Chapter 8 - The Kandyan Kingdom

[Full title: Between the Portuguese and the Nāyakas: the many faces of the Kandyan Kingdom, 1591–1765]

[by Gananath Obeyesekere]

This chapter explores the signs of a cosmopolitan court culture that flourished in the kingdom of Kandy, and in particular at the royal court of its capi-tal Senkadagala, from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries.^[1] The Kandyan kingdom resulted from a secession led by Sēnasammata Vikramabāhu (r. 1469–1511), the ‘founder ruler’ of the kande uḍa pas raṭa (‘the five regions of the hill country’) from the realm of Kōṭṭe. For much of the sixteenth century, Kandy stood in a field of tension between Kōṭṭe, Sītāvaka and the Portuguese, taking part in numerous alliances and often unpredictable diplomatic games.^[2]

Catholicism was brought into the kingdom by its rulers as part of their strategy to gain full independence from the lowland kings. Under Jayavīra Baṇḍāra (r. 1511–52) Catholic friars appeared at court and some conversions took place. Karalliyadde Baṇḍāra (r. 1552–82) publicly embraced Catholicism, but ended up fleeing the kingdom with, among others, his infant daughter Kusumāsana Devi in his retinue. The princess was soon baptized by the Portuguese and called Dona Catarina. After a period of great political turmoil involving a Portuguese-supported military campaign in the Kandyan highlands, Dona Catarina was cap-tured by the forces of Vimaladharmasūriya I (r. 1590–1604) in 1594 and the king espoused her as his chief queen. Vimaladharmasūriya, originally known as Konappu Baṇḍāra, was the son of a distinguished aristocrat from the province known as hatara kōrale (‘four districts’, roughly equivalent to today’s Kegalla District) who was cruelly murdered by Rājasiṃha I of Sītāvaka. Consequently Konappu had to flee to Portuguese Goa where he became a Catholic convert as Dom João de Áustria.^[3] Such conversions were quite common in the Kōṭṭe kingdom and also among the rulers of Kandy prior to Vimaladharmasūriya.

Consequently there is no way in which one could in hindsight decide their ‘sincerity’. Vimaladharma means ‘of the pure doctrine’, apparently a name bestowed on him by monks possibly unsure of his previous antecedents while sūriya refers to the ‘dynasty of the Sun’.

A profound yet creative contradiction was at the heart of Vimaladharmasūriya’s reign as the first consecrated king of Kandy. As a Buddhist ruler resisting Portuguese attacks, and also attempting to cement his position against the traditionally unruly elite of Kandy, Vimaladharmasūriya sought the recovery of the Tooth Relic and, to house it, had a ‘two-s toreyed, superb relic temple [i.e. relic house] erected on an exquisitely beautiful piece of ground in the neighborhood of the royal palace’.^[4] Following the example of previous kings, he publicly demonstrated his faith by going on pilgrimage to Śri Pāda, the holy footprint of the Buddha. He also sent a delegation to Rakkhanga (Arakan in Burma) to bring monks to Sri Lanka to revitalize Buddhism, owing to a lapse in the higher ordination (upasampadā). When they arrived within the sīma or ordination boundary, the king himself ‘led the bhikkhus [and] had the ceremony of admission to the Order performed in this Great bhikkhu [monk] community on many of the sons of good family and thus protected the Order of the Enlightened One’.^[5] However, quite unlike what later historians have come to see as Lankan pat riotism, Vimaladharmasūriya’s reign was also culturally and politically very complex. Kandyan society in the early seventeenth century reflects a modernity that was not permitted to fully develop in later times. Dona Catarina herself, although usually listed by Sri Lankan historians as Kusumāsana Devi, never gave up her Catholic faith when serving as queen consort. According to an early Dutch source, she ‘visit[ed] no pagodas’ at all, a potential sign of Catholic intransigence, while her prolonged presence at the heart of the Kandyan court certainly alerts us to the complexity of the situation.^[6] From a Buddhist perspective, Catholicism could be treated as an addition to the existing religious landscape. The openness in principle and in practice of many Buddhists to the adoption of new religious faiths is well-known. As Kitsiri Malagoda pointed out in respect of conversions in the early British period, one could become a Christian nominally but remain at heart a Buddhist.^[7] Jesus can be easily absorbed into Lankan culture as Viṣṇu, Saman or any other of the adopted Hindu gods; and the Virgin Mary easily became one of the many mother goddesses adored by Lankans, often identified by Sinhala Catholics with the goddess Pattini. The missionaries were aware of these overlaps and, while hoping that in the next generation or two the descendants of the first converts would become ‘genuine’ Christians, they also learned to live with such dilemmas on the ground, especially where they lacked military backing by the empire. The very word used to designate what we now call ‘conversion’–kulavädī–is polysemic. It certainly refers to the act of being baptized, but implies more generally the joining of a new group, caste or faith.^[8]

Differences in religion aside, Dona Catarina and Vimaladharmasūriya were familiar with Portuguese customs, to which they had both been exposed during their time away from Kandy. And yet Vimaladharmasūriya’s openness to Western ways of living is something that we would hardly know of if we had to rely exclusively on Pāli and Sinhala sources. It is the Dutch accounts of the time that off er the most remarkably cosmopolitan panorama of Kandy. According to Phillippus Baldeaus, the Lankan king ‘ridiculed the idea of all religious tenets, permitting everyone a free exercise of it according to their own will and pleasure’.^[9] The Dutch envoy Sebald de Weert famously mentions how he saw the king hold ing ‘a gold cup full of wine made from the grapes that grow in his house’.^[10] The Spilbergen embassy of 1602 on visiting the court recorded the presence of ‘many Spanish chairs [and] a table on which all was arranged in the Christian manner’.

It further noted that Vimaladharmasūriya had ‘all new buildings constructed according to the Christian style’. The king himself took some of the Dutchmen into his courtly service and ‘even began to learn to play several instruments’.^[11] Spilbergen was brought into the ‘chamber of the Queen where she sat with her children, the Prince and the Princess, who were all dressed in the Christian man-ner’.^[12] This of course was in part to please the guests, but it is likely to reflect broader changes in the material and visual culture of the Kandyan court. As Paul E. Pieris summed it up, ‘for a century Portuguese ideas molded the fashions of the Court at Senkaḍagala’.^[13] In fact, the preference for certain elements of Western fashions remained evident under Narēndrasinha, the last of the patrilineal line of Vimaladharmasūriya I, who ‘used to wear white wigs […] with the necessary powder and pomade the Dutch sent him’.^[14]

In contrast with some of the later Nāyaka rulers, Vimaladharmasūriya cultivated a remarkably open attitude towards foreign envoys at court. Distinguished guests were permitted into the inner chamber of the palace to meet the royal family. Of course ambassadors had to pay homage to the king, but not in the abject ceremonial style that the British and Dutch ambassadors had to endure especially during and after the reign of the great Nāyaka king Kīrti Śri Rājasiṃha in the mid-eighteenth century.^[15] As the Dutchman Sebald De Weert noted, he greeted Vimaladharmasūriya ‘in the manner of our country, with one knee on the ground’, and was then permitted to see his children.^[16] There is a beautiful picture of the king shaking hands in Western style with Spilbergen.^[17] And De Weert, the next Dutch envoy says that when the king was with some of his counsellors he tried to kiss the king’s hand as a token of honour but the king ‘took me in his arms and squeezed me heartily, so that he made my ribs crack’.^[18] One of his reputed actions surely anticipates our own time when he informed De Weert ‘that he was prepared to send his own son, when of suitable age, to Europe, to be trained under Prince Mauritz [Prince of Orange]’.^[19] According to Phillippus Baldaeus, the king was ‘in every sense of the word a finished courtier’.^[20]

When the Spilbergen account places emphasis on the fashionable outfits of the men and women of Kandy,^[21] this naturally refers to the elite of the capital in the first place, rather than the general population as it was described by the English captive Robert Knox.^[22] Even so, village women dressed in style when visiting family and friends. Wine and foreign foods may have been served at court, but ordinary people, like all Sinhalas of the time, were ‘not allowed to eat bull’s or cow’s or buff alo meat nor can they drink any wine’.^[23] What we do not know is whether court culture had an influence in other important cities, especially Bintänna-Alutnuvara, the alternative residence of the Kandyan kings, and the location of the great pilgrimage centre at Mahiyangana.^[24] In these urban centres, house and dress fashions were certainly at a premium, following not only Western but also other Asian models. Much of this had to do with the growth of international trade, which was in the hands of South Indian Muslim merchants beginning to establish communities in the Kandyan area. This in turn had linguistic consequences, because no trade or businesses could be conducted without the knowledge of Tamil and, to some extent, Portuguese–two widely diff used linguae francae across much of South and Southeast Asia. Even those who did not wear expensive foreign clothes would thus have come into contact with the wider flow of cultural goods.

The Kandyan policy of toleration and cultural cosmopolitanism was fraught, tense, and perhaps even paradoxical for a kingdom struggling so fiercely against the Portuguese. It was nevertheless a thriving reality and continued by Senarat (r. 1604–35). This former Buddhist monk in fact married the widowed Dona Catarina.^[25] Both he and his son Rājasiṃha II (r. 1635–87), in spite of their political hostility to the Portuguese, continued a policy of religious toleration.^[26]

Senarat gave shelter to about 4,000 Muslims expelled from various parts of the coastal lowlands by the Portuguese, allowing them to settle on the East Coast.^[27] His successor, in turn, took in Catholic refugees persecuted in the lowlands by the Dutch.^[28]

It should be remembered that, under the influence of his mother, Rājasiṃha II was educated in his early childhood by Christian friars. He ‘could read, write and speak Portuguese fluently, and was familiar with the manners and customs of many European peoples’.^[29] It seems that a clear distinction must be made again, in this specific context, between Catholic friars serving as the king’s teachers and the Portuguese colonials fighting Kandy from the lowlands. Unlike in the Portuguese territories, friars in Kandy began to recognize that the dominant religion was Buddhism and that, beyond the boundaries of the Estado da Índia–the Portuguese Empire in the East–they lacked political clout. Further, we must remember that the Catholic Church was not in practice a unitary organization. While some priests carried the full set of colonial prejudices, others could act more diplomatically even without abandoning in principle an exclusivist notion of religion. It is thus logical that, while Vimaladharmasūriya I, Senerat and Rājasiṃha II were unrelenting in their hatred of Portuguese rule, this attitude did not necessarily extend to Catholicism as such; that is, to Catholicism as an intellectually provocative religious culture introduced by educated priests.

It is, again, the European sources that give us the most vivid depictions of reli gious and ethnic diversity in mid-to late seventeenth-century Kandy. Spilbergen says that, ‘among these Singales there live many Moors, Turks and other heathens, who all have special laws. Brahmos [Brahmins] are there in large numbers, who are very superstitious and respected by the other nations’.^[30] Numerous Hindu ascetic wanderers such as āṇḍis and paṇṭārams carried their own brands of faith throughout the country. Spilbergen mentions how he ‘was received [in] the city of Candy by some thousand armed soldiers of all nationalities, such as Turcken (Turks), Mooren (Moors), Singales, Caff eros (Kaffi rs) and renegade Portuguese’.^[31]

Knox tells us that many Englishmen captured during the reign of Rājasiṃha II were kept as ‘prisoners’ in the villages close to the city, naturally failing to mention that they, like a number of Frenchmen and perhaps some Danes, enjoyed substantial liberties.^[32] Rājasiṃha II was especially keen to have foreigners in his kingdom for a variety of reasons: as servants, as interpreters, craftsmen, soldiers, mechanics and gunners. He also seems to have appreciated–like many other Asian rulers–the variety of humanity in his domain, just as he loved to have a good stable and many animals and birds in his menagerie.^[33] As H. W. Codrington nicely put it, ‘luckless Europeans as fell into his hands [were treated] as curiosities, much in the same way as the lion and other animals sent him by the Dutch’.^[34]

After Rājasiṃha II, there are some signs of a regime shift under his son Vimaladharmasūriya II (r. 1687–1 707) and his grandson Narēndrasinha (r. 1707–39), but no straightforward rupture. The developments are best understood against the backdrop of Dutch conquest in the lowlands formerly held by the Portuguese, including almost all of the island’s ports (the last Portuguese ports to fall were Colombo in 1656, and Jaff na and Mannar in 1658). The Dutch might have been religious liberals in Holland, but not in Sri Lanka.^[35] Here, the Dutch conquest suff ocated Catholicism in the low country, generating a remarkable clandestine revival under Father Joseph Vaz, a Catholic Brahmin from Goa, and his Oratorian mission.^[36] Kandyan attitudes towards Catholicism after Vimaladharmasūriya II cannot be understood without taking into account this key development, including the enormously successful apostolic mission of Vaz.

Father Vaz’s missionary outreach embraced a vast area, and there is little doubt that today’s Catholic population in the Kandyan kingdom and much of the low country owe considerably to the toleration of this apostolic work by the Kandyan kings.^[37] Vimaladharmasūriya II apparently ignored the treaty of 1638 between the Dutch and his father Rājasiṃha II that stated that the monarch ‘should not allow Roman Catholic monks and priests and other ecclesiastics to domicile themselves in his dominions’.^[38] When one of the missionaries died, Vimaladharmasūriya II permitted him to be buried in Christian style in the church in Kandy, within the city limits itself, an action that certainly upset the Dutch and might have been con-sidered outrageous in later Nāyaka times. But it is also telling that, along with his support of Catholicism and the many Indian ascetic sects, Vimaladharmasūriya II remained concerned with the welfare of the sāsana or the Buddhist dispensa-tion and civilizational order. A splendid account of his Buddhist activities is found in chapter 97 of the Cūḷavaṃsa, the overall content of which is confirmed by a Catholic report from 1701.^[39]

More than Vimaladharmasūriya, it has been his son Narēndrasinha who has received a particularly bad press regarding his Buddhist credentials. Lorna Dewaraja, for example, has it that there was public discontent about this ruler’s ‘inadequate support of Buddhism’. The distinguished historian adds that although he did ‘at times show a superficial interest in Buddhist art and literature […] no whole-h earted attempt was made to resuscitate the most vital organization, the Sangha’.^[40] The historiographical problem at stake is, however, not so much the connection of discontent with a lack of Buddhist patronage. The main issue is how resentment against the king is naturally assumed to have been ‘caused’ by the latter’s ‘partiality’ for Catholics and the alien Nāyakas. The fact of the matter is that resentment against kings by rival factions at court is hardly exceptional. I would say that tolerance for another religion ought to be considered a compliment to Narēndrasinha as an expression of his Buddhist and cosmopolitan values that commenced with the reign of Vimaladharmasūriya I.

As so many other Lankan rulers did, Narēndrasinha supported the presence of various religions in his realm. He does indeed seem to have known Father Joseph Vaz since childhood and regarded him with some veneration.^[41] He also conversed with his disciple Father Jacome Gonҫalves, admittedly a much more problematic figure.^[42] Yet like other Kandyan kings he was highly educated and must have had regular conversations with the sāmaneras he housed in his palace premises, as well as with his teachers who were educated, albeit not fully ordained monks. As a monarch he could hardly have avoided consulting his Brahmin purōhitas (counsellors) at court. However, it is time to move beyond such categories as ‘patriotic’ versus ‘unpatriotic’, or ‘Buddhist’ versus ‘non-Buddhist’ in such complex settings. Let us revive, for the sake of a nuanced picture, Narēndrasinha’s Buddhist persona as expressed in the Cūḷavaṃsa. If this monarch was a crypto-Catholic, he would hardly have provided accommodation to Buddhist novices in his palace premises in Kuṇḍasāle and performed so many other acts of Buddhist merit-making. He continued the grand tradition of giving alms to monks and had religious texts copied for their benefit. ‘His heart was grieved’ when he noted that the Palace of the Tooth Relic his father had erected in the capital had fallen into disrepair, and set about rebuilding it into a beautiful two-storey structure ‘resplendent with all kinds of brilliant ornaments’.^[43]

Narēndrasinha’s artistic patronage included support for a graceful roof and the depiction of thirty-two jatakas, actually listed in the Cūḷavaṃsa.^[44] Earlier in his reign we are told that he went to Mahiyangana-Bintänna (i.e., Alutnuvara), where his grandfather Rājasiṃha was born, and off ered several pūjas. Mahiyangana was one of the great pilgrimage centres and palace complexes and according to Buddhist myth it was here that the Buddha banished the demons and cleared a space for Buddhism. It was such an important place that Narēndrasinha went twice again to Mahiyangana at the head of a great army (or following) where he ‘celebrated a great sacrificial festival’.^[45] He went on pilgrimage to Śri Pada and also once to Anurādhapura.^[46] He supported Viṣṇu by endowing the god’s shrine in Kandy with extensive maintenance villages, just as he might have supported Christ as a kind of Viṣṇu. He constructed a rampart or wall to enclose the bodhi tree, the Buddhist temples and the shrine for the god Nātha, the future Buddha Maitreya in the city.^[47] According to Codrington, the king also built the Mahā Dēvāle for Viṣṇu in Kandy in 1731 but if this author is right, this might mean that either he did extensive reconstruction of the already existent Viṣṇu shrine or that the present Mahā Dēvāle is the work of his later years.^[48]

Religious patronage in Kandy was not a matter of either supporting Buddhism or going against it. Rather, it involved a skilful combination of patronage extended to many diff erent currents of thought and groups, as indeed was the case at many other South Asian courts. To understand this complexity, it is crucial that we further observe the connection with the Nāyakas of Madurai and its impact on Kandyan kingship.^[49]

In her important chapter on the Nāyakkar dynasty and its origin, Dewaraja sums up what many historians think:

Śri Vīra Pārakrama Narendrasiṃha, known to his subjects as Kuṇḍasāle deyyo, the last of the royal Sinhalese line of Sēnasammata Vikramabāhu, died in the year 1739. His brother-in-law who hailed from the outskirts of Madura in South India ascended the throne of Kandy as Śri Vijaya Rājasiṃha (1739–1747). He and the three kings who ruled after him until 1815, constitute the Nāyakkar dynasty, so called because of their association with the Nāyaks of Madura. In Kandy they were aliens, not only in race but in language, religion and culture as well.^[50]

Sri Lankan historians often assume that the presence of the Nāyaka dynasty resulted in the ‘Dravidianization’ of Sri Lankan Buddhist culture. This is Dewaraja’s position, too, although she recognizes that the Cūḷavaṃsa unre servedly praises the Nāyaka kings. As Dewaraja further admits, there were only a few rebellions, and ‘we also have the unanimous verdict of all our sources that all the Nāyakkar rulers except the last were popular with their subjects’.^[51] But if the Nāyakas were ‘aliens’ in respect of race, language, religion and culture, why their remarkable popularity? To deal with this issue we must move away from observing the Nāyaka kings as simple foreigners, to exploring the impact of the Nāyakas on Kandyan society against the background of what we have observed already.

Long before Nāyaka rule began in Sri Lanka, the Kandyan kings had polit ical and marital relations with the Nāyakas. Evidence in this regard is abundant for the reigns of Rājasiṃha II, his son Vimaladharmasūriya II and his grandson Narēndrasinha.^[52] Military cooperation may have been an early trigger, although a longer tradition of Lankan rulers seeking support in the Madurai-Tanjore region against Kōṭṭe and the Portuguese has been pointed out.^[53] Dewaraja notes that ‘no less than a thousand men from Madura fought for Rājasiṃha [the second of that name] in the victorious battle of Gannōruva [against the Portuguese] in 1638’.^[54] Some of these would have married Sinhala women, just as other immigrants and foreign settlers did. It should be remembered, incidentally, that the Nāyakas were not Tamils but Telugu speakers, vaḍuga (northerners) originally from Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Madurai itself had important historical connotations for the Sinhalas, whose ancestral hero and founder, Vijaya, having discarded his demon-wife Kuveṇī, espoused a princess from Madurai as his mahēsi along with other Madurai women as wives for his followers. Both in mythic and practical terms, the Nāyakas of Madurai were hardly aliens and therefore marital alliances with them could be seen as a further cementing of political and mythic relations with Madurai.

The first marital alliance recorded in the Cūḷavaṃsa happened under king Rājasiṃha II, who ‘brought royal maidens [kaññā] from the city of Madhurā’.^[55] What is striking is that this marriage alliance must have occurred when the not-able king Tirumala (r. 1623–59) reigned in Madurai. The overlap with Rājasiṃha’s reign gave the two plenty of time to contract an alliance against the Portuguese, who were a potential threat to Madurai’s integrity on grounds of their proselytism among the Paravas and other castes of the ‘Fishery Coast’. It is thus likely that Rājasiṃha obtained one or more of Tirumala’s daughters as his own mahēsi or mahēsis. Alternatively, the Cūḷavaṃsa statement that Rājasiṃha married royal maidens could be interpreted to mean that he might have brought home daugh-ters of Madurai rājas and married some of them as secondary queens known as yakaḍa dōliya in Kandyan kingship, in contrast with ran dōliya, the chief queen or queens, a metaphorical distinction between palanquins (dōliya) of gold (ran) and iron (yakaḍa). Multiple chief queens or mahēsis (ran dōliya) were an acceptable Sri Lankan royal custom.

Rājasiṃha’s son Vimaladharmasūriya II (1687–1707) continued the Madurai connection in respect of marriage. The Cūḷavaṃsa states that he ‘took to wife the daughter of the queen who was brought from Madhura, and made her his chief queen’, implying that the king married his father’s mahēsi’s daughter.^[56]

As for Vimaladharmasūriya’s son Narēndrasinha, Dewaraja is right to point to the offi cial negotiations conducted in the Madurai kingdom by Lankan emissaries, as described in the Dutch sources.^[57] After a first unsuccessful mission around 1706 (when the powerful Madurai regent Mangammal was about to relinquish her rule to her grandson, the impetuous Chokkanātha), a second mission succeeded: the Kandyan side ‘fetched princesses from the town of Madura and made them first mahēsis’.^[58] Intriguingly the Cūḷavaṃsa wording implies that Narēndrasinha may have married ‘princesses’ belonging not necessarily to the ruling family sensu stricto. They may have been from a lateral line or even an unrelated, yet politically influential, family of the complex Madurai polity. What we do know for certain is that the princesses came with their own retinues of male and female relations, and that the impact of all these individuals at the court in Kandy must have been substantial, both ‘biologically’ and culturally. South Indian connections were, in essence, an integral part of the life of the Kandyan rulers through much of the seventeenth century already.

Virtually every Sri Lankan historian refers to Narēndrasinha, the son of Vimaladharmasūriya II, as the ‘last Sinhala king’. It may thus be no surprise that Lorna Dewaraja should point, as we have seen already, to his ‘inadequate support of Buddhism’. The reality, however, is much more complex, and best understood if we observe religious matters as a part of the wider power struggles in the kingdom. Take the much-t outed issue of an absence of fully ordained (upasampadā) monks. The first king to bring in monks to renew the ordination had been, as mentioned above, Vimaladharmasūriya I. Vimaladharmasūriya II again sent, in 1697 and with Dutch assistance, an embassy ‘to the country of Rakkhanga [Arakan] and invited the bhikkhu community with the thera [monk] Santana at the head’.^[59] Thirty-three monks arrived from Burma who, on the king’s orders, conferred the higher ordination on thirty-three ‘sons of good family’, and initiated as novices (sāmanera) another 120 men.^[60]

By contrast, Rājasiṃha II and Narēndrasinha allowed full ordination to lapse again and made no moves to renew it. Diffi culties in dispatching ships across a Dutch-dominated Bay of Bengal may have played a role, but certainly more significant was the dependence of both kings on powerful non-ordained monks known as ganinnānses, those who did not wear the yellow robe but instead wore white or some other sartorial marker. Many belonged to the aristocracy and owned large estates, some served in the courts and as diplomats (for example, a certain Kobbäkaḍuve Ganebaṇḍāra served repeatedly in negotiations with the Dutch), and a few even contracted marriages.^[61] Their knowledge of the doctrine was variable, although in theory they were supposed to be proficient in the Ten Precepts (uposatha) obligatory for novices, know the basics of Buddhist ethics and the main jātakas, and perform Buddhist rituals for lay folk. If the Cūḷavaṃsa categorically states that Narēndrasinha, at the start of his reign, ‘showed care for the bhikkhus who had been admitted to the Order during his father’s life’ and also ‘had many sons of good family submitted in faith to the ceremony of world-renunciation’,^[62] then we have to ask ourselves why, if not for political reasons, he should have allowed ordination to lapse again by around 1714. In my view the young king, in order to consolidate his position, was forced to compromise with the established ganinnānses. This is the best possible explanation for an otherwise inexplicable action of the king in 1715, when he ordered the execu-tion of an important monk, Sūriyagoḍa Rājasundara, for treason. The venerable Sūriyagoḍa had been ordained by the Arakanese delegation in 1697, and he must have got involved in some resistance against the young Narēndrasinha and the ganinnānses. The latter clearly won the war, at least for the time being.

Again, once we question the supposedly natural connection between ‘the foreign’ and local discontent, and identify such conflicts as primarily political, the religious panorama appears much more fluid and complex in early eighteenth-century Kandy than is usually said. Kandyans, as we have seen, were not only familiar with the presence of outsiders and their religious beliefs, but clearly open to engaging with them without necessarily undermining their traditional faith in Buddhism. The Nāyaka migrants, in their turn, were particularly prone to eclectic combinations, worshipping Viṣṇu along with Śiva, the powerful goddess Mīnaskṣī and many others. In Kandy they found shrines or dēvāles where they could eas ily worship Viṣṇu and Skanda (aka Murugan or Kataragama). As for Buddhism, from the view point of early Nāyaka immigrants, the Buddha was the ninth avatar of Viṣṇu and hence neither they (nor other Hindus until very recently) had any problem worshipping him. Gradually some of the Nāyakas would become more and more Buddhist, further encouraged by the inclusive practices of Rājasiṃha II, Vimaladharmasūriya II and Narēndrasinha.

As we now approach the reign of the first Nāyaka king of Kandy, Śri Vijaya Rājasiṃha (r. 1739–4 7), we ought to recognize how diffi cult it is to draw the dividing lines. Having grown up in Kandy from his very birth Śri Vijaya was surely acquainted with Buddhism, knew his Sinhala, and was familiar with the politics and culture of the court and society at large, including those of his Telegu kin-folk.^[63] He contracted a marriage (or marriages) with an influential royal fam ily from Madurai, and his father-i n-law Nārenappa Nāyaka later became one of the most powerful persons at court. It is impressive that Śri Vijaya’s queens soon became ‘good Buddhists’. According to the Cūḷavaṃsa ‘they gave up the false faiths to which they had long been attached and adopted in the best manner possible the true [Buddhist] faith’, worshipping the Tooth Relic day by day with many off erings. Most strikingly, ‘they kept constantly the five moral commandments and the uposatha vows [the ten precepts] even on days that were not uposathas’.

Among their acts of piety described in great detail, they also ‘had sacred books copied’. Naturally ‘they were highly regarded in the whole of island of Lanka’.^[64] This account of the Nāyaka queens is the longest description of any instance of female Buddhist piety in the whole Mahāvaṃsa/ Cūḷavaṃsa. It was as easy for the Nāyakas to slip from Vaishnavism to Buddhism as it is for anyone to slip from see ing the Buddha as the ninth avatar of Viṣṇu to seeing Viṣṇu as a kind of avatar of the Buddha.

But could we see all this as just an attempt by a foreign-m inded king to be more Buddhist than the Buddhists? Certainly not, albeit the picture is again rather complex. Śri Vijaya Rājasiṃha combined two religious strategies that had not quite gone together so closely before. On the one hand, he attempted to reintroduce the upasampadā ordination that Narēndrasinha had neglected.

On the other hand, and more disturbingly, he persecuted the Catholics. On the first front, it seems clear that the king felt strong enough to defy the power of the ganinnānses and the entrenched aristocratic class. But this task could not succeed without the cooperation of the Dutch. While the king’s first attempt was to restore the ordination through Pegu in Burma, failure on this front forced him to contact Ayutthaya in Thailand with Dutch help. Although the death of the Kandyan king in 1747 resulted in a cancellation of this endeavour, the dynamic was not broken, and the ordination went ahead in the reign of Kīrti Śri Rājasiṃha (r. 1747–8 2).

This indicates quite clearly, in my view, the growing power and confidence of the Nāyakas in Kandy and their sustained power struggle against established inter ests, but also their ability to play successfully on the international field.^[65]

It would make sense to assume that Śri Vijaya Rājasiṃha’s persecution of the ‘Portuguese’ and other Catholics may have had to do both with this confidence and the Dutch factor.

According to the Cūḷavaṃsa:

The infamous Parangis, the infidels, the impious ones who at the time of King Rajasiha [Rājasiṃha II] had still remained behind in the town and now dwelling here and there, rich in cunning, endeavored by gifts of money and the like to get their creed adopted by others, lead a life without reverence for the doctrine (of the Buddha). When the king heard thereof he became vehemently indignant, issued commands to the dignitaries, had their houses and their books destroyed and banished from the country those who did not give up their faith.^[66]

However, a third condition needs to be taken into account. I believe that the hostility to Catholics developed in Kandy only during the second phase of Oratorian proselytism, after the death of Joseph Vaz in 1711. This phase was dominated by the work of Jacome Gonҫalvez, another Konkani Brahmin who arrived in the kingdom in 1706 and stayed until his death in 1742. Narēndrasinha was well-disposed in principle to Gonҫalvez, but Gonҫalvez was quite unlike Vaz. He was a militant type of missionary in the spirit of Francis Xavier. He was openly hostile to Buddhism and to Dutch Protestantism, using his thorough familiarity with idiomatic Sinhala and Tamil, not so much to build bridges but rather to tear them down.^[67] His enormous theological and polemic output began with Upadesa (‘advice’ or ‘instructions’) in Sinhala and Tamil and a catechism of Catholic doctrine, followed by a mass of popular and theological work in Sinhala (and Tamil) that made him the leading exponent of Sinhala Catholicism. According to Father S. G. Perera, ‘perhaps his greatest achievement was that he enriched the Sinhalese language’, replacing the stilted terminology operative at that time with idiomatic Sinhala ‘to convey the essentially Christian ideas of the one true God, Church, Sacrament, Eucharist, Gospel, Confession and the like’.^[68] Consequently, ‘for the first time in the history of Ceylon, Catholics were able to read explanations and vindication of their faith in their mother tongue, in compositions that vied with the Buddhist classics in elegance and purity of language’.^[69] Among Gonҫalvez’s many works listed by Don Peter is Vēda Kāvyaya in 528 stanzas on the life of Christ and his teachings and modelled apparently on the great Sinhala Buddhist classic of Vīdāgama, the Buduguṇālaṅkāraya dealing with the life of the Buddha.

These are no doubt remarkable achievements but it is hard to believe that they did not produce negative reactions and hostility among Buddhists, who were now being empowered by their own remarkable resurgence of faith under Saranaṃkara and his sophisticated novice followers popularly known as the sil vat samāgama, ‘the pious community’. Gonҫalvez tried to influence Śri Vijaya Rājasiṃha while he was still a ‘crown prince’ (Prince Asthāna), presenting him in 1737 a copy of the Budumula (The Root of Buddhism), a refutation of Buddhism. But, as one might expect, ‘it failed to convert him’.^[70] Śri Vijaya, owing to the ser ious illness of Narēndrasinha, was the de facto ruler already, and chose to main tain an image of a good Buddhist under the influence of Saranaṃkara. Gonҫalvez was also an unrelenting anti-Calvinist polemicist, confronting in one of his most famous debates Nauclairs de la Nerolle, a French Calvinist active at the Kandyan court. Defending the worshipping of images as an aspect binding Catholics and Buddhists together, one might have expected the Oratorian’s stance to be success-ful. But Gonҫalvez’s venture backfired on both fronts, providing ammunition to his Buddhists and also Dutch opponents.

The complexity of the situation comes out beautifully in a Catholic report from 1746.^[71] From the viewpoint of the Portuguese, the villains were the heretical Dutch who were supported by Saranaṃkara and a couple of the ministers of the court and especially the governor (disāva) of the Four Korales, an area that already had seen considerable proselytization during Portuguese times. According to the ‘report’, the Dutch failed to incite the king, but stirred up ‘commotion among the sangatares, or priests of the Budun, and the Chingala common people’.^[72] They threatened Śri Vijaya with revolt if he favoured the Christian community, namely the Catholics, and tried to win ‘Ganne Villivata’ [Valivita Saranaṃkara] with ‘a good deal of money’.

Thus, the Chingalas, allied with the heretics [Dutch], demanded that as our Fathers were the authors of these books [that were] contrary to the doctrine of the Budum which they follow, the king should give a command to arrest them, confiscate their properties, have them brought before him, and destroy the churches they had built in his kingdom.^[73]

The ministers, whether or not with the king’s permission, did what the Dutch requested and what their own passions dictated. Thus ‘each dissava sent order to his province where there were Christians, to seize the missionaries, bring them to the capital, confiscate their property and destroy the churches’.^[74] One of the influential ministers (Adikārama or Adigar in popular usage) ‘ordered the church of Candia to be surrounded’, and had Father Mathias Rodrigues taken and all church property confiscated on 17 March 1744.^[75] In eff ect, wherever possible missionaries were pushed out of the areas under Kandyan and Dutch control. According to this report, the Dutch ambassador (‘the deadliest enemy’) instigated Saranaṃkara to threaten the king, and said that his monks would ‘either kill themselves or quit the country of Ceylao if the king and his councilors allowed the missionaries to remain in the realms’.^[76] The king then ordered the expulsion of the missions.^[77] According to another Catholic report, the king was sympathetic to Catholicism and so was another influential minister but both were compelled to withdraw their support of the missions. Needless to say, this was not primarily a matter of doctrine, and the king acted under heavy polit-ical pressure.^[78] Although the persecution was a reality, the missionaries found support in the vast and relatively uncharted area of the Vanni. When exactly things went back to normal is not clear, but there is no evidence that the Nāyaka kings who followed Śri Vijaya evinced a comparable hostility to Catholicism.

Consequently, it is likely that Catholics continued as an important presence in the Kandyan kingdom.^[79] The Dutch, by contrast, fell out with Kīrti Śri very early in the latter’s reign, seeking alliances with local chiefs against him well before military confrontations began in 1762. They thus created the conditions for the more radical demonization of Śri Vikrama during early British times, in sub stantial measure propelled by the spy John D’Oyly–an issue to be explored in a forthcoming work.^[80]

Let us stay with the Dutch then, but only insofar as they can throw additional light on some changes in Kandyan court culture during the late eighteenth century. It is in Narēndrasinha’s reign and in connection with the VOC’s diplomatic and military strategies that we have the first clear example of Madurai ceremonialism in Sri Lanka, along with a version of cosmic kingship that began to radically change the norms governing the earlier traditions of Kandyan king-ship. A key event may have been the visit of the Dutch governor Joan Wilhelm Schnee to Kandy in 1732, recorded in detail by a prominent Sinhala interpreter from the low country.^[81] I shall focus here on the style in which the Dutch ambas sador was received in Narēndrasinha’s court. Let us start with the embassy arriving in the proximity to the city where it was met by four major Kandyan chiefs and thereupon it ‘moved on through two rows of armed lascorins [lascars] with a line of tusked elephants on one side amidst the whirling of lighted flambeaux’

until it reached the first gate of the palace (vāhalkaḍa). There the embassy officials were met by still higher echelons of the bureaucracy, the second adigar (one of two chief ministers) and the disāvas of three of the most powerful districts, namely, Sabaragamuva, the Seven Kōrales and Four Kōrales. The adigar on the king’s orders informed the ambassador to bring with him the letter of authorization while his secretary and interpreter would wait in the neighbourhood of the king’s Audience Hall (dakina sālāva). After some time the ambassador received the letter from the hands of several lesser offi cials (appuhāmis), who then placed the letter on his head and climbed up the stone steps to the audience hall. The interpreter took his position on the ambassador’s right, while the two adigars and the disāvas grouped themselves on either side as the following events unfolded: After a short pause the seven curtains were drawn aside and revealed His Gracious Majesty seated on his throne. Immediately the Ambassador sank on his knee, while the rest of the chiefs and I [the interpreter] prostrated ourselves six times; we then entered the Hall of Audience repeating the same salutation at three places. On reaching the edge of the carpet which was spread in front of the Throne, His Majesty commanded that the letter should be presented […]. Thereupon the rest of the chiefs advanced with the Ambassador, and as he knelt on one of the steps leading to the throne, His Majesty took the letter in his own royal hand and commanded the chiefs to place it with its wrappings and the silver tray on his right, which they immediately did. The Ambassador them immediately removed his hat and saluted according to custom, and moved backwards with the chiefs till he reached the middle of the carpet, where he remained kneeling on one knee.^[82]

Much of this ceremonialism could be read simply as an exaggeration of the existing Kandyan ritualism, where the king is often enough treated and addressed as a god (deviyo). Narēndrasinha himself was known as ‘Kuṇḍasāle Deviyo’, the god of Kuṇḍasāle. Yet, the grand development of ‘abjection’, and especially the emergence of the king from behind seven curtains, are signs that a more radical concept of divine kingship was at play. This does not necessarily indicate an instance of direct South Indian ‘influence’, because ritual ceremonialism had been develop-ing in the Kandyan court for some time before Narēndrasinha. Thus Rājasiṃha II was known as ‘Rāsin Deviyo’, the god Rājasiṃha, but there is no evidence that he adopted the extreme ceremonialism that we have associated with the Nāyakas.

But we have to ask why this sudden stepping up in diplomatic ceremonials occurred, at a time when Narēndrasinha was forty-t wo years old and had been suffering from various illnesses since the early 1730s.^[83] It seems that the king’s illness had begun to take its political toll, leaving important matters of state in the hands of the designated successor, the future Śri Vijaya Rājasiṃha. And it would not be surprising if we found that state ceremonialism was by this time under the control of the king’s Nāyaka relatives, especially Śri Vijaya Rājasiṃha’s powerful father-in-law. The full development of this form of ceremonialism occurred in the reign of Kīrti Śri Rājasiṃha, the successor of Śri Vijaya, and afterwards.

In any case, we need to handle this period with as much caution as the pre-vious one. Historians have paid a heavy toll for seeing the later Nāyaka kings simply as ‘foreigners’ in a static political landscape dominated by tensions between the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘exogenous’ or the ‘foreign’. As we have seen, the Nāyakas in Kandy were a little of both, allowing for polemics to crystalize around their perceived alien-ness in certain moments and contexts, but by no means as a fixed condition and an inevitable necessity. Kīrti Śri Rājasiṃha’s was certainly more vulnerable than others to being picked out as a foreigner because he did not suc-ceed Śri Vijaya in direct line (he was in fact the brother of the late king’s wife).^[84] It seems that the sense of Nāyaka foreignness began to be developed as a matter of public discourse during his regime when a few influential aristocrats and monks grew increasingly hostile to him and decided to label him as an alien Tamil. This was encouraged by deliberate misinformation on the part of the Dutch who feared his ambitions in the Maritime Provinces and resisted his indigenization by labelling him a ‘Malabar’, a synonym for ‘Tamil’. Are there ‘signs’ that might allow us to ‘test’ the ruler’s sense of identity because historians are anything but straightfor-ward in their representations of this king? John Holt has pointed out that Kīrti Śri Rājasiṃha had strong Śaivite beliefs and that these were part of his own inherited tradition.^[85] One hostile account written in the late nineteenth century says that he daubed himself in sacred ash.^[86] Even if this late rumour were true, we know that the same practice was rather common for ordinary persons, especially when they worshipped at Skanda shrines. The accusation thus only made sense in connection with a wider discourse of exclusion directed against the king on grounds that he was an outsider who became king by default. It is possible that Kīrti Śri Rājasiṃha knew little or no Sinhala when he was selected to be king at age sixteen, but it is certain that he picked it up later. He gave his own strong signs of Buddhist piety, which cannot be reduced to a simple façade. Remember it was Kīrti Śri Rājasiṃha who helped institute the Siamese fraternity, today’s dominant order of Buddhist monks. Although Kīrti Śri Rājasiṃha supported Saranaṃkara as the head of the newly instituted Siamese fraternity, the latter in conjunction with a few influential monks and aristocratic offi cials attempted–unsuccessfully–to assas-sinate him in 1759. It is to Kīrti Śri Rājasiṃha’s credit that although he executed some of the conspirators, he did not exact revenge on Saranaṃkara, who under Kandyan law could have suff ered the death penalty. Thanks to his sustained commitment to Buddhist orthodoxy he ended as a popular king for the generality of the Sinhala public, as did his Nāyaka successors Rājādhi Rājasiṃha (1782–98) and Śri Vikrama Rājasiṃha (1798–1815) both born and raised in Sri Lanka. The former was a good Buddhist extolled in Cūḷavaṃsa and a pundit who rendered a well-known text, Asadruśa Jātaka, in 598 stanzas, a remarkable achievement by any standard. A strange Nāyaka indeed!^[87] Yet in the historiographical tradition, Nāyakas have all been subjected to exclusion again and again.

Nevertheless, it was during the Nāyaka reigns that the model of sacred kingship we first encountered in the 1730s fully unfolded wherein the divinity of the king was emphasized as never before. I believe that when any Sinhala king is consecrated he becomes a divine being but how that sense of the divine is expressed in courtly life is another issue. With the Nāyakas the divinity of the king and the ceremonialism associated with it developed to a degree unthinkable earlier, even in the case of the powerful Rājasiṃha II (Rāsin Deviyo). The public prostrated before the Kandyan kings because they too were ‘gods’ and thus their ‘abjects’. Nonetheless, these ideas were carried to an extreme degree in Nāyaka kingship.

With that came a series of rules on public life designed to keep the king away from the public gaze and enhance his exceptional status, very likely based on the con-ventions of Madurai of that time. Consider the following episode from the reign of King Ranga Krisna Muttu Vīrappa (r. 1682–89), illustrating the Nāyaka ruler’s attempt to humiliate the representatives of a Muslim ruler: When they were ushered into the presence of the King, after some little delay and with an absence of deference on the part of the gentlemen ushers which astonished and angered them not a little; the Nabobs found the King seated on a gorgeous throne, splendidly arrayed and resplendent with jewels; and surrounded by a brilliant staff of ministers and courtiers skillfully grouped together with a view to scenic effect, whilst the hall of audience had been magnificently furnished and decorated for the occasion.^[88]

With Nāyaka kingship in India in steep decline precisely at the time of its Sri Lankan ascendancy, it was in Kandy that this cultural practice was fully formed, intensified to impress not only foreign envoys but also the Sri Lankan public and the Nāyakas themselves. This comes out very vividly in the report of the British embassy of John Pybus in 1762. As the envoy attempted to approach Kīrti Śri, he had to put up with humiliating ceremonials unthinkable among earlier Kandyan kings.^[89] Three dec-ades later, the British representative Robert Andrews experienced the same sort of ceremonials and gave a graphic account of them in 1795–6. Andrews tells us that when he visited the palace of Rajadhi Rājasiṃha, Kīrti Śri Rājasiṃha’s successor, seven curtains were drawn, finally allowing him to see: the Sovereign of Candia arrived in all his glory seated on a Throne of solid Gold studded with precious Stones of various Colors [A] Crown of Massy Gold adorned his brows and enriched with valuable and shining Gems the product of his native Sovereignty [T]he moment he blazed upon our sight Lieutenant Kingston and myself (with the salver on my head) were directed to kneel while Native Courtiers who attended us prostrated themselves on the ground.^[90]

The Dutch ambassadors even at the time of Narēndrasinha used to only bend on one knee before the king but by the time of Rājādhi Rājasiṃha in 1782 they were forced to perform complicated ceremonials of abjection, which they thoroughly resented.^[91] During the later Nāyaka reign, says Lorna Dewaraja, only the king could build a two-storey house and ‘in the vicinity of Kandy the use of tiles and lime was prohibited except in the temples’.^[92] In the capital city, adds Dewaraja, only the king and the gods could be accompanied with drums and within the larger city the use of palanquins, horse or elephant or use of footwear were prohibited (although Kandyans did not wear footwear and even kings for the most part abstained using them). John Pybus had to get off his palanquin and ‘trudge ankle deep in mud through the miry paths of Kandy’.^[93] There is no gainsaying the fact that such prohibitions had been for the most part alien to the earlier Kandyan kings. It would have been impossible for Vimaladharmasūriya II and Narēndrasinha to converse and entertain Catholic priests in such a stultifying atmosphere. Nevertheless, once outside the capital, the kings visited the provinces and went on pilgrimages to Buddhist sacred sites. This means that the Kandyan cosmopolitan ethos came under siege but did not succumb. Nāyakas after Kīrti Śri continued to be open to persons of diff erent nationalities and were not hostile to the many Catholics domiciled in the Kandyan territories or for that matter to Brahmins and wandering ascetics from the neigh-bouring subcontinent. Perhaps part of the resentment of the Nāyakas by monks and the aristocracy was not to their being ‘too foreign’ but, ironically, to their excessive imitation of divinity. These, however, are issues that need further exploration.

Note, again, how none of this happened against a backdrop of the ruler challenging Buddhism, but rather of enriching it. Kīrti Śri, although a staunch Hindu, was also staunchly Buddhist and more so surely after he engaged in the construction of a large number of temples and engaged in Buddhist practices. As Dewaraja herself acknowledges, one of the first acts of his reign was to ‘reclaim the Peak from the Śaivites (who had occupied it in the time of Rajasimha I) revive its rites and ceremonies, endow it with valuable lands and restore it to its pris-tine sanctity’.^[94] True, he made some important changes in the annual procession associated with the Tooth Relic during the month of äsela, generally in July or August–but certainly not to undermine it. Kīrti Śri Rājasiṃha incorporated the popular Hindu gods Viṣṇu, Skanda, Nātha and the goddess Pattini into the public ritual associated with the processional events at the Palace of the Tooth Relic. By doing this, he created one of the most popular spectacles that the Sri Lankan public enjoys to this very day. The blend is so enticing that, ironically, these rituals with their displays of music and dance are now regarded by many as part of an ancient Sinhala tradition. In this sense Kīrti Śri was a great inventor of tradition–but even he knew exactly where to draw the line, and refrained from introducing the Hindu gods anywhere near the inner sanctum of the Palace of the Tooth Relic. Viṣṇu or Skanda could not be allowed to compete, as gods and as kings, with the Buddha as the ‘god among gods’ (devāti deva).

The Tooth Relic was inextricably tied with Lankan kingship, and all Nāyaka kings not only respected and worshipped it but also saw to its safe upkeep and maintenance. Lankan kings may contract all sorts of rituals of consecration, but none could replace the need to possess the sacred Tooth Relic. Parākramabāhu I (r. 1153–8 6), for example, could only assume full kingship when he obtained the relic formerly in possession of the ruler of Ruhuna, the southern division of the Tri Sinhala.^[95] The same ambitions guided Parākramabāhu II and Parākramabāhu IV.^[96] The king as rājā is empty of significance unless his capital contains the Tooth Relic. Incidentally, the king’s palace is in general small in comparison with the ‘palace’ housing the relic, as are the shrines of even major gods such as Viṣṇu, Skanda, Vibhīṣaṇa, Saman, Nātha and Pattini–a marked contrast with Indian kingship, including Madurai, where palaces and temples were of magnificent pro-portions.^[97] It is the British who produced a radical change in the cosmic significance of the Tooth Relic when they appropriated it and later redefined the offi ce of the Diyavaḍana Nilame (‘the water bearer’) as the guardian and custodian of the Palace of the Tooth Relic. That is an innovation without precedent in the his tory of Sri Lanka.

There can be little doubt that tensions existed during the Kandyan period between diff erent religious communities. But one must recognize that when we speak of a religious culture we also concomitantly speak of the political. Much of what I have emphasized in this chapter pertains to the domain of the political that then is seen or rationalized in terms of the religious. In Kandy, as with the world in general, the political and the religious are in intimate relation with one another, although for analytical purposes we might want to disaggregate them as separable entities.

It seems from our account that the cosmopolitan discourse has stood in a field of tension between those who wished to resolve inter-religious issues and those who wished to perpetuate them. Cosmopolitanism is never a fixed entity, it is a matter of constant negotiation, at the mercy of diff erent ways of interpreting and appropriating the ‘foreign’. The foreign can, without losing its supra-local connections, be a valuable addition to whatever constitutes the local. The inter-play between the local and the foreign is not simply a phenomenon of Nāyaka rule but existed in different shapes and forms in Lankan history and, one might even add, in the history of other nations. But then: this is not a matter of kingship alone because the indigenization of ‘foreigners’ and ‘outsiders’ has been a historical phenomenon the world over, a larger issue that I cannot deal with here.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

This chapter is based on a lecture given at the South Asia Policy Research Institute (SAPRI) in Colombo in April 2013. I am greatly indebted in this work to my friends and colleagues, especially H. L. Seneviratne, Kitsiri Malalgoda, H. G. Dayasisira and the many scholars quoted–in particular Lorna Dewaraja, to whom all of us who work on the Kandy period are deeply indebted. It is therefore with sadness that we have to record the death of Lorna Dewaraja on 28 November 2014. Her work documented here and elsewhere is a monument to her scholarship.

[2]:

See Tikiri Abeyasinghe, ‘The Politics of Survival: Aspects of Kandyan External Relations in the Mid-Sixteenth Century,’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka, New Series XVII (1973), 11–21 and ‘The Kingdom of Kandy: Foundations and Foreign Relations to 1638,’ in University of Peradeniya History of Sri Lanka, Vol. 2, ed. K.M. de Silva (Peradeniya: University of Peradeniya, 1995), 139–6 1; C. R. de Silva, ‘The rise and fall of the kingdom of Sītāvaka,’ in University of Peradeniya History of Sri Lanka, Vol. 2, 61–104; Zoltán Biedermann, Island Empire: Renaissance Portugal, Sri Lanka, and the Beginnings of Habsburg Colonialism in Asia (forthcoming).

[3]:

On Vimaladharmasūriya see most recently Alan Strathern, Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka: Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 214–21.

[4]:

Cūḷavaṃsa, trans. Wilhelm Geiger (Colombo: Government Press, 1953), 94.14. Unless otherwise specified I shall employ this version of the Cūḷavaṃsa.

[5]:

Cūḷavaṃsa, 94.18–19.

[6]:

Donald Ferguson, The Earliest Dutch Visits to Ceylon (1927–30; reprint New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1998), 44.

[7]:

Kitsiri Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1750–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 30–3.

[8]:

Both Sinhala editions of the Rājāvaliya say of Konappu Baṇḍāra: ‘Tammittarālagē doniyan kasāda bäňdalā kulavädī kolamba unnāha.’ The Rājāvaliya or a Historical Narrative of Sinhalese Kings, trans. B. Gunasekara (Colombo: Information Department, 1953), 66. Here kulavädī has been translated by both Gunasekara and Suraweera as ‘baptized’, see The Rājāvaliya: A Comprehensive Account of the Kings of Sri Lanka, trans. A. V Suraweera (Rathmalana: Vishva Lekha, 2000), 86; Soratha Thero, Sri Sumangalasabdakosaya, Vol. 1 (Colombo: Maligatenne, 1952), 264, interprets kula vadina as joining another caste (kula) or another faith or religion.

[9]:

Phillipus Baldaeus, A True and Exact Description of the Great Island of Ceylon, trans. Pieter Brohier (Maharagama: Saman Press, 1960), 38–40. This was originally published as Vol. 8, nos. 1–4 of the Ceylon Historical Journal (1958–9).

[10]:

In Ferguson, Earliest Dutch Visits, 44. 281

[11]:

Joris Van Spilbergen, Journal of Spilbergen, the First Dutch Envoy to Ceylon, trans. K.D. Paranavitana (Dehiwela: Sridevi Press, 1997), 32.

[12]:

Van Spilbergen, Journal of Spilbergen, 32.

[13]:

Paul E. Pieris, Ceylon: The Portuguese Era Being a History of the Island for the Period 1505–1658, 2 vols. (1913–14; reprint Dehiwala: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1992), Vol. 1, 365.

[14]:

Paul E. Pieris, Sinhale and the Patriots, 1815–1818 (Colombo: The Colombo Apothecaries, 1950), 115–16. For a modern view of this whole issue of clothes see Nira Wickramasinghe, Dressing the Colonized Body: Politics, Clothing and Identity in Colonial Sri Lanka (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003).

[15]:

The Pybus Embassy to Kandy, 1762, ed. R. Raven-Hart (Colombo: National Museums, 1958).

[16]:

Ferguson, Earliest Dutch Visits, 61 (emphasis added).

[17]:

R.K. de Silva and W.G.M. Beumer, Illustrations and Views of Dutch Ceylon, 1602–1796 (London: Serendib Publications, 1988), 34.

[18]:

Ferguson, Earliest Dutch Visits, 65.

[19]:

Paul E. Pieris, The Dutch Power in Ceylon, Some Documents Relating to the Rise of the Dutch Power in Ceylon, 1602–1670 (1929; reprint London: Curzon Press, 1973), 32.

[20]:

Baldaeus, Ceylon, 38–40.

[21]:

Van Spilbergen, Journal of Spilbergen, 39–42.

[22]:

Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon (1681), ed. J. H. O. Paulusz (Dehiwala: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1989). Knox was nineteen when he, his father and sixteen sailors were captured in 1660. The senior Knox died a year later but Knox made his escape in 1679. For a contemporary critique and rereading of Knox, see Sarojini Jayawickrama, Writing that Conquers: Re-reading Knox’s An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 2004).

[23]:

Ferguson, Earliest Dutch Visits, 42. Note that kings also did not eat beef but enjoyed ‘meat from the hunt’, generally provided by Veddah hunters.

[24]:

Valentijn says of Bintänna-Alutnuvara that ‘here the old Emperors used to hold court as it is a beautiful city where there are many large streets, beautiful buildings and wonderful pagodas or heathen temples […] It has also a beautiful and large palace of the Emperor full of beautiful buildings within. Here the best galleys and sampans of the Emperors are made. Here are also many shops but no market, stone monasteries and a great many bamboo houses which stretch for a mile or two in distance along the river’. Francois Valentijn’s Description of Ceylon, ed. and trans. Sinnappah Arasaratnam (London: Hakluyt Society, 1978), 153.

[25]:

Lorna S. Dewaraja in The Kandyan Kingdom, 1707–1760 (Colombo: Lake House Investments, 1972), 17, states that Senerat married Dona Catarina’s daughters from two marriages and these would be in Sinhala kinship his own daughters–but this evidence comes from a footnote in Fernão De Queyroz, The Temporal and Spiritual Conquest of Ceylon, trans. Father S. G. Perera, 3 vols. (Colombo: Government Printer, 1930), Vol. 2, 788, which is not entirely reliable on this matter. See also Baldaeus, Ceylon, 80. Sinhala sources simply say that Senarat married Dona Catarina.

[26]:

It is unfortunate that there are no full and rounded studies of these important monarchs, in particular Rājasiṃha II, who reigned for more than half a century.

[27]:

Chandra Richard de Silva, The Portuguese in Ceylon, 1617–1638 (Colombo: H. W. Cave, 1972), 85.

[28]:

Sinnappah Arasaratnam, ‘Oratorians and Predicants: The Catholic Church in Ceylon under Dutch Rule,’ in Ceylon and the Dutch, 1600–1800: External Influences and Internal Change in Early Modern Sri Lanka (Aldershot, New Hampshire: Variorum, 1996), 219–21. W. L. A. Don Peter, Francis Xavier, Teacher of Nations (Colombo: Evangel Press, 1987), 81. One of their most prominent settlements is Vahakōṭṭe; other settlements are mentioned in Don Peter, Francis Xavier, 78.

[29]:

Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom, 183. Additionally, I think we can trust the panegyric (praśasti) on the king known as Rājasiṃha Haṭana (‘Rājasiṃha’s war’ written in 449 four-line stanzas) when it mentions the education of the king, including training in arms, swordsmanship and the like. Stanza 52 refers to his education in Tamil, Sinhala, Sanskrit, Magadha, Nagara and Portuguese ‘letters’ (akuru). While this may be a panegyric trope and not signify actual competence in all these idioms, the fact that multilingualism is given as an ideal is in itself significant. See Allepola H.M. Somaratna, ed. Rajasiha Haṭana (Kandy: Godamune Brothers, 1966), 8.

[30]:

Donald Ferguson, Earliest Dutch Visits, 41. The newer translation by Paranavitana rightly states that these were Brahmins, not monks as Ferguson thought (Van Spilbergen, Journal of Spilbergen, 62, n. 121).

[31]:

Van Spilbergen, Journal of Spilbergen, 29, translator’s parentheses.

[32]:

Knox, Historical Relation, 324–5 and passim. The term ‘prisoner’ is somewhat of a misnomer and has no relation to that term in contemporary usage everywhere because Kandyan ‘prisoners’ were free 82 to wander in a demarcated region containing many villages, some even living in the city of Kandy. However, villagers were held responsible if ‘prisoners’ moved out of a permitted zone. Prisoners could practise crafts and sell their products and many of them were permitted, even encouraged, to marry Sinhala women, thus domesticating them.

[33]:

Ryckloff Van Goens Jr, a Dutch governor (1675–79) who generally wished Rājasiṃha dead, put it thus: ‘However, as long as Rajia Singa is alive, it would be well to often send His Majesty presents, such as hawks, horses, and curiosities from Socratta [Socotra], Persia, and other places, with which he would be more pleased than if we evacuated ten Provinces.’ Memoir of Ryclof Van Goens, Jun. Governor of Ceylon, 1675–1679, to his successor Laurens Pyl, trans. Sophia Pieters (Colombo: Government Printer, 1910), 14.

[34]:

H. W. Codrington, A Short History of Ceylon (1929; reprint New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1994), 136.

[35]:

For a good discussion of the Dutch in Asia and their relations with the Portuguese see Markus Vink, ‘Introduction,’ in Mission to Madurai: Dutch Embassies to the Nayaka Court of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century (Delhi: Manohar, 2012), in particular 86–106.

[36]:

Sinnappa Arasaratnam, ‘Oratorians and Predicants’, 221.

[37]:

Father S. G. Perera rightly points out that ‘Vimaladharmasūriya was one of the chief benefactors of the Church in Ceylon, for it is his tolerance and benevolence that enabled Father Joseph Vaz to eff ect the revival of the faith in the island’. S. G. Perera, Life of the Venerable Father Joseph Vaz, Apostle of Ceylon (Galle: Loyola Press, 1953), 173.

[38]:

Perera, Life of Joseph Vaz, 174. In fairness to Rājasiṃha, he himself seems to have ignored some of the articles of that treaty, including no. 17 requiring the expelling of Catholic priests from his domain. See Valentijn’s Description of Ceylon, 322–4 for details.

[39]:

Perera, Life of Joseph Vaz, 165.

[40]:

Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom, 83.

[41]:

Perera, Life of Joseph Vaz, 216.

[42]:

Perera, Life of Joseph Vaz, 216–22. The few references to Vimaladharmasūriya II are in chapter XIV (173–87) and the detailed account of Narēndrasinha in chapter XVII (214–25). Both the ups and downs of the relationships with the Catholic Church are also well documented in the classic nine-volume work of Father V. Perniola, The Catholic Church in Sri Lanka, especially The Catholic Church in Sri Lanka: The Dutch Period, Vol. 1, 1658–1711 (Dehiwala: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1983). About Narēndrasinha a missionary report says: ‘In the reign of that King our religions had every liberty and many churches were built and feasts were held [in the kingdom] with processions and other ceremonies without the least opposition but rather with all permission and favour’ (Perniola, The Catholic Church, Vol. 3, 24). On Gonҫalvez, another Konkani Brahmin, see W.A. Don Peter, Studies in Ceylon Church History (Colombo: The Catholic Press, 1963), 53–60.

[43]:

Cūḷavaṃsa, 97.35–6.

[44]:

Cūḷavaṃsa, 97.37–44.

[45]:

Cūḷavaṃsa, 97.30.

[46]:

Cūḷavaṃsa, 97.31–2.

[47]:

For a discussion of the Viṣṇu shrine endowment see John Cliff ord Holt, The Buddhist Viṣṇu: Religious Transformation, Politics, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 165–6; and Cūḷavaṃsa, 97.46–7.

[48]:

Codrington, A Short History, 138.

[49]:

The main Nāyaka territories were in Singi in the northern Tamil country, in Tanjavur (Tanjore) south of Senji, and further south in Madurai. There were other Nāyaka regimes, the most prominent among these lesser regimes being Ikkeri. See K. D. Swaminathan, The Nāyakas of Ikkeri (Madras: P. Varadachary and Co., 1957). The kings of Vijayanagara known as rāyas employed Nāyaka warrior chiefs as ‘governors’ to rule their extensive southern kingdoms. These gradually became independ- ent in a process completed after the fall of the Vijayanagara Empire in 1565. The Madurai Nāyakas effectively controlled the southernmost part of India known as the Ramnad through their own dis- trict representatives known as the pālaiyakkārār (aka poligar). During most of the Madurai period the local chiefs of the Ramnad were known as sētupatis (cetupatis) or lords of Rama’s bridge, and they in turn owed allegiance to Madurai until that kingdom split up and disintegrated with the Muslim onslaughts from the late seventeenth century.

[50]:

Lorna S. Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka: 1707–1782, 2nd edn (Colombo: Stamford Lake Publication, 2008), 26 (emphasis added).

[51]:

Lorna S. Dewaraja, ‘The Kandyan Kingdom and the Nāyakkars, 1739–1796,’ in University of Peradeniya, History of Sri L anka, Vol. 2, ed. K. M. de Silva. Peradeniya: University of Peradeniya, 1995, 281. 283

[52]:

Abeyasinghe, ‘The Kingdom of Kandy’, 150. See also Knox, Historical Relation, 183, and Dewaraja, ‘The Kandyan Kingdom 1638–1739: A Survey of its Political History,’ in University of Peradeniya, History of Sri Lanka, Vol. 2, 183–209.

[53]:

Biedermann, Island Empire and Chapter 7 in this volume.

[54]:

Dewaraja, ‘The Kandyan Kingdom 1638–1739’, 200.

[55]:

Cūḷavaṃsa, 96.41–2 as given in The Mahāvaṃsa, trans. L. C. Wijesinha (1889; reprint New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1996). Geiger’s better-known translation has ‘king’s daughters’, but this usage might not be the best rendering of kaňňā, which means ‘young women’ or ‘maidens’ or ‘unmarried women’.

[56]:

Mahāvaṃsa, 97.3.

[57]:

Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom (1972), 33–6.

[58]:

Cūḷavaṃsa, 97.24.

[59]:

Cūḷavaṃsa, 97.10–11

[60]:

Cūḷavaṃsa, 97.13–15. These were also of high social extraction–in line with an unfortunate tradition of social exclusiveness that continued throughout Kandyan times.

[61]:

Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 50. The name Ganebaṇḍāra indicates he was a ganinnsānse (gane) and an aristocrat. Arasaratnam affirms that he was appointed chief priest, suggesting that some ganinnsānses were held in high regard as monks even if not fully ordained. See Arasaratnam, Ceylon and the Dutch, 63.

[62]:

Cūḷavaṃsa, 97.26.

[63]:

Sinnappah Arasaratnam, ‘Introduction: The Dutch in Ceylon and South India, 1700–1750,’ Memoir of Julius Stein Van Gollenesse, Governor of Ceylon, 1743–1 751 trans. and ed. S. Arasaratnam (Colombo: Department of National Archives, 1974), 13.

[64]:

Cūḷavaṃsa, 98. 5–20.

[65]:

For succinct accounts of these two events, see Arasaratnam, ‘The Dutch in Ceylon’, 14–1 5, and Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom (1972), 89–90.

[66]:

Sri Vijaya’s hostile attitude to Catholicism is described in the Cūḷavaṃsa, 98.80–3.

[67]:

For a brief account of Gonҫalvez, see Don Peter, Ceylon Church History, 53–60. I refer the reader to Don Peter’s work but shall employ Father S. G. Perera’s chapter on Gonҫalvez in Historical Sketches (Colombo: Catholic Book Depot, 1962), 110–20, that deals with Gonҫalvez because its polemics help us understand the conflicts between Buddhists, Catholics and Dutch Calvinists dur- ing Gonҫalvez’s dispensation. For a more detailed account see S. G. Perera, Life of Father Jacome Gonsalves (Madurai: De Nobili Press, 1942).

[68]:

Perera, Historical Sketches, 116.

[69]:

Perera, Historical Sketches, 115.

[70]:

Perera, Historical Sketches, 117. The date for the presentation of Budumula is from Perniola, The Catholic Church, Vol. 3, 24, n. 1.

[71]:

‘Report of the Mission of Ceylon, 1746,’ in Perniola, The Catholic Church, Vol. 2, 491–5 11.

[72]:

Perniola, The Catholic Church, Vol. 2, 492.

[73]:

Perniola, The Catholic Church, Vol. 2, 492.

[74]:

Perniola, The Catholic Church, Vol. 2, 493.

[75]:

Perniola, The Catholic Church, Vol. 2, 493. The date is my inference.

[76]:

Perniola, The Catholic Church, Vol. 2, 497.

[77]:

Perniola, The Catholic Church, Vol. 2, 24. Perniola gives the accepted version of what transpired when he says that all the councillors except Ähälepola, the first Adigar in Kandy, favoured the expulsion.

[78]:

See ‘The Triumph of the Catholic Faith,’ in Perniola, The Catholic Church, Vol. 2, 422–38, especially 436.

[79]:

Perhaps early British censuses might be able to supply demographic data on the spread and presence of Catholic populations in the Kandyan kingdom. It should be remembered, however, that owing to the power and prestige of British rule, many Catholics would have switched to the Church of England–a transition facilitated by the many resemblances between Catholicism and Anglicanism.

[80]:

Gananath Obeyesekere, The Doomed King: A Requiem for Śri Vikrama Rājasinha (forthcoming).

[81]:

Lewis de Saram, ‘The Dutch Embassy to Kandy in 1731–32: Diary of Wijesiriwardhana Maha Mudiyanse, Otherwise Called Lewis de Saram, Maha Mudaliyar,’ trans. Paul E. Pieris, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch 21, 62 (1909), 1–34.

[82]:

De Saram, ‘The Dutch Embassy to Kandy’, 19–20.

[83]:

Arasaratnam, ‘The Dutch in Ceylon’, 9.

[84]:

John Holt points out that Kīrti Śri was brother in law of Śri Vijaya’s chief queen. He was selected to be king at age sixteen and formally consecrated four years later. Holt considers him to be a Tamil, but 284 more likely he was a Telugu speaker, the label vaḍuga meaning ‘northerner’, that is from the Telugu speaking north, in Andhra Pradesh. John Clifford Holt, The Religious World of Kīrti Śri: Buddhism, Art and Politics in Late Mediaeval Sri Lanka (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11.

[85]:

Holt, Religious World of Kīrti Śri, 10.

[86]:

The only place I found reference to Kīrti Śri’s addiction to sacred ash is Śasanāvatīrnavarṇaṇāva, ed. C. E. Godakumbura (Moratuva: Dodangoda and Company, 1956), 22.

[87]:

A good account of this work is in P. B. Sannasgala, Sinhala Sāhityavaṅśaya (Colombo: Cultural Affairs Department, 1994), 507.

[88]:

J. H. Nelson, The Political History of the Madura Country, Ancient and Modern (1868; reprint New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1989), 211.

[89]:

The Pybus Embassy to Kandy.

[90]:

J. P. Lewis, ‘Andrew’s Journal of a Tour to Candia in the Year 1796,’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch 26, 70 (1917), 95. The peculiar language use is that of Andrew’s.

[91]:

Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom (1972), 218.

[92]:

A custom recorded by the Portuguese in South India from the early sixteenth century: see Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom (1972), 215, and Zoltán Biedermann, ‘Imagining Asia from the Margins: Early Portuguese Mappings of the Continent’s Architecture and Space,’ in Architecturalized Asia. Mapping the Continent through Architecture and Geography, ed. V. Rujivacharakul, H. H. Hahn, K. T. Oshima and P. Christensen (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 40.

[93]:

Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom (1972), 215.

[94]:

Dewaraja, ‘The Kandyan Kingdom and the Nayākkars’, 310.

[95]:

Tri Sinhala refers to the classic division of the Island into three regions: Rajaraṭa, in the north, Maya Raṭa in the west, and Ruhuna in the south. After the thirteenth century, owing to the decline of the Rajaraṭa, that region was renamed as Pihiṭi Raṭa, or the established country. The union of the three divisions was the ideal aspiration of kings.

[96]:

Cūḷavaṃsa, 85.109–12.

[97]:

The only exception might have been Kīrti Śri, about whose large palace based on Madurai models we know too little to make clear assertions.