The Broken Promise of the Lankan Cinema: Asoka & Swarna’s Thrilling-Melodrama — Part IV

“Dr. Ranee Sridharan,’ you say. ‘Nice to see you again.’ The woman in the white sari places a thumb in her ledger book, adjusts her spectacles and smiles up at you. ‘You may call me Ranee. Helping you is what Iam assigned to do,’ she says. ‘You have seven moons. And you have already waisted one.’” The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (London: Sort of Books, 2022. p84)

- by Laleen Jayamanne

Swarna was clearly fascinated by Manorani Sarwanamuttu. She has noted the striking,

angled close-up photograph of Manorani’s face, eyes closed, head thrown back, dressed in a black sari with a large white print and her hair held in place as usual with a spray of Jasmine, at the public cremation of Richard’s body on an open pyre. A brilliant public theatrical riposte, fearless. I think Lucien de Zoysa was standing beside her.

Swarna mentions a detail she observed during one of her four visits to meet Manorani, beginning in 1996, dressed with her hair tied in a low knot adorned with Jasmine flowers as Manorani usually did, as some Tamil women do. She said that she saw Manorani ‘gulp down her tears (kandulu gilagatta).’ Her response to what she saw clearly puzzled her as a Sinhala mother. So, her response in enacting her as Rani was to offer the opposite in her portrayal of Manorani. In her rendition of Asoka’s Rani (Queen) she indulged in a limited melodramatic gestural repertoire, perhaps imagining that Manorani had ‘repressed’ her sorrow. Therefore, she, Swarna, was doing her a favour by finally enabling the ‘return of the repressed,’ through her Melodramatic rendition of her Rani.

A Cosmetic Tamilness

The red pottu functioned as the seal for the white scroll invitation to the premier and in the advertisement to dot the ‘I’, in Rani. As well, a close-up of Rani pasting on a red pottu after having delivered a baby, emphasises it as a marker of difference. This is a cosmetic use of Tamilness without any idea of the multi-ethnic Ceylonese social milieu in which she grew up. Used adjectively, ‘Cosmetic’ implies superficial measures to make something appear better, more attractive, or more impressive but doesn’t change anything structurally.