The function of the foreign in dynastic systems

[Full title: The function of the foreign in dynastic systems: a comparative perspective]

Thus far we have touched upon ways in which rulers and subjects may be bound together as an imagined community tied to the land. But this tendency existed in tension with an equally common desire on the part of ruling elites to associate themselves with the world beyond the local. The purpose of this second part of the chapter is to develop an appreciation of the paradoxical manifestations of this tension, with the help of two brief comparative forays.

Rather than appeal to ‘cosmopolitanism’, we may do better to consider the drivers of premodern elite ‘extraversion’, by which the supra-l ocal (its commercial fecundity, modes of civility, technology, potential allies and effi cacious ritual) is seen as a source of local power. One of the most important of these was simply elite will to power–that is, their desire to conquer neighbouring realms and expand their hegemony: to create empires. Imperial rulership is almost by definition estranged from certain groups of subjects. But there is a less routinely observed process that works the other way, where elites sense their peripheral position in relation to imperial formations, and find themselves drawn to their glamorous, expansive and sophisticated civilizational traditions, their long-refined literary cultures and long-burnished imagery of rulership.^[1] Local rulers are concerned with their position relative to their peers in the wider world, and these can only be addressed in a ‘cosmopolitan’ language of equivalent reach.^[2]

But if local rulers suffer from status anxiety with relation to foreign rulers, their domestic status is hardly a matter of blithe assurance either. Another driver of elite extraversion then is lodged within the very process of erecting hierarchy, in the necessity for elites to distinguish themselves from the lower orders: to reign over the merely domestic by signalling their transcendence of it. In this way, kings find a way to lift themselves above the entanglements of local kinship claims, the pretensions of aristocrats and upstart chiefs.^[3] In contrast to Pollock’s vision of South Asian kingship as something simply accepted by the governed as an unquestionable fact of life, it is surely better to consider it as the site of constant symbolic labour, as new means of exaltation are gleaned and new audiences for its self-display are assembled. Just as ruling elites are driven to seize upon coercive powers from the outside (guns, mercenaries, alliances), and economic powers from the outside (trade revenues, commercial taxes), so they are prone to seek out means of symbolic distinction from the outside too.

In the inscription quoted above, Niśśankamalla may have emphasized the importance of Buddhist kingship in order to ward off any claims from other South Indian powers but he also sought to protect his position from local claimants by insisting that the kings of Lanka must be of kṣatriya caste, which appealed to a wider Indic normative tradition and a status that no one else on the island could claim.^[4] This introduces a more specific aspect of this process of royal estrangement, which is a function of the biological reproduction of rarefied breeds. For such distinction to be maintained, it becomes desirable to find marriage partners boasting the best claims of royal blood, and where else could these be found but in foreign lands? The very claim of a dynasty to unique status within their realm drives the search for marital alliance without it. This is why in monarchical polities, foreign elites are rarely merely enemies; they are nearly always also aff -ines.^[5] To the extent that royal courts tend to participate in transregional kinship networks and elite cultures distinct from their subjects, and deny their subjects much meaningful participation in governance, all premodern dynastic states have a somewhat ‘imperial’ quality.^[6]

The potency of the foreign is not simply a threat to local rulers then; it is also an opportunity. Another ubiquitous driver of elite extraversion is the way that internal factional conflicts within local centres lead rivals to appeal to foreign powers to support their cause: this is the key logic behind the phenomena of Lankan princes in exile explored in Biedermann’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 7). But even on a symbolic level, declarations of vassalage or submission to external empires may be undertaken in order to strengthen claims to local sovereignty. This has been a theme in recent work on Lanka’s sixteenth century, analysing both the initial accord with the Portuguese in 1506 and the subsequent proclamations of vassalage to the kings in Lisbon over the decades following 1518.^[7] This is surely the context too in which to see Ähälēpola’s willingness to advertise his acknowledgement of George III’s suzerainty in 1816, and yet at the same time establish himself as a king in the full sense, which Sivasundaram mentions in this volume (Chapter 10).^[8] This vision of hierarchical kingship was no longer acceptable to nineteenth-century British officials in the way that it had been to Portuguese kings of the sixteenth century, who had happily acted as liege to Lankan kings and cakravartis.^[9]

In late eighteenth-century Hawaii, we see a similar movement on the part of local elites, but this also reflected a particularly powerful driver of elite extraversion: the tradition that their claims to superiority already depended on a conception of themselves as strangers or even as foreign aggressors to the native people. This phenomenon of stranger-k ingship has been extensively analysed by Marshall Sahlins.^[10] I have written on this analysis at length elsewhere, so this is not the place for a proper discussion, except to say that it alerts us to a globally prevalent means of understanding the ascension of kingship as a journey from the zones beyond–the wild, foreign, animal, supernatural, transgressive–to the heart of the domestic: it is the archetypal narrative of alien potency digested, and it appears over and again in the Mahāvaṃsa.^[11]

(Fundamentally, then, its initial emergence is not best seen as a legitimization of kingship so much as a collective means of understanding the origins of hier-archical society.)^[12] Here we need only note that there seem to be at least two forms in which the logic of the stranger-king model may impress itself upon our sources: 1) as a structuring principle of origin myth for rulers and peoples, and 2) as a charter for a living mode of social organization. I have argued that the first is strongly present in the Pāli and Sinhala material, which thus bear striking analogies with other origin myths worldwide. Indeed, the Shamabala of Tanganyika have told a story about a lion king founder that is strikingly close to that of Sīhabāhu.^[13] But it is worth taking this opportunity to note that the second was not, I think, present.^[14]

To clarify: in the latter cases, Sahlins perceives a ‘dual society’ in which the foreign-born ruling dynasty must bow to the ritual primacy of the autochthonous people. The king may have overriding authority but by various means his dependency on the life-giving powers of the indigenous people is registered. There are a few indications that the symbolic relationship between the väddās and Sinhala kingship may have preserved some such understanding.^[15] It is intriguing, for example, that the rebel king of 1815–18 should have been presented to the people surrounded by väddās.^[16] But in general the väddās were symbolically as well as geographically on the margins of the Sinhala social order. This mirrors the manner in which the mythical indigenes, the yakkhas, are simply purged from the island in the vaṃsas (although note they return…), or that their descendants, the Pulindas (Vijaya’s off spring with Kuveṇī) were banished. Whereas in the most typical ‘dual society’ the general name for the people is derived from the autochthons, in the case of Sri Lanka it derives, as we have seen, from the royal dynasty itself, which arrives to the island as foreign. In fact, in Lankan society, at times the most important court ritualists were Brahmans.

So the foreignness of the ruling stratum was not a predicate of Sinhala social and political life in quite the manner that it apparently was for the chiefly elites in parts of Oceania (such as the ali’i in Hawaii). This is not at all to deny that the dynasties ruling over Sinhala kingdoms often carried foreign blood or maintained foreign lifestyles as a matter of fact. We have already referred to the many reasons why that should be so in terms of the interests of the dynasty, chief among them the marital logic of dynastic systems and the political logic of hierarchical uniqueness. However, we can supplement this with a consideration of the interests of the noble class beneath it, which may in certain situations seek out stranger-kings in order to establish a relatively disinterested force of arbitration and maintain the balance of power among the various factions. In this way, they forgo the potential for immediate advantage for the long-term preservation of stability. This understanding of stranger-kingship–quite distinct from the Sahlinsian model, and which rather recalls a Hobbesian vision of the development of the state–has been applied in Southeast Asian historiography and was introduced into a Lankan context by Alicia Schrikker.^[17] To the extent that the ideology of kingship is thereby understood as a reflex of political calculation, however, it would imply a certain instability in the system. This is because the utility of the stranger-k ing to the nobility must be set against the bar it places to their highest pretensions, for a faction that finds itself suddenly out of favour that bar may seem disagreeably high.^[18] We shall return to the implications of this below.

In what follows, we shall rather emphasize two vaguely paradoxical points: the first is that the foreignness of the king need not impede the coalescence of ethnic feeling beneath or around him, and the second is that his foreignness is usually subject to certain forms of domestication which renders it palatable. These two points have a certain relevance in the context of Lankan historiography. It is sometimes argued, for example, that the fact that the Nāyaka kings of Kandy (1739–1815) hailed from Madura and upheld a distinct identity and lifestyle distinguishing themselves from the Sinhala nobility must tell of the absence of Lankan patriotism or Sinhala group belonging.^[19] Or that there must therefore be two distinct understandings of Sinhala ness at work, the ‘political’ and ‘cultural’, which were not equivalent.^[20] This is the point at which the comparative method may provide some assistance, for our interpretation of any one case really depends on certain sociological or even psychological assumptions: how does group identity formation work in monarchical societies? What kind of logic does it tend to obey? At this point, Britain may be appealed to for comparative purposes. From the late medieval period to the present day, England has had royal dynasties of foreign origin: the Welsh Tudors, Scottish Stuarts, followed by Germans of some description to the present day, with the Hanoverians and Windsors. George III (r. 1760–1820), for example, who claimed sovereignty over Sri Lanka in the 1810s, was the third Hanoverian king of Great Britain and Ireland but the first to use English as his first language, and was the result of a union between Frederick, Prince of Wales, and Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha.^[21] This has been the way of things regardless of great transformations in the political structures over which the ‘kings and queens of England’ reigned from their medieval origins into their early modern expansions and then the era of the full-blooded nation-state and empire. Even the briefest consideration of early modern English history indicates then that the inherent ‘extraversion’ or rampant cosmopolitanism of premodern dynastic systems need not act as an indigestible obstacle to the emergence of ethnic and patriotic emotion.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

Pollock makes some such voluntarist urge central to his argument about the spread of Sanskrit, although he prefers a different terminology and seeks to detach it from empire per se in the Sanskrit case; it also has much in common with Marshall Sahlins’ notion of ‘galactic mimesis’.

[2]:

Hence in Berkwitz in this volume, kings are consistently compared to deities with an Indic wide relevance (Chapter 5).

[3]:

See, for example R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, ‘Colonialism, Ethnicity and the Construction of the Past. The Changing Identity of the last Four Kings of the Kandyan Kingdom,’ in Pivot Politics: Changing Cultural Identities in Early State Formation Processes, ed. M. van Bakel et. al. (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuls, 1994), 203, or Lorna Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka 1707–1 782 (Colombo: Lake House Investments, 1988), 31–2.

[4]:

Hallisey, ‘Works and Persons in Sinhala Literary Culture’, 697.

[5]:

Obeyesekere, ‘On Buddhist Identity’, 226.

[6]:

This is particularly clear when we make a contrast with the modern nation-state. On the paradoxes of cultural integration and elite distinction in imperial systems, see Alan Strathern, ‘Religion and Empire,’ in The Encyclopedia of Empire, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). 297

[7]:

Strathern, Kingship and Conversion, 41–6, and 22–4, and Zoltán Biedermann, ‘Tribute, Vassalage and Warfare in Early Luso-Lankan Relations (1506–1545),’ in Indo-Portuguese History: Global Trends. Proceedings of the XIth International Seminar of Indo-Portuguese History, ed. Fátima Gracias and Charles Borges (Goa: Maureen & Camvet Publishers, 2005), 185–2 06.

[8]:

Compare the way that Ähälēpola wanted to wear a picture of King George with the way that Kamehameha flew the Union Jack from his house even before the ‘cession’ of the Hawaiian Islands. See Marshall Sahlins, ‘Alterity and Autochthony: Austronesian Cosmographies of the Marvellous,’ Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2010), 143.

[9]:

See also Zoltan Biedermann, ‘The Matrioshka Principle and How it was Overcome: Portuguese and Habsburg Attitudes toward Imperial Authority in Sri Lanka and the Responses of the Rulers of Kōṭṭe (1506–1656),’ Journal of Early Modern History 13 (2009), 265–310. The crystallization of the concept of sovereignty as indivisible power among European elites from the late sixteenth century was an important watershed here, see Paul Kléber Monod, The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe 1589–1715 (New Haven: Yale, 1999), 73–9.

[10]:

For example Sahlins, ‘Alterity and Autochthony’.

[11]:

Strathern, ‘The Vijaya Origin Myth’; Strathern, ‘Vijaya and Romulus’. In the latter paper, I explored the possibility that the Vijaya and Kuveṇī strand of the plot had a distant origin in stories about Odysseus and Circe issuing from the Graeco-Roman world. If so, it would have emerged in-between the writing of the Dīpavaṃsa (early fourth century ce) and Mahāvaṃsa (mid-fifth or sixth century ce). This is intriguingly coincident with the period in which Darley, Chapter 2 in this volume, sees as witnessing a shift in Lanka’s connectivity towards the West, i.e. ‘between the middle of the fifth and the middle of the sixth century’.

[12]:

This, then, is an aspect of the textual tradition for which legitimization theory is insufficient. Note, for example, that it also allows the dark side of kingship to be kept in view, and that it is an origin story for a whole society rather than kingship per se. None of this impedes the possibility that in the hands of the vaṃsa authors it may have assisted in the glamorization of the ruling dynasty, however.

[13]:

Edgar Vincent Winans, Shambala: The Constitution of a Traditional State (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), 16, cited in Marshall Sahlins, ‘The Atemporal Dimensions of History: In the Old Kongo Kingdom, For Example’ (unpublished paper).

[14]:

This was implied in Strathern, ‘Vijaya Origin Myth’, 23, but not explicitly argued. I have recently come across Nancy E. Falk, ‘Wilderness and Kingship in Ancient South Asia,’ History of Religions 13 (1973), 1–15, which argues, using the Mahāvaṃsa material as its main case, that ‘It appears that a king had to have some kind of transaction with the wilderness and the beings that inhabited it to acquire or hold his kingship’, and ‘the pattern that we have been studying suggests that something of a chaotic nature also was made a foundation of the ordinary human community. It perhaps first had to be mastered, and we have seen several instances in which kings in particular managed to subdue it. But once it was subdued, it was available to its master’. This speaks very much to the interpretations developed in the two articles on Vijaya above.

[15]:

A. M. Hocart did argue that the Tooth Relic originally derived its power from associations with the yakkhas, see Falk, ‘Wilderness and Kingship’, 8. Obeyesekere, ‘On Buddhist Identity’, 236, reads the Vijaya narrative as a ‘myth of ethnic seperation and integration’.

[16]:

Yatinuwere Sattamby of Haliyadde, Kandy, 30 June 1818 (CO 54/ 7 1), and Robert Brownrigg to Earl Bathurst, 23 Feb 1818 (CO 54/ 71), in T. Vimalananda, The Great Rebellion of 1818 (Colombo: M. D. Gunasena, 1970), 189, 223, and see Sivasundaram, Chapter 10 in this volume.

[17]:

Ian Caldwell and David Henley, eds., Stranger-Kings in Indonesia and Beyond, special issue of Indonesia and the Malay World, 36 (2008), and Alicia Schrikker, Dutch and British Colonial Intervention in Sri Lanka, 1780–1815 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 23, 207–8.

[18]:

Schrikker, Dutch and British Colonial Intervention, 244, argues that such tensions were rising from the 1780s.

[19]:

Gunawardana, ‘People of the Lion’, 68, and E. Nissan and R. L. Stirrat, ‘Generation of Communal Identities’, contra K. N. O. Dharmadasa, ‘The Sinhala-Buddhist Identity and the Nayaka Dynasty in the Politics of the Kandyan Kingdom, 1739–1815,’ in Collective Identities, Nationalisms and Protests in Modern Sri Lanka, ed. M. Roberts (Colombo: Marga, 1979), 79–104.

[20]:

John Rogers, ‘Early British Rule and Social Classification in Lanka,’ Modern Asian Studies 38 (2004), 629; Sujit Sivasundaram, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 33.

[21]:

His father, George II (r. 1727–6 0), was born in Hanover and retained the title of Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (Hanover). This monarch had to face down the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 to place the 298 Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, on the throne of Great Britain and Ireland. The prince was of Scots (Stuart) and Polish descent, although born and raised in Italy, and had tried to raise a French fleet to retake the throne from the German Hanoverians. So when the British confronted the pseudo-Malabar ‘Pretender’ of Kandy in 1816 (see below) they did not have to look far back into their own history for analogies of rampant dynastic cosmopolitanism.