රුක්මිණි දේවි
21 songs performed
Rukmani Devi (රුක්මණී දේවී, also romanized Rukmany Devi), born Daisy Rasammah Daniels, was a Sri Lankan singer and film actress widely remembered as “the Nightingale of Sri Lanka”. She was the leading female voice of the gramophone era and one of the foundational figures of early Sinhala cinema and popular song.
Rukmani Devi was born on 15 January 1923 at Ramboda in the Nuwara Eliya district, into a Tamil Colombo Chetty Christian family. Her father worked on a plantation and her mother was a teacher. She came to performance through the stage as a child, and adopted the name Rukmani Devi as her career in music and drama took shape.
She made her first gramophone recording in the late 1930s for His Master’s Voice, working with the musician H. W. Rupasinghe. That early catalogue included the devotional standard Siri Budhdha Gaya Vihare, one of the recordings most associated with her voice. Over the following decades she recorded prolifically and became Sri Lanka’s foremost female playback and gramophone singer.
Rukmani Devi also moved from the stage to the screen, appearing in close to a hundred films across her lifetime and ranking among the first heroines of Sinhala cinema. On screen and on record she often sang the songs her characters performed, blending the careers of actress and singer in a way few of her contemporaries did.
Her recorded work ranges from devotional pieces to film love songs and lullabies. The lullaby Doi Doiya Putha and the romantic numbers Adaraya Nisa and Manike Obe Sinahawe remain among the songs listeners still seek out under both the Rukmani Devi and Rukmany Devi spellings.
Rukmani Devi was married to the dramatist and actor Eddie Jayamanne and lived in the Negombo area. She died on 28 October 1978 in a road accident while returning from a musical performance, a loss that drew enormous public mourning. She was posthumously honoured with the Sarasaviya Lifetime Achievement Award in 1979. For Sri Lankan listeners and the diaspora, the recordings of Rukmani Devi (Rukmany Devi) endure as a touchstone of the country’s early recorded music.
Every Sinhala lyric, composition, and song credit by Rukmani Devi.