Master Sir (Panam Aten) Lyrics by Neela Wickramasinghe

Film: Kalu Diyadahara (1975)

(You raised me on just eight panams a day,
even though I could barely put a fistful of rice in my child’s mouth.
Master Sir, will you give me the place that is rightfully mine?
Oh sir, won’t you feel some pity for me?)…//

This tug of war going on between us,
will it ever come to an end?
Oh sir, will the two of us ever be friends?
Will that day ever dawn?…

I still remember how the white man beat us and crushed us,
how we talked on our knees, gasping for breath, fallen low.
Master Sir, give me the place that is rightfully mine.
Oh sir, please treat me with kindness…

This tug of war between us….
(Will that day ever dawn?)..//

This is a working man’s plea, sung to the boss he calls “Master Sir.” It comes from the 1975 film Kalu Diyadahara, and the voice is a laborer who has spent his life serving under someone with power over him, asking for nothing more than the dignity and the fair place he has earned. There is no love story here. It is about a poor man and the master he both depends on and quietly resents, and the long, unfair distance between them.

The whole song hangs on a few sharp images. “Eight panams a day” (a panam was a tiny old coin) tells you in one line how little he was paid, so little that he could hardly find a fistful of rice for his own child. That fistful of rice, “bath mitak,” is the plainest measure of survival in a Sri Lankan home, and saying he could “barely” manage it says everything about how hard the poverty was. The relationship itself he calls “kamba adilla,” a tug of war, the rope-pulling contest of village fairs. Two sides hauling against each other with no end in sight, that is how he sees the master and the worker, locked in a struggle neither one seems able to stop.

Underneath the request for fairness there is real history. When he remembers “how the white man beat us and crushed us,” the “sudda,” the white colonial master, he is reaching back to the plantation and colonial days, when laborers spoke to their bosses on their knees, breathless and afraid. That memory of being made small is what gives the song its weight. He is not just asking for a raise. He is asking to no longer be treated as someone beneath a fellow human being.

What makes it ache is how gently he asks. Every verse turns back to the same soft, almost pleading question, “won’t you feel some pity,” “will the two of us ever be friends,” “will that day ever dawn.” He is not demanding, he is hoping, and the song leaves you holding that hope along with him, the simple wish of a poor man to be seen as an equal and finally given the place that was always his.