ඉන්ද්රානි විජේබණ්ඩාර
5 songs performed
Indrani Wijebandara (ඉන්ද්රානි විජේබණ්ඩාර), known after marriage as Indrani Senaratne, was a Sri Lankan singer and cinema playback vocalist whose career stretched across more than six decades, from the early 1950s into the 2010s. With her husband, the singer and composer Sisira Senaratne, she was part of the wave of artists who reshaped Sinhala popular and film music in the years after independence.
She was born on 15 July 1935 in Borella, in what was then British Ceylon. Her father, M. M. W. Wijayabandara, worked in the Department of Health, and she was schooled at Musaeus College and Devi Balika Vidyalaya in Colombo. She began performing professionally around 1953, when radio and the new Sinhala cinema were opening the first real platforms for local singers.
Her screen breakthrough came with Rekava (1956), Lester James Peries’s landmark debut feature, for which she recorded Sudu Sanda Eliye (සුදු සඳ එළියේ). From there she sang for close to forty Sinhala films and recorded extensively for Columbia Records. She worked with leading composers and lyricists of the era, including Sunil Shantha, Mahagama Sekara, Karunaratne Abeysekara, and W. D. Amaradeva, and her recordings ranged from film numbers to the gentle children’s songs she became most loved for.
Several of her best-remembered recordings are children’s and devotional pieces that remain in circulation among Sri Lankan families and the diaspora. Alongside her husband she toured internationally with the “Sisindra” concert series, a partnership that defined much of her later public life. The songs by Indrani Wijebandara hosted on Lyrics-lk include:
Indrani Wijebandara was recognised with the Deepashika Award (1959), a Pioneering Award at the Presidential Awards (2000), and the Rana Thisara Award (2007), among other honours. She died on 23 June 2019 in Colombo at the age of 83. Her recordings, particularly the children’s songs, continue to be sung and shared, and the Sisira and Indrani partnership is remembered as one of the enduring musical pairings of twentieth-century Sri Lanka.
Every Sinhala lyric, composition, and song credit by Indrani Wijebandara.