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The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
The Wicked Monarchs of Sri Lanka I Part 1
It’s often said that to rule, you must be ruthless to excess. But exactly what were the excesses created by the final Sri Lankan kings to earn them a place on a list of wicked monarchs?
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Welcome to Part Two of a two-part Podcast dedicated to Sri Lanka’s most wicked monarchs.
After the excesses of Prince Vijaya and Queen Annua, it is time to encounter our third candidate king and the winner of an abiding place in the island’s register of wicked monarchs.
So little is actually known about Yassalalaka Tissa, King of Anuradhapura, that he almost fails to cut. And yet three key qualifications mark him, two of which are so beautifully distinctive as to ensure his remembrance for as long as anyone ever bothers to remember the island’s ancient kings.
His path to power was so traditionally iniquitous that it has become an almost essential distinction for any candidate for this guide: he murdered his predecessor. Simply by virtue of his ascension, Yassalalaka Tissa makes the grade, though the ancient sources helpfully validate this by calling him “a vicious ruler.”
But by virtue of his placement in the line of the founding Vijayan kings, his inclusion here offers an irresistible and matchless neatness to the account, for he was to be the last true Vijayan ruler. His own murder, in 60 CE, just 8 years after seizing the throne, brought to an end the royal dynasty that, more than any other, set up the country to be what it was.
And what an ending it was, with its preposterous characteristics ranking third among the reasons to include in this guide.
Yassalalaka Tissa's own reign suffered because his dynasty had never really recovered from overcoming the island’s third invasion by Tamil warlords between 103 and 89 BCE. This was to so weaken the kingdom as to fatally undermine its confidence and capability.
It all started with yet another grubby and bloody power struggle that saw one brother kill another to grab the throne before passing it on – briefly – to yet another brother, Khallata Naga, who was himself to be dispatched by a fourth, Valagamba, in 103 BCE. It was a damned succession.
Barely had Valagamba digested the celebratory when all the hounds of hell slipped their leads and the kingdom’s preeminent port, Mahatittha (now Mantota, opposite Mannar), fell to invaders.
The third Tamil invasion of Sri Lanka was on. Valagamba fled, lucky to be alive, and in a 14-year tableau reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s novel “Five Little Pigs”, the once-grand Anuradhapura Kingdom was manhandled into atrophy.
Two of the Dravidians returned to India, leaving one of the remaining five, Pulahatta, to rule from 104-101 BCE. At this point, history struggles to keep up.
Pulahatta was killed by Bahiya, another of the five remaining Dravidians and the head of the army, who was, in turn, murdered in 99 BCE by Panayamara, the third Dravidian who had been unwisely promoted to run the army.
Proving those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it, Panayamara was assassinated in 92 BCE by his general, the fourth Dravidian, Pilayamara.
But by now, Valagamba, ever the comeback king, began his return, his guerrilla tactics toppling Pilayamara, who had lasted all of seven months on the throne, and then defeating the last of the Pandyan chiefs, Dathika.
Valagamba’s return to power should have marked a long-lasting, confident restart of the dynasty. Still, too much blood had been spilt, and regicide had been so normalised as to undermine nearly every succeeding monarch with its malign and cancerous weight.
Two periods over the next 130 years in particular were to be its undoing, the first being the chaos unleashed by the ambitions of Queen Annua herself, who murdered seven kings before being murdered in her turn.
Just five kings later, chaos once again took hold when a civil war, promoted by one too many serial regicides, caught up with a king called Kanirajanu Tissa, who was to be dispatched in 33 CE by his successor, Chulabhaya, in time-honoured fashion.
Dead within 2 years, Chulabhaya’s sister, Sivali, took the throne for 4 months before –, but by now a proper civil war had broken out, with all its attendant disasters, including leaving their kingdom itself utterly ruleless for periods of time.
Sivali bobs up and down in the months succeeding her ascension, vying for control of the state in what looks like a three-cornered struggle between herself, her nephew Ilanaga and the Lambakarnas. By now, the Vijayan dynasty had to contend not only with itself but also with the much-put-upon and exasperated nobility, especially the Lambakarna family.
Little about this period of Sri Lankan history is certain, except that from around 35 CE an uncensored civil war preoccupied the entire country, leaving it without any plausible governance.
For a time, Ilanaga seemed to be ahead of the pack. But he then appears to have scored a perfect own goal by demoting the entire Lambakarna clan. This abrupt change in their caste, in a country increasingly rigidified by caste ideology, galvanised them into a full-scale rebellion.
The king – if king he really was – fell and fled into the hill country, returning 3 years later at the head of a borrowed Chola army to take back his throne in 38 CE. Ilanaga’s reign lasted another 7 years before his son, Chandra Mukha Siva, succeeded in 44 CE – only to be murdered by his brother, Yassalalaka Thissa, our third candidate in this guide, in 52 CE.
The stage was now set for one of the most eccentric periods of island governance. With the ascension of the regicidal Yassalalaka Thissa, the last chorus of the Vijayan throne sounded, in Frank Sinatra style: “and now the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.”
With a story too bathetic to be encumbered by inconvenient disbelief, The Mahavamsa recounts the bizarre end of this once-great dynasty in 60 CE.
“Now, a son of Datta, the gate-watchman, named Subha, who was himself a gate-watchman, bore a close likeness to the king. And this palace-guard Subha did the king Yasalalaka, in jest, bedeck with the royal ornaments and place upon the throne and binding the guard's turban about his own head, and taking himself his place, staff in band, at the gate, he made merry over the ministers as they paid homage to Subha sitting on the throne. Thus was he wont to do, from time to time.
Now, one day, the guard cried out to the king, who was laughing: `Why does this guard laugh in my presence?' And Subha, the guard, ordered to slay the king, and he himself reigned here six years under the name Subha Raja.”
Despatched by his own lookalike, Yassalalaka Thissa, the last Vijayan king died, one hopes, seeing the unexpectedly funny side of assassination. King Subha’s own reign lasted 6 years, when, whetted by a 3-year rule back in 35 CE, the Lambakarna clan took royal matters back into their own hands and put the ex-palace guard to death.
Some 200 years after all this dayglow-mad tale, we encounter our 4th candidate; villainous for sure but oddly sweet too – though not so sweet as to rule himself out from his rightful place in this guide.
By the time Jettha Tissa I came to the throne, the Lambakannas, the dynasty that replaced the Vijayans, had already been in power for 60% of their reign. However, they were to regain power 245 years later and rule for a second term, this time for almost 300 years until the most significant Tamil invasion the island was to know eradicated their offspring from all known records forever.
But that was all still to come. For now, the first set of Lambakanna kings seemed to be approaching a rare and wonderful chink of regental quietude and plenty. Until that, Jettha Tissa, I took over.
What extenuating circumstances there were to explain his nature could be said to be found in his fathering, for his father, Gotabhaya, himself a near-specific candidate for this guide, had come to the throne having murdered at least one, if not two, previous kings.
In 254 CE, Gotabhaya grabbed the throne, ruling it with the proverbial rod of iron. A deeply conservative religious man, he was unimpressed by the Vajrayana movement, a form of tantric Buddhism that was making a slim but noticeable appearance in his kingdom.
The movement was closely aligned with Mahayana Buddhism and was seen by many as incompatible with the Theravada Buddhism practised on the island since the 3rd century BCE. The king did all he could to thwart it, even banishing sixty monks for such beliefs.
But what he kept out with one door slammed shut, he inadvertently let in with another, for he entrusted his son, Jettha Tissa’s education to an Indian monk named Sanghamitta, a closet follower of Vaitulya Buddhism.
The Vaitulya doctrinal strand was even more radical than the Vajrayana doctrine that Gotabhaya was so busy trying to eradicate. Like a time bomb, the impact of this private religious education on his successor was timed to go off the moment this alarming and archaic old king died.
His death in 267 CE left the country deeply divided. Several ministers, blithely (and, as it turned out, suicidally) bold, refused to participate in his funeral rites. For it was at this point that Jetta Tissa made his monstrous mark, which the Mahavaṃsa faithfully records with an eye for the kind of gory detail more beloved of sensational newspapers:
“After his father’s death,” it begins, “Jettha Tissa became king.
To punish the hostile ministers who would not go in procession with him, at the performing of the king’s funeral rites, the king himself proceeded forth, and placing his younger brother at the head and then the body following close behind, and then the ministers whilst he himself was at the end (of the procession), he, when his younger brother and the body were gone forth, had the gate closed immediately behind them, and he commanded that the treasonous ministers be slain and (their bodies) impaled on stakes round about his father’s pyre.”
This pitiless habit of creating a circle of staked heads was a useful iconic pageant of power that helped the new regime whip people into place. Still, it has haunted the island through the centuries, its most recent appearance being during the brutal JVP uprising in 1971 and 1987, when anxious neighbours, calling on nearby villages, might find similar circles of horror.
Under Jetta Tissa, as under his father, the country received tough love, and his subsequent decade-long rule was not an easy ride for those around him. Indeed, states The Mahavamsa, “he came by the surname: the Cruel.” It then, with dismay, elaborates on the steps he took to shift patronage and resources from the orbit of Theravāda Buddhism to Vaitulya Buddhism.
But mixed in with such stern rule and an eagerness for sudden acts of capital punishment was also a certain amount of largesse toward the religious community, including building a large water tank for the monastery Arama Pacinatissapabbata and tailoring six sets of robes for 30,000 monks.
The Mahavaṃsa, with a surprising and somewhat unusual tone of balance, ends its coverage of his grim reign, stating that “thus, reflecting that sovereignty, being the source of manifold works of merit, is at the same time the source of many an injustice, a man of pious heart will never enjoy it as if it were sweet food mixed with poison.”
Jetta Tissa’s nine Lambakanna successors were to romp their way through reigns which, the odd happy ending notwithstanding, failed to reverse an ever-weakening realm.
When the subsequent invasion by 6 Dravidian chiefs came, the kingdom fell compliantly into their hands. It was 436 CE, and though Sri Lanka’s new rulers were Buddhist Tamils and not Hindu ones, they were still essentially good time boys out for as long as it might last - and all the easy plunder they could muster.
It took 16 long and violent years to finally eject them, an achievement made possible only by the advent of a new homespun dynasty, the Moriyas, under a new warlord-king, Dhatusena, a ruler who would be remembered as one of Sri Lanka’s most fabulous kings. But not even his considerable achievements could protect him from his own son, Kashyapa, the fifth and most glamorous member of the elite villains included in this guide.
Being the son of a non-royal concubine, Kasyapa had no place in the succession – that right going instead to his royal brother, Moggallana. But Kasyapa played family politics with the skill of a card shark.
Cleverly, he was able to leverage an old family rift created when his father had his sister killed for failing to protect her own daughter from being abused by her husband, Migara. Whatever else this act could be called, it was also unwise, for Migara was also the head of the army.
Never scorn a soldier. Willingly enlisted in the planned coup d'état, the army sided with Kasyapa, and King Dhatusena was deposed in 473 CE.
For Moggallana, this was a significant setback. Penurious exile rather than years of milk and honey (or Kittel) were now to be his fate. Even so, it was a fate far better than that awaiting his father.
Had things ended with mere deposition or even a quiet touch of regicide, we may never have heard of Kashyapa. He would just have been yet another one of the island’s numerous coup d'état kings.
But with Oedipian instincts, Kashyapa went further. Much further. He began by entombing his father alive in his palace walls. For so distinguished a king as Dhatusena, to be reduced to mere bricks and mortar was a shocking way to end a reign. And to escape the widespread disapprobation this would have created, Kashyapa abandoned his capital of Anduraupura much as Tiberius had abandoned Rome for Capri and headed for Sigiriya.
Here, for a time at least, he ducked those biblical warnings that declared that “he that covereth his sins shall not prosper.” Even so, as an otherwise obscure American wildflower enthusiast later noted, “the wages of sin are the hardest debts on earth to pay, and they are always collected at inconvenient times and unexpected places.”
It took 22 years before Kashyapa’s debt was called in, during which time he turned Sigiriya into one of Asia’s most remarkable pleasure palaces; the venue for a lifestyle that made living one long, spectacular party.
A capital for just one reign, Sigiriya was a cross between the Tivoli, Akhenaten’s Amarna, and the Brighton Pavilion. It enjoyed every last innovation and refinement available – and there were many.
It set new standards for urban planning: the royal bastion, surrounded by an elaborately laid-out outer city, encircled by geometric water circles, terraced and boulder gardens, with ponds, pavilions, fountains, and cut pools.
Double moats and triple ramparts, and defendable gateways guarded it, and the massive sentinel sculpture of a 45-foot-high crouching lion marked out its main entrance. The world's most advanced water technology powers its fountains, lakes, wells, streams, and waterfalls. Artists whose frescoes equalled those of the later and faraway Leonardo da Vinci painted their perfumed inhabitants.
Nothing was denied it – nothing until the Moggallana denied it everything. In joy is sorrow - and Kashyapa, king, party giver, gourmand, and libertine, knew that his moment of doom was bound to come sooner rather than later. Gazing across the plains from his high fortress walls in Sigiriya, he would have been presciently aware that his brother would eventually arrive to stop all the fun.
And so he did. Commanding a specially recruited mercenary army from nearby India, Moggallana had come to take back his rightful throne. Kashyapa would have watched his sibling nemesis gather on the plains below him, his implacable army spilling out across the water gardens and pleasure terraces of his Alhambra-like palace.
The day was to end with the death of Kashyapa and the extinction of all that Sigiriya stood for - one of Asia’s most remarkable pleasure palaces; the venue for a lifestyle that made living one long, spectacular party. The victorious brother returned the seat of government to the old capital, Anduraupura, like some brow-beaten and repentant deserter, ensuring that power was once again exercised with appropriate and demure propriety.
Immortalised as the patricide king, Kashyapa emerges as a rather likeable monster, the sort that Mary Wollstonecraft had in mind when she wrote that “no man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.”
The following 720 years are lavishly populated with errant kings of one sort or another, their iniquitous errantry usually little more complicated than a touch of regicide, which is perhaps why it takes quite so long before we get to this guide’s 6th exultant member - Kalinga Magha, one of the last of the island’s most prominent Tamil invaders.
In a sense, Kalinga Magha stands as a devilish ambassador for all eight notable pre-colonial invaders suffered by the island. Although one or two others outdid him in impact, Kalinga Magha appeared to make up for it with the psychotic, enthusiastic style he brought to his task. Plunder, land, murder, and all on the broadest possible scale – this was what got him up in the morning.
Most of the others were merely after money: Sena and Guttika, the cunning Tamil horse traders who stole the kingdom in 237 BCE for 22 years; the almost a dozen invading Pandyan Dravidian chiefs, the first 5 capturing the state in 103 BCE for 14 years; the next 6 in 429 CE for 26 years.
One even loved the land he conquered: Elara, the mighty and even respected Chola strongman who ruled for an astonishing 44 years.
Two merely saw it as an appropriate annexure to their already vast empire: the Chola emperors Rajaraja I and Rajendra I, who ruled Andhra Pradesh for 77 years from 993 CE.
And the last barely counts, for Parakrama Pandyan II, the Pandyan warlord who first captured Polonnaruwa, ruled it for just 3 years, under whom he himself was killed by Kalinga Magha in 1215 CE – and even he, the chronicles observed, did so “without transgressing the political precepts of Manu”.
Under Parakrama Pandyan II, life in Polonnaruwa went on essentially unchanged.
The city, having been made the new capital by Vijayabahu, the king who had finally expelled Rajendra I and the last Cholas in 1070 CE, had enjoyed a vast building programme under this new line of Sinhalese kings.
The site was transformed by immense, beautiful buildings, supported by an agrarian economy enabled by hydraulic engineering marvels that fed expansive water tanks used to irrigate crops.
The Kingdom was no pale echo of Anuradhapura, being, at times, at least as powerful, creative, and influential - but a depressing run of quarrelsome monarchs fatally undid its future. It fell with depressing ease when “there landed a man who held to a false creed, whose heart rejoiced in bad statesmanship:” Kalinga Magha.
Arriving in 2015, he was “a great scorching fire,” whose “heart rejoiced in bad statesmanship … an unjust king sprung from the Kalihga line, “who “put out the Monarch’s eyes and plundered all his treasures, pearls, jewels and so forth”.
The chronicles eagerly enumerate his sins. “His great warriors oppressed the people, boasting cruelly everywhere … they tore from the people their garments, their ornaments and the like, corrupted the good morals of the family which had been observed for ages, cut off hands and feet and the like (of the people), destroyed many houses and tied up cows, oxen and other (cattle) which they made their own property.
After they had put fetters on the wealthy people and had tortured them and taken away all their possessions, they made them poor.
They wrecked the image houses, destroyed many cetiyas, ravaged the viharas and maltreated the lay brethren.
They flogged the children, tormented the five comrades of the Order, made the people carry burdens and forced them to do heavy labour.
Many books, known and famous, they tore from their cord and strewed them hither and thither.
The beautiful, vast, proud cetiyas like the Katanavali and others, which embodied, as it were, the glory of former pious kings, were destroyed by being overthrown and, alas! Many of the bodily relics, their souls as it were, are to disappear.
The Monarch forced the people to adopt a false faith, bringing great confusion to the four sharply divided castes*. Villages and fields, houses and gardens, slaves, cattle, buffaloes and whatever else belonged to the Sihalas he had delivered up to the Kerajas.
The viharas, the 77 pariveijas and many sanctuaries he made over to one or other of his warriors as a dwelling. The treasures which belonged to the Buddha and were the property of the holy Order, he seized and thus committed several sins to go to hell.
In this fashion, committing deeds of violence, the Ruler Magba held sway in Lanka for twenty-one years.”
A massive migration of Sinhalese people followed, to the south and west of Sri Lanka and into the mountainous interior, as they attempted to escape.
Kalinga Magha earns his place here not simply because of the terrible destruction he carried out, but because he drove the final nail into the idea of the unitary state. With a couple of ephemeral interludes, the island would not again be governed as an independent whole until 1948, when it gained independence from the British.
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.