The Broken Promise of Lankan Cinema: Asoka and Swarna's Thrilling Melodrama – Part I

The very first Sinhala film Broken Promise (1947), produced in a studio in South India, was a plucky endeavour on the part of the multi-ethnic group who powered it.

- LALEEN JAYAMANNE

Directed by B.A.W. Jayamanne, it introduced the classically trained Tamil singer and stage actress in the Minerva Theatre Company, Daisy Rasamma Daniels, as Rukmani Devi, (who was the only real star of the Lankan cinema at the height of its mass popularity), to an avid cinephile audience of Ceylon who had grown up enjoying Hindi, Tamil and Hollywood films. The producer of the film, S. M. Nayagam, an Indian of Tamil ethnicity, skilfully negotiated the production of the first Lankan film in Sinhala in his South Indian film studio in Madurai because Ceylon had neither the film infrastructure nor the technical know-how to do so. A Tamil singer/actress and a Sinhala director were the Ceylonese 'capital', both of whom had to learn on the run, the craft of filmmaking.

Rukmani Devi and Swarna Mallawarachchi

There is a rather strange parallel between the Tamil Rukmani Devi, playing Sinhala women throughout her entire career with impeccable professionalism, great devotion and love, and the Sinhala Swarna Mallawarachchi, playing a Tamil woman for the first time, in Rani, but quite late in her career. In terms of their careers as independent, self-made film actors these are, undoubtedly, professional achievements of cultural significance for our multi-ethnic, highly stratified, Island nation with its 28-year war. But Rukmani Devi's career began with the very inception of Lankan cinema when she was quite young and ended all too soon, when she was no longer young enough to play lead roles. However, she continued to earn a living singing at live carnival variety shows, until her tragic death in her 50s.