Sanda Hiru Tharu (Api Marenne Na) Lyrics by Victor Rathnayake

As long as the moon, the sun and the stars endure, we will not die
We are deathless beings of boundless courage, the boon of immortality is ours
We will not die, we will not die
We will not die

In time we fall away from here

In time we fall away from here
We are driven off, and we rise and flourish again

We are driven off, and we rise and flourish again
The lineage takes a different shape
And we come back to this world once more
Apart from that, on no day at all
do we die

Those who walk behind the plough

Those who walk behind the plough
will rise up against us
will rise up against us
Borders, boundaries, fences, none of these
belong to us
Even if our breath slips away by mistake
we will not be mourned

This is one of Victor Rathnayake’s defiant, philosophical anthems, a song built around a single proud claim: “we will not die.” It is not a love song or a personal lament. It is the voice of a people, or of a movement and an idea, declaring that they cannot really be wiped out. The “we” here is collective. Read it as ordinary working people, the ones who walk behind the plough, and the spirit of struggle that carries on through them from one generation to the next.

The opening line ties their survival to the most permanent things the old Sinhala imagination knows: the moon, the sun and the stars. As long as those endure in the sky, the song says, we endure too. Calling themselves deathless beings who hold “amara waram,” the boon of immortality, is a deliberate borrowing from myth and legend, where gods and great beings are granted everlasting life. The singer claims that same gift, not for one body but for a whole people.

The middle of the song explains how that immortality actually works, and this is where the Buddhist idea of rebirth quietly does the heavy lifting. Yes, individuals fall away in time, they are driven off, they pass on. But the line keeps going. The “pelapatha,” the lineage or bloodline, simply changes its shape and returns to this world again, the way Sri Lankans understand a life as one turn in saṃsāra, the long cycle of rebirth. So death is never an ending here. Each person who is pushed out only rises and flourishes somewhere else, and the people as a whole come back, over and over. Apart from that ordinary turning of the wheel, the song insists, there is no day on which we truly die.

The closing turn is the sharpest. Those who labour on the land, the plough-folk, will stand up against whoever opposes them, and the song shrugs off the very things that usually divide and pen people in: borders, boundaries, fences, none of it is theirs to bow to. The last image is almost grim comfort. Even if a breath is lost, even by accident, there will be no mourning, because in this vision a single death changes nothing. What you are left holding is a stubborn, almost serene confidence: the body can fall, but the people, and the idea they carry, go on.