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The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
The Wicked Monarchs of Sri Lanka I Part 1
Spoiled for choice, selecting the naughtiest monarchs of Sri Lanka is an arduous job. But why does the list begin with its founding father, and a latter queen who made a kitten out of Henry VIII of England?
The awful thing about wickedness is just how interesting it is. Kind and benevolent rulers; admirable warrior kings; even the fumbling but kindly nice ones who build hospitals and live blameless lives – they all pale into guilt-wrenching insignificance when set before a list saturated by the sinful, iniquitous, and depraved.
And in this respect, Sri Lanka is spoilt for choice, simply by virtue of its statistics.
Around 200 kings, with the odd queen, ruled the island from its first recorded beginnings in 543 BCE to its last king, who was packed off into exile by the invading British in 1815. From island-wide kingdoms to those circumscribed by covetous foreign occupiers, the 2358 years of royal rule the country enjoyed were markedly different experiences. It was just as Longfellow had once said of a little girl: “When she was good, she was very, very good/ But when she was bad, she was horrid.”
The country’s monarchs averaged little over 11 years a reign, but with massive variances. Most lapped up a rule of just a few years; sometimes, only a few hours.
A happy few enjoyed reigns that must have seemed an eternity to their fortitudinous subjects. But if the ancient chronicles are to be believed, almost half of them died well ahead of their divinely allocated time – at the hands of their own successors, often sons, sometimes brothers, uncles or even wives or occasionally an invading Indian emperor or edgy Tamil warlord.
No studies have been conducted to precisely identify which country can claim to be the most regicidal. Still, in any future list, only a fool would bet against Sri Lanka not scoring somewhere in the top 5.
From this long, bloody start, regicide took a modest back seat during the rule of the Dutch and the British. But things picked up after independence in 1948. Assassination, often but not always fostered by civil war, promoted the killing of a sitting president, a prime minister, and a leading presidential candidate, Vijaya Kumaratunga, whilst another almost killed his own wife, the then president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, in 1999.
It was but one of many other fortunately failed attempts at regicide that the independent republic had to face, a trait that reduced, at times, its own leaders to accusing one another of hatching yet more malodorously mortal plots.
But selecting just 6 of the country’s most egregious baddies – barely 7% of the total of potential scoundrels - is as tricky as choosing which chocolate to take from an Anton Berg’s Heart Box. The box has an impossibly delicious mix of pralines, marzipan, nougat, soft caramel, coconut, sea salt, orange, Chocolate Liqueur, Nut Truffle, hazelnut, cherry, and apricot. To make it to this list, a Sri Lankan monarch had to be very bad indeed, a real and indisputable villein.
The list begins, quite neatly, with the county’s first recorded king. Embodying a prescient creation myth, which, like many of their type, mixes horror and achievement in equal measure, as with going into labour, Prince Vijaya fits the bill perfectly.
As Romulus and Remus had earlier demonstrated in faraway Rome, being a founding father often necessitated random acts of abomination and cruelty. And so it was with Prince Vijaya. Even his father heartily disapproved of him.
Coming from a royal Indian family said to be descended from lions, the prince might, psychologists might argue, never have had a chance. Violence was in his nature.
But the Mahavamsa, the great ancient Chronicle of Sri Lanka, which is rarely modest in its praise of anything remotely proto-nationalistic, pulls no punches when it comes to its paterfamilias. Given its mission (“compiled for the serene joy and emotion of the pious”), the Mahavamsa had little other choice but to call a spade a spade.
“Vijaya,” it begins, as it meant to go on, “was of evil conduct and his followers were even (like himself), and they did many intolerable deeds of violence. Angered by this, the people brought the matter to the king; the king, speaking persuasively to them, severely blamed his son. But all fell out again as before, the second and yet the third time; and the angered people said to the king: `Kill thy son.’”
For the king, this helpful request enabled him to kill two birds with a single stone. He chose to rid himself not just of his own son but of most of his kingdom’s rogues, whilst demonstrating, like the consummate politician he was, blameless clemency. The Mahavaṃsa records how “then did the king cause Vijaya and his followers, seven hundred men, to be shaven over half the head and put them on a ship and sent them forth upon the sea, and their wives and children also.”
The problem was exported. The prince sailed away from India and “landed in Lanka, in the region called Tambapanni on the day that the Tathagata lay down between the two twinlike sala-trees to pass into nibbana.”
This time, reference (“Tathagata”) to Lord Buddha notwithstanding, the renegade prince wasted little time in smiting most of those whom he first came across. His ruthlessness and expedient mindset can be seen at work in his marriage to Kuveni, a tribal princess, who was herself no stranger to brutality.
Piecing together what actually happened on his arrival is all but impossible. Still, from the extravagantly violent tales told in the Mahavamsa, the vagabond prince likely found no empty island – but rather one already well stocked with people who had ordered themselves in tribes, perhaps even miniature kingdoms. To carve out his own domain necessitated fighting, and in this, a marital alliance with a local princess who could help him in the fight was invaluable.
In piecing together the ghostly DNA of Sri Lanka’s pre-Vijayan native kingdoms, historians have had to turn to local folklore, Indian epic poems like the Ramayana, and the Mahavaṃsa itself. Still, the picture they present is blurred and fantastical.
There was the Ramayana, a half-human tribe founded by the ten-headed demon King Ravana, whose followers have gone down in history as a terrifying lot, given to cannibalism.
A further tribe, the serpent-like Naga, may exist only in myth, despite references to Lord Buddha arriving among them to settle disputes. The Nittaewo, dark-skinned, tiny, and understandably defensive, are a possible third tribal strand, their last members possibly smoked to death.
On marginally surer ground are the Yaksha, described by the Dipavaṃsa, the oldest of the island’s three ancient chronicles and which, with support from the later Mahavaṃsa, could have given rise to the Vedda.
Archaeogeneticists believe the Vedda are descendants of the original Mesolithic settlers who migrated from India 40,000 years ago. Scattered communities still exist today, an ever more ghostly presence on the island, their bloodlines dissipated by intermarriage.
They worship a range of ancient folk deities, as well as mainstream Hindu gods such as Murugan. Ancestor worship and the cult of the dead mark out many of their still-living practices.
This was Kuveni’s tribe, and they seemed to live in scattered communities of kingdoms in various parts of the island. Overcoming her first instinct to kill him, Kuveni instead married him, and on their wedding day, she helped hatch a plot to kill her own clansmen.
They married in a wave of blood. If this was a most Lady Macbeth-like way to ensure freedom and foreclose on reprisals, it was no less monstrous of Viyaja, who more than fulfilled his homicidal role in eliminating all nearby native chieftains.
The Mahavaṃsa describes how “he listened to her and did even (as she said) he slew all the yakkhas, and when he had fought victoriously, he himself put on the garments of the yakkha-king and bestowed the other raiment on one and another of his followers.”
Credited though he is with creating the first Singhalese state, Vijaya is likely to have been, but one of several Indian warlords who washed up on Sri Lankan shores, fought and to some extent enslaved the local tribes to set up kindships for themselves.
This certainly was what Vijaya did, for having slain his new in-laws on his marriage day, he would have gone on with this ethnic cleansing until he had been able to consolidate his new kindship.
Villainy, of course, does not stop with mere bloodshed, however great. With practised and cold-blooded expediency, Vijaya then sacked his wife, abandoned his children, and sent off to India in search of a more compliant and aristocratic partner.
Discarded and unable to return to the family she had helped destroy, Kuveni is said to have climbed to the top of Yakdessagala mountain, cursed her disloyal husband, and plunged to her death. Or was chased there by relatives furious over her earlier attempts with Vijaya to annihilate them and forced off the rocks.
Needless to say, the Mahavaṃsa has a somewhat different take on matters, recoding how “the envoys of the Pandu king delivered up to the prince Vijaya the gifts and the (maidens) with the king’s daughter at their head. When Vijaya had offered hospitality and bestowed honours on the envoys, he bestowed the maidens, according to their rank, upon his ministers and retainers.
According to custom, the ministers in the complete assembly consecrated Vijaya, the king and appointed a great festival. Then King Vijaya consecrated the daughter of the Pandu king with a solemn ceremony as his queen; he bestowed wealth on his ministers, and every year he sent to his wife’s father a shell-pearl worth twice a hundred thousand (pieces of money).
When he had forsaken his former evil way of life, Vijaya, the lord of men, ruling over all Lanka in peace and righteousness, reigned, as is known, in the city of Tambapanni, thirty-eight years.
“ You don’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" may have been Vijaya’s line of self-defence. Still, his murderous and duplicitous actions had given his nascent kingdom some of the behavioural traits that were to be enthusiastically adopted by many of his equally nefarious descendants.
Of physical evidence for any of this, there is none – or perhaps nearly none. Although the tropical climate is ruthlessly focused on ceaseless decluttering, the Sri Lankan countryside, its jungles, mountains, valleys, the dry scrub of the Wanni, and the cloud forest of its mountains nevertheless seem to hoard, and from time to time liberate, an inexhaustible treasury of lost sepulchres and temples.
Astonishingly, it is better than a one-in-two bet that the tomb of Sri Lanka’s first king, Vijaya, still exists. It is said to be located on Medagama Hill in Paduwasnuwara, halfway between Kurunegala and Puttalam. Indeed, the unmissable shape of a very ancient stupa is evident.
And astonishingly too, ashes found in its heart during conservation work were tested by the Archaeological Department of Sri Lanka and found to be at least 2,500 to 2,600 years old, placing them well within touching distance of the first king.
Across the entire island, a lonesome scrap of haunting folklore offers a hint at the final resting place of Queen Kuveni. There is nothing to verify it except the curious behaviour of the local people.
Visitors to the village are welcomed to its little temple, the Maligatenna Raja Maha Viharaya, but not permitted to walk to the top of the little hill above it, where the queen’s crypt is said to lie. Permits have to be applied for and are only ever issued on Poya days, and most typically not even then.
Reluctantly, one has to skip the many top-drawer choices before arriving at the country’s second most horrifying ruler, this one a queen, the consort of King Choura Naga – Anula.
It had taken almost 500 years, long and achievement-laden, to reach these last few blood-drenched decades of Vijayan rule, but Choura Naga managed the transition with depressing ease. In its new king, the Vijayan dynasty had found the leader best able to steer it onto the final road to oblivion.
Its last few decades were rich with plotlines that would make most horror movies look tame. He, and his short-lived successors, travelled these years with unforgettable horror – most of them fated to be murdered by their successors in an outpouring of serial regicide that plunged the country into civil war; and ultimately forced a complete change of national leadership.
Yet it all started so well. Choura Naga, the son of King Valagamba, ascended to the throne in 62 BCE upon his stepbrother's death. The kingdom, rescued from its third Tamil invasion by Valagamba in 89 BCE, had enjoyed almost 30 years of peace and nation-rebuilding when the new king and his new wife celebrated their marriage’s poruwa ceremony, witnessing the Ashtaka recite his religious chants at the precisely preordained auspicious time.
As events were later to prove, the Ashtaka had his work cut out for him over the next few years, becoming so in demand that he became a nationwide celebrity in his own right.
Anula would turn out to be one of the island’s more colourful characters; the kind of person Anne Tyler had in mind in “Back When We Were Grownups,” writing “once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”
What little is known of King Choura Naga is that he managed to get himself poisoned by Anula in 50 BCE, an act of realpolitik in which his wife quite probably played on her husband’s deep unpopularity with the traditional Theravada Buddhist monks who dominated the country.
This was not a school of Buddhism that won Choura Naga’s devotion. Indeed, he even went so far as to destroy eighteen of their temples, earning the eternal disapprobation of The Mahavamsa, who recorded the poisoning with significant censure: “the evildoer died and was reborn in the Lokantarika-hell,” adding, for good measure, that the slain king was also “a fool.”
The political support Anula’s coup enjoyed is lost to all but the most pernicious speculation, and she filled the vacancy she had created by placing Choura Naga’s young nephew, Kuda Thissa, on the throne. But not for long. Anula was ever a lady short of patience. Tiring of her ward, she poisoned him in 47 BCE and installed her lover, a palace guard, as Siva I.
It was the start of the Love Period in ancient Sri Lankan history, every bit as deadly as a cobra bite.
Long-term love was not to be the hapless Siva’s destiny. He, too, was poisoned, and the queen installed a new lover, Vatuka, on the throne in 46 BCE. This was something of a promotion for the Tamil, who had, until then, been living the blameless life of a carpenter. By now, Anula was well into her stride. The following year, the carpenter was replaced by Darubhatika Tissa, a wood carrier, who also failed to measure up.
Her last throw of the love dice was Niliya, a palace priest whom she installed as king in 44 BCE before feeding him something he ought not to have eaten. At this point, Anula must have reached the logical conclusion: if you want something done well, do it yourself. Busy women, after all, don't have time for excuses, only solutions. As Dolly Parton said, "Find out who you are and do it on purpose."
And so, from 43 to 42 BCE, Anula ruled in her own name, Asia’s first female head of state, beating President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga by two thousand and thirty-six years. It was not a success.
After just four months, her group-breaking reign ended at the hands of her brother-in-law, Kutakanna Tissa, who, having sensibly become a Buddhist monk during Anula’s reign, remained alive and so able to rescue the monarchy. He did so by burning the queen alive in her own palace in 42 BCE, bringing down the curtains on a royal career that eclipsed that of the entire Borgia clan put together.
By any standards, this killing of so many kings by another monarch was a world record few have ever bettered, and secures for Anula an abiding place in the most exacting registers of wickedness.
That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbrick at 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.