This is a Sinhala-language title from Godage International Publishers. The text is in Sinhala throughout, with no English translation, so it will suit readers who are comfortable in the language — students of the Sri Lankan performing arts, teachers, performers, and collectors building a Sinhala-language shelf on traditional theatre.
The title names kolam, the masked drama of Sri Lanka's southwestern coastal belt, in which carved and painted wooden masks carry a succession of stock figures and comic types through episodes announced by a drummer and a narrator. It is one of the island's distinct folk theatre forms, performed alongside — and quite separately from — the ritual traditions of the low country and the dance of the Kandyan highlands.
K. G. Amarasekara writes in Sinhala on the traditional performing arts, and his work is catalogued by the National Library of Sri Lanka. Much of it concerns puppet theatre: he is the author of Sri Lankave rukada natya, Rukada natya kalava and Rukada natya pitapath bhavithaya, the last of these on puppet-play scripts and their use, as well as Natya ha ranga kalava 1 on drama and stagecraft. He is a different writer from the novelist Gunadasa Amarasekara, with whom the surname is sometimes confused.
Godage International Publishers is an established Colombo house with a long list in Sinhala and English, and its catalogue includes a substantial body of writing on Sri Lankan folk arts, history and culture — the kind of subject matter that rarely reaches print outside the island.
For buyers abroad, the practical point bears repeating: this is a Sinhala book. If you read Sinhala and your interest is in the traditional theatre of Sri Lanka, it belongs with the rest of Amarasekara's writing on the subject. If you do not, the masks and the form itself are better approached through an illustrated English study.
- Author: K G Amarasekara
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 152
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