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In under a 100 pint-sized chapters, The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka, tellsthe story of an island renowned for a history many times larger and more byzantine than that of far bigger nations. From prehistory to the present day, each short chapter makes a little clearer the intricate sagas of its rulers, people, and progression.
Welcome to an episode of The History of Sri Lanka, brought to you by The Ceylon Press.
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Episode 7. Conquered: Sri Lanka & Time of Sorrows.
Good advice is often nearer to hand than even the most foolish leader can imagine. Or be minded to seek.
One hundred and fifty years earlier, and six thousand six hundred and one kilometres away, Thucydides, whose work, The Peloponnesian War, set such standards for history as to anticipate every conceivable future military and political ploy, had the perfect solution in mind to fend off the catastrophe that befall Sri Lanka on the death of their visionary king, Devanampiya Tissa in 267 BCE – or 207 BCE, depending on whether you accept the tempered chronology of such scholars as the impossibly talented Wilhelm Geiger.
That such advice could have been given or received is not as far-fetched as it first seems. The Mahavamsa refers to visits by what they call ‘yona’ to Sri Lanka in the fourth to third centuries BCE, ‘yona’ being the word the Persians used for their archenemy, the Greeks.
Other chroniclers note how Pandu Kabhaya established a special quarter of his dazzling new city, Anuradhapura, for foreign merchants, including, it is suspected, the Yona Greeks, sometime after 437 BCE.
Just across the Palk Straits, in India’s current Bihar province, Megasthenes, the Greek Ambassador to the Maurya court around 290 BCE, was busy mixing with, amongst others, those very same Anuradhapuran Greeks who came to badger and barter with the Mauryas.
Historian as he was himself, he was also the sort of bookish man who may have had a few spare scrolls of Thucydides’ main works to lend to the governing literati of the time, including the Sri Lankan kings and their associates.
But if there ever had been a loaning of scrolls, it seems that Devanampiya Tissa’s successors failed to read them. Indeed, they missed Thucydides’ most famous thoughts about the three “gravest failings,” namely “want of sense, of courage, or of vigilance”.
For it was the want of all three, especially the last of these attributes, which was to tip the Vijayan kingdom not once but twice into such long and shocking periods of surrender that for well over half the intervening century it was a kingdom under occupation; its great city of Anuradhapura recast with a Tamil polish; and its plaintiff kings killed or exiled.
Back in 267 BCE, as Devanampiya Tissa moved into what all would have hoped to have been Pari-Nirvana (the post-nirvana state of total release), this was far from what anyone would have thought even remotely possible. The great kingdom was utterly solid, surely? Unbreakable. Resilient. Or was it?
For glum historians inclined to search for the deepest runes and trumpet them loudly, Devanampiya Tissa’s death was actually the start of a bleak three-hundred-year promenade that would lead to the dynasty’s inevitable collapse, a journey that would also fatally embed the country with an ongoing appetite for incipient disaster, regardless as to which dynasty, president, or occupying invader was calling the shots.
Over this sorrowful period, through the reigns of almost 30 kings, Sri Lanka was to enjoy just three short periods of peace; interspersed with three Tamil invasions and occupations; several decades of continuous regicide; and a concluding civil war in which the Vijayans turned their spears dhunnas (bows), muguras (clubs), adayatiyas (javelins), kaduwas (swords) and kunthas (spears) upon one another until there was no credible heir left standing, merely an preposterous and fleeting lookalike monarch, until he too was murdered by a group of nobles for whom enough was quite enough.
No one saw the turmoil that lay ahead.
That such chaos should await did not seem even wildly probable as Devanampiya Tissa’s brother, Uththiya, succeeded to the throne.
He was to be followed by two more brothers, Mahasiwa and Surathissa, all three of them, according to The Mahavamsa, ever on the side of neatness, to rule for respectably lengthy periods of ten years apiece.
Whether they died in their beds or were murdered by their successors over these thirty years is a guessing game for clowns.
The Mahavamsa maintains a prim muzzle on the matter. Indeed, the period was suspiciously uneventful; unnervingly calm even. All seemed fine with the state – and yet something, somewhere, was going fatally wrong. “What goes up,” said Isaac Newton, “must come down.”
At best, it is probable that nothing happened, merely a governing indolence that spread like rising damp or unseen termites.
Perhaps all three brothers were so distracted by the promise of enlightenment as they got to grips with the new religion their brother had introduced, that they forgot about all other aspects of good governance. Of vigilance, there was none; and over time, the kingdom’s defences and its ability to dominate and control its own destiny became fatally compromised as events were to show later.
For Uttiya, his role must at times have seemed more chief mourner than king as first one and then another all-consuming state funerals took place, the like of which the country had never seen.
First to go was Mahinda, prince, monk, missionary, and saint, “the light of Lanka,” who had first brought Buddhism to the island from India.
Dying aged eighty in 205 BCE, he was considered to have become an Arhat, one who, having gained insight into the true nature of existence, had been most happily liberated from the troublesome cycle of rebirth. Uttiya assiduously collected the evangelist’s relics and busied himself constructing stupas over them, laying him to rest with a single hair of Lord Buddha in Mihintale’s stunning Ambasthala Stupa, surrounded by two tall rows of slender stone pillars carved with lions, birds and dwarfs.
Hardly had he or the country recovered from this devastating, step-changing bereavement than a second struck just two years later when Sangamitta, Mahinda’s sister, bearer of the bo-tree, princess, nun, and saint, died just a year short of eighty.
Once again, King Uttiya busied himself with stupa-building, erecting the Sangamiththa Stupa over her ashes in Anuradhapura, his own reign drawing to a shattered end just a few years later.
He was succeeded by his brother, Mahasiwa, whose own ten-year rule, from 257 BCE – 247 BCE, goes almost as unremembered - apart from the fact that he built the Nagarangana Monastery, whose location is now the subject of modest arguments.
The king, noted The Mahavamsa approvingly, was especially careful to protect “the pious”. He was said to have been very close to one of Mahinda’s principal followers, Thera Bhaddasara, a relationship that may further indicate how preoccupied the crown was with matters spiritual rather than temporal.
By the time Mahasiwa’s brother (or possibly uncle) Surathissa took the throne in 247 BCE, things were clearly going most seriously wrong, and the young country would have been wise to take to heart the words of the Egyptian writer, Suzy Kassem: “Never follow a follower. It's why the whole world is falling apart.”
For by now the kingdom itself was falling apart. It had become so ineptly run and poorly defended as to lay itself wide open to invasion – the first recorded invasion of the country from South India.
Three kings, and three decades on from the kingdom’s apogee, the governance of the country had eroded badly. The systems, protections, administration, and defences put in by the last three great kings had broken down under the following three.
All the Mahavamsa has to say about this doomed monarch is that he was “zealously mindful of meritorious works.” However, a preoccupation with forts, weapons, the latest foreign intelligence, and armies and ships patrolling the Palk Straits would have been much more helpful.
The invasion came in the ignominious form of a couple of Tamil horse “freighters,” Sena and Guttik.
Spotting the ultimate commercial opportunity (a kingdom) in the weak rule of King Surathissa, the traders met little resistance in conquering Anuradhapura and slaughtering the ineffectual Surathissa. With a ruthlessness that would have put Cornelius Vanderbilt to shame (“What do I care about law? Ain't I got the power?”), They were to rule it for 22 years, the first of a succession of Tamil invaders.
Twenty-two years in the course of a dynasty’s six-hundred-year-long ascendance is no more troubling than celery in heat. Still, this first Tamil invasion, simply by virtue of ever happening, presented the state, then as now, with a symbolic significance that was impossible to overlook, playing as it did right into the rowdy heart of Tamil vs Singhala political mythology.
Like football, the weather or when the next bus might arrive, discussions on this subject are fated never to be concluded. Many, but by no means all, agree that, although the Vijayans themselves originated from northern rather than southern India, Sri Lanka was, from the outset, profoundly shaped by the norms of Tamil society and culture; in language, script, literature, pottery, architecture, and urban planning - to name a few attributes.
Tamil states within Sri Lanka, albeit subsidiary, coexisted with the Anuradhapura crown for long periods. Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu were different and the same. Even so, the gradual rise of a more distinct island culture made later reflections on this invasion, as with other ones, appear more shocking than they probably were; and the differences between conquered and conquering were more marginal than they seemed later, seen from the platform of a discernibly different Singhala culture.
But although this humiliating first invasion presented King Surathissa with his reincarnation moment, it was not to put an end to the Vijayans, the lucky dynasty. Like the immortal jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii, dead, in this case, did not mean what it usually does. The fight had not quite left them.
Out there in the wilderness lay Asela, another son of old King Mutasiva. After Surathissa was killed, Asela took refuge far south in the Kingdom of Ruhuna – a sub-kingdom that Mahanaga, another son of King Mutasiva, had established. Descending on the horse trader kings with much shattered dignity to put right, Asela killed them in battle.
After decades of poor rule, followed by a pair of asset-stripping Indian merchants, there was much that King Asela had to put right. But the task proved too much for him, and his own rule was brought to an abrupt end 10 years later, in 205 BCE, when he was killed in battle by Ellara, an invading Tamil Chola.
That he should meet such an end, after so much trouble to restore his family’s right to reign, seems almost unfair – but as Nicholas Sparks gloomily observed, “life, I’ve learned, is never fair. If people teach anything in school, that should be it.”
Unlike the first, the second invasion and subsequent occupation of Sri Lanka was an outcome no one could miss, right across South Asia.
Ellara was to rule the Anuradhapura Kingdom for 44 years, smashing, with greater impact than his horse-treading predecessors, the extraordinary edifice of Vijayan rule that had already given the island so much of its new cultural identity.
A good way to get up close and personal with this unusual conqueror is to visit the northern Tamil city of Jaffa, where a curious white clock tower stands, with Italianate windows, Roman pillars, and a little minaret. Built by subscription to honour the 1875 visit of the Prince of Wales, it was damaged in the civil war and repaired, partly with the help of a later Prince of Wales, Charles, in 2002. Before it, as if leading a charge, is a golden elephant, ridden by a golden king – Elara, or in Tamil, Ellalan.
Invaders are rarely liked and often forgotten. But Ellalan's forty-four-year reign merits much more than a modest footnote in the island’s story. Unlike almost all other conquerors before or since, Ellalan cherished his kingdom as much as any man might his own home.
He came to rule – not rape and pillage, pulling back from an early bout of temple destruction; and possibly even converting to Buddhism, as the horse-traders were rumoured to have done earlier, motivated, like the ex-Protestant Henri IV later, by the view that “(Catholic) Paris is worth a mass.”
That he was not a total outsider is also indicated by some of the men he included in his conquering army, including Singhalese administrators such as Nandi and commanders whose names have come down to us as Deegejanthu, Gemunu and Isuru.
“The sword of justice has no scabbard,” said Antione De Riveral. And so it was with Ellalan. He is a strange figure, his Tamilness eliciting not even a scintilla of condemnation in The Mahavaṃsa, which notes instead “a Damila of noble descent, named Elara, who came hither from the Cola-country to seize on the kingdom, ruled when he had overpowered king Asela, forty-four years, with even justice toward friend and foe, on occasions of disputes at law.”
The ancient text then goes on to illuminate Ellalan’s many acts of justice and generosity. Just to the point of terrifying, he even executed his own son for transgressing the law.
Virtuous though he was, Ellalan was, all the same, a footnote, for the Vijayans were still not yet finished with their rule. The main line of succession had been destroyed. Still, a cadet branch existed in the southern Kingdom of Ruhuna, a Vijayan redoubt ruled over by the descendants of King Devanampiya Tissa’s brother, Mahanaga.
The Kingdom of Ruhuna had never really been part of the Anuradhapura domain. Indeed, since at least the reign of King Surathissa, the Anuradhapura Kingdom itself had begun to fracture, as the Mahavaṃsa points out the presence of 32 semi-independent Tamil states coexisting alongside King Ellalan’s Anuradhapura.
Far south of Anuradhapura, the often faithful, usually semi-detached and forever remote kingdom of Ruhuna was incubating the fightback.
Ruhana, at this time, was fortunate to be ruled by the Vijayan King, Kavantissa, who pursued a focused and implacable strategy of absorbing the little would-be kingdoms that bordered his land. By the time of his death, he had created a powerful southern state, one perfectly poised to help the family regain control of Anuradhapura itself.
The death of King Kavantissa sparked a predictable sibling spat between his two sons, Dutugemunu and Tissa. In a series of trials involving elephants, the kidnapping of the dowager queen, and set-piece battles, Dutugemunu emerged victorious. His victory in his home kingdom was to have a profound impact on the whole island, for it was in his reign that the Vijayans finally asserted their dominance across the entire island.
A notable adherent of Walt Disney’s modus operandi (“Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long”), Dutugemunu, throne secure, set off for the north with an army of chariots, monks, horses, a lucky spear, his favourite elephant (Kandula) and, states The Mahavaṃsa, Ten Giant Warriors (Nandhimitra, Suranimala, Mahasena, Theraputtabhya, Gotaimbara, Bharana, Vasabha, Khanjadeva, Velusamanna, and Phussadeva). Composed, as was normal, of four units – elephants, horses, chariots, and infantry – the army was spectacularly successful.
Having learnt much from his sagacious father, Dutugemunu began by first mopping up the splintered Tamil statelets in the north. The campaigns reached their climax outside the walls of Anuradhapura.
The old king Ellalan, mounted on his elephant Mahäpabbata, faced his younger rival, mounted on his elephant, Kandula. Did he tremble when he heard Dutugemunu call out, 'none shall kill Ellalan but myself'?
We can but guess. The ancient texts report that the deadly combat was honourable but decisive, a spear thrust finally ending Ellalan’s life in 161 BCE. The records state that "the water in the tank there was dyed red with the blood of the slain.
And perhaps in acknowledgement of Ellalan’s fine reputation, the king had his victim cremated properly and a stupa constructed over the pyre. “Even to this day,” comments The Mahāvaṃsa, “the princes of Lanka, when they draw near to this place, are wont to silence their music.
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That was a production from The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.
The complete list of podcast series from The Ceylon Press includes:
1. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka
2. Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast
3. Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka
4. Poetry From The Jungle
5. The Jungle Diaries
6. The Archaeologies Diaries