone knew, had never shown any talent for music or the arts.
As an old man, Premasiri Khemadasa always located the turning point of his life in the Sixth Grade. He was then studying at St. Johns College Panadura where he was one of the top students. When he was not awarded the double promotion he deserved, he went to the school’s principal and demanded to know why. Khemadasa was whipped then for impertinence, for the award had been reserved for a rich politician’s son instead of him. It was at that moment, he later claimed, that Khemadasa lost interest in his studies and really started playing the flute seriously.

Once again his family refused to support him, and his older brothers and sisters often burned his flutes, because they thought he could do better than become a musician. He spent a lot of time out of the house, playing down by the ocean, where he would be left alone. One of Khemadasa’s favorite stories was of how he would play the flute on the train from Panadura to Colombo. He brought joy to the harbor workers on the train and made small change playing for them.

Sometimes the ticket inspectors would come onto the train and fine people without tickets. Khemadasa as a boy never bought a ticket because, as he said, the workers would “surround me with their dirty sarongs, and hide me , and protect me from the ticket inspectors.”

Because the Perera land was adjacent to a small Buddhist temple with a few monks, Khemadasa’s family had the idea of turning him over to the monks to become one of them. He refused, and anyone who knew his hard-headedness and sensuality later in life would be amazed to think of Khemadasa as a monk. But when one speaks with teachers and fellow students from his childhood, they remember him as timid.
Knowing what we now know about Khemadasa, the only way to explain his timidity as a boy is to imagine him in those years before the Sixth Grade, before his angry disappointment at the whipping delivered at the hands of the unjust principal in Panadura. This anger, together with the anger the young boy must have felt at being bullied by his brothers and sisters, who kept burning his flutes, must have built up over the years into the towering willpower and temperamental ferocity of Khemadasa, a man who refused to bow before anyone.

Imagine how hard it must have been to overcome so much and to build up so much beauty and delicacy in music from almost nothing. Khemadasa never had any serious musical or compositional training. He is one of the few real examples of a self-made man. The one thing that seemed to keep Khemadasa from despairing, in his early years, is the great love he always had for his mother Alan. He spoke of her with great affection toward the end of his own life.


Khemadasa flirted with leftist politics throughout his life, partially because his older brothers joined the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and held meetings at their family home, partially because of his anger at being mistreated by the local elites as a boy. One of his first operas, “Rathu Mal,” produced in the mid 1960s, was commissioned by the party.

Nearly all music broadcast on Ceylon radio in the 1930s and ‘40s was Hindustani film music from India, but Khemadasa was also exposed to Buddhist chanting and drumming from the temple beside his home. Thalpitiya, like other coastal villages, was religiously diverse, so he would have also heard Christian hymns and Christmas carols, chanting from Tamil Hindu temples, and down the coast in Galle, the Muslim call to prayer from the large mosque there.

Khemadasa’s most important decision as a young man came when he had to choose between continuing his education or taking up a career in music. On the same day in year 1954, he had to choose between sitting his final examination in high school and travelling north to Colombo to audition for the SLBC (Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation). There wasn’t time for both. He chose to take the exam, but while sitting there he became frustrated and started humming a tune. The angry supervisor rushed to silence him and Khemadasa abandoned his exam papers, tucked his flute into his pocket, rushed out of the exam hall, jumped the school wall, barely caught the train to Colombo, and made his audition at the SLBC.

Early Career: 1955-1960

During the 1950s Khemadasa played the flute and accordion as a part-time musician at the SLBC. He also started using the harmonium in his private time to work up the melodies for his earliest serious compositions. By about 1955, Khemadasa had learned all the instruments in a small orchestra, either by playing them himself, or by listening to them at the SLBC. He often spent time at the radio’s library, listening to new music. Khemadasa had friends at the Polish embassy and through them he became exposed to Western classical music and harmony, which was alien to the Indian tradition he had grown up within.

Disappointed with the leading music masters of the late fifties in Colombo, Khemadasa set up his own music school. Founded on January 3, 1959, it was called Sangeetha Manjariya and was beside the noisy railway station in Maradana. Life was so tough then that Khemadasa started other businesses just below the music school to raise cash to support his music. First he started a barber shop, but his only customers in the rough neighborhood of Maradana were poor men who came to get their armpits shaved for one penny each. Soon his barbers ganged up on him, stole the equipment, and ran off. He then started to supply lunches to office workers, but this too ended in a fiasco.

Working late nights to keep one step ahead of his music students, Khemadasa often learned the instruments he was teaching at the same time as his students. His school, Manjariya, though barely making money, quickly became a cozy bohemian hangout for leading artists and young politicians. His opera “Kala Mal,” 1960, was the first in Sri Lankan history and was so experimental that he could find no financial backers. He borrowed money from money lenders to stage his early works. One day an insistent money lender forced his way into Manjariya to collect his cash, and Khemadasa, who was broke then, rushed out to his balcony and threatened to jump off and commit suicide. He was held back by an artist friend. Shocked, the money lender vowed never to come back to collect his debt and wished Khemadasa good luck with his music.

“Bari Sil,” his second opera, was plagued by poor attendance and rain. Usually the orchestra members outnumbered the viewers. And then one day Khemadasa’s luck changed. Another outdoor performance of “Bari Sil” was scheduled, and, as always, the sky started darkening hours before. Khemadasa made a plea to all the gods in the heavens to stop the rain and show him that his musical vocation was a worthy cause. All of Colombo was pounded by rain that day except for the Vihara Maha Devi Park where his opera was shown. Considered a miracle by many, this dry performance also brought Khemadasa his first contacts in the Sri Lankan film industry (through screenwriter Dharmasri Kaldera who introduced him to film director Sirisena Wimalaweera), in which Khemadasa was finally able to make a financially viable career in music.

Career from 1960-1980

Sri Lankan film music in the 1950s and ‘60s was dominated by Indians. The musical style was closely modeled on Hindi films; the music was usually recorded in India; often Indian composers were used. Premasiri Khemadasa was the pioneer of a new style of film music for Sri Lanka, based on folk melodies and his own inventions, sometimes inspired by Western classical pieces. He was able to create film songs that became huge hits on the radio, while also scattering bits of melody throughout each film to tie the film together into an emotionally developing story. Critics were surprised and impressed by how totally he had rejected the Hindi film music model. His music emphasized the core themes of each film and became as important as the visuals in creating emotional depth.

His first big success came with K.A.W. Perera’s film, “Sanasuma Kothanada,” which premiered on February 17, 1966, coincidently the same day Khemadasa married Soma Latha, who remained his wife until his death and bore him two daughters, Anupa in 1969 and Gayathri in 1976.

By the late 1960s Khemadasa was in huge demand to compose film music. His most brilliant work was done with director Lester James Peiris in his two internationally acclaimed films, “Golu Hadawatha” and “Nidhanaya.” Everywhere you go in Sri Lanka people still recognize the music from these films, produced in the 1970s.

Although Khemadasa soon came to dominate Sri Lankan film music, he had many troubles getting his more “serious” music recognized by the Sri Lankan music establishment, the pandits and the professors. He fought many verbal battles with them in the media, as they attacked him for not following the rules of “Oriental Music,” and he attacked them for being provincial idiots who understood nothing about the larger musical world and about true creativity. His mantra was “more music, fewer myths.” He spoke often, at the end of his life, about how all these supposed leaders of Sri Lankan music were just “bluffing.” Khemadasa always said the “people” loved him and his music, and it was their support which kept him going .

On May 1, 1966 Khemadasa conducted his opera “Rathu Mal” in Beijing in front of Mao Zedong. In the same year he composed the first symphony written by a Sri Lankan, “Sinhala New Year,” a minimalist piece with fascinating harmonies, blending together Western classical, Indian, and Sri Lankan instruments, including the bamboo flute, rabana, and sitar. Loved by Western music lovers in Colombo, the symphony was rejected by leading oriental music pandits, such as the dean of the College for Aesthetic Studies in Colombo, who mocked Khemadasa’s conducting, writing “Why is he up there? He doesn’t even have an instrument.”

During the early 1970s Khemadasa went to the USSR for an international composers’ conference, where he performed “Sinhala New Year.” He came in contact with many new musical trends which influenced his future works, especially his first choral work, “She,” a haunting lyrical piece twenty minutes long. In 1978, he wrote his last symphony, “Mother of My Time,” a tribute to Alan Perera, his mother, who was then 93. His program notes at that time read: “A mother lives through her son’s life like a fire. Her love, compassion, and expectations are trapped in the flow of his life. May you, my mother, live another ten years to see your dreams come true in me.” Unfortunately, Alan Perera died three days before the symphony premiered. Khemadasa conducted the symphony as his mother’s funeral pyre was still burning down to ashes.

Khemadasa established the Khemadasa Foundation in 1993, and his Institute gave free schooling in music and performance to Sri Lankan youths, especially from rural and underprivileged areas of the country. The youths came to Colombo and formed the chorus which performed Khemadasa’s symphonies, operas, and other major works. Many of these singers became the country’s top vocalists, and many still perform Khemadasa’s works in Colombo even two years after his death.