The collapse of the ancient Sinhalese kingdom of the dry zone is one of the major turning points in Sri Lanka’s history.1 Traditionally, M•gha’s invasion and the orgy of destruction in which his cohorts indulged are regarded as the climacteric in the deracination of Sri Lanka’s hydraulic civilization. Yet the fact remains that many of the invasions of preceding centuries, notably that of the Cōḷa ruler R•jar•ja, were just as destructive as those that followed on the death of Ni••aṅka Malla. The irrigation network had been resuscitated after these tribulations and the population returned to the productive regions of the dry zone. The questions we need to answer are why it was that after the mid-thirteenth century Sri Lanka’s hydraulic civilization did not demonstrate a similar resilience and why the processes of destruction proved to be irreversible.
One needs to guard against exaggerating the extent of the recovery from the destructive effects of the Cōḷa invasions of the tenth century, for its key feature had been the shift of the capital from the traditional centre of Sinhalese power, Anuradhapura, to Polonnaruva. This was in itself an admission of weakness for it was the abandonment of Sri Lanka’s classical urban centre, its capital for nearly 1,500 years. No other city in south Asia has had a longer period as the capital city. The events of the mid-thirteenth century demonstrated that Polonnaruva was just as vulnerable to attacks from the mainland. By now the proverbial resilience of the Sinhalese kingdom of the dry zone was gone, because the latter’s resources of vitality had been impaired beyond replenishment by the feverish activity of the three major rulers of the Polonnaruva kingdom—Vijayab•hu I, Par•kramab•hu I and Ni••aṅka Malla. The centralization of power at the capital city, which was a feature of their administration—and their swift and ruthless suppression of particularist aspirations of the outer provinces—eroded the traditional autonomy of these regions to the point where they lost their ability to serve their time-honoured function as a refuge for Sinhalese kings confronting invasions from the mainland, as well as their ability to sustain a viable core of resistance once the R•jarata itself had succumbed. Above all, there was a distinct diminution of the strength of the Sinhalese kingdom vis-à-vis its rivals on the Indian mainland and hence a greater vulnerability to attack. The age-long pressures from the Indian mainland assumed a more forbidding dimension with the establishment, consolidation and expansion of a Tamil kingdom in the north of the island and the emergence of the Vanni chieftaincies as a buffer between this northern kingdom and what was left of Sinhalese power in Sri Lanka.
Polonnaruva was abandoned after M•gha’s rule and the next three kings ruled from Dambadeniya. One ruler made Yapahuva his royal residence. These were both rock fortresses; so was Kurunegala, another site of royal power in this quest for safety against invasion from south India and the threat from the north.
The last occasion when Polonnaruva served as the capital city was in the reign of Par•kramab•hu III (1287–93), but this only illustrated the perilous position to which Sinhalese power was reduced: he ruled at Polonnaruva because of his subservience to the P•ṇ•yas.2 But not all the Sinhalese monarchs of this period were content with being the rulers of a client state or to relinquish the natural aspiration of Sinhalese kings to establish control over the whole island even if the resources to achieve this were grievously limited. Par•kramab•hu II almost achieved this: his power extended over Rohana, the central hills and the Vanni and he annexed Polonnaruva, but could not establish control over the Tamil kingdom in the north of the island. He held his coronation at Polonnaruva and attempted to restore that city to its former status as the centre of Sinhalese power, but was compelled to return to Dambadeniya which remained his capital for the rest of his reign in recognition of the persistent danger of a P•ṇ•yan invasion of the island.
As we shall see in the next chapter, Sinhalese power shifted from Kurunegala to the central mountains further to the south, a region which had never in the past been well-developed or highly populated or a centre of civilization, although it was an excellent refuge for defeated causes and a bridgehead for resistance movements. And it was there in the fourteenth century that a kingdom was set up with Gangasiripura or Gampola on the Mahaveli River as its capital. The capital was shifted to Senkadagala, modern Kandy or Mahanuvara. It was probably the southward expansion of the northern kingdom which compelled this shift to Gampola which was much more easily defensible than Kurunǟgala and far less accessible as well to intruders from the north.
At much the same time that the Sinhalese kingdom of Sri Lanka’s dry zone began its slide to oblivion, hydraulic civilizations in Cambodia, northern Thailand and the Pagan region of Burma, in all of which a rich agricultural surplus served as the highly productive basis of complex societies and cultures of great vitality, were losing their vigour and drifting to irrevocable decline.3 None of these regions was reoccupied.
A hydraulic civilization is like a highly efficient and robust machine with a sophisticated but delicate, even brittle, controlling mechanism—the intricate network of tanks, weirs and channels and the institutional machinery devised for its maintenance. The fact that these civilizations all declined at about the same time has been the basis of the argument that this controlling mechanism and especially institutional machinery for its maintenance tends to weaken in time from some inherent structural fault, quite apart from the invasions of the sort that plagued Sri Lanka in the tenth and thirteenth centuries.4 The contention that the breakdown in hydraulic civilizations comes remorselessly with age carries conviction. The irrigation network which sustained the Polonnaruva kingdom, for instance, represented fifteen centuries of development. But by itself it is inadequate as an explanation for the fall of Sri Lanka’s hydraulic civilization and we need to turn once more to the political problems of the mid-thirteenth century.
A complex irrigation network such as that of the Polonnaruva kingdom requires a high level of organization and efficiency in administration. The comprehensive disintegration of the political system bequeathed by Par•kramab•hu I would have paralysed the administrative machinery which kept this irrigation network in running order. Under the Anuradhapura kings, village institutions and regional administrations had ensured the survival of some parts of the irrigation system at least during periods of turmoil at the capital—succession disputes and periods of civil war—and invasion. But the over-centralization of administration in the Polonnaruva kingdom appears to have had a deleterious effect on local initiatives, with the result that when royal authority collapsed at Polonnaruva, administrative units in the outlying regions were no longer capable of maintaining their sections of the irrigation network in good repair.
There seems to be another factor which made the thirteenth century different from earlier periods of crisis. This was malaria,5 which, it must be emphasized, was not the cause of the abandonment of the heartland of ancient Sri Lanka. Very little is known about when it took root in the island, but it would appear to have spread to Sri Lanka well before the sixteenth century. The anopheles mosquito would have found ideal breeding places in the abandoned tanks and channels, and, in fact, malaria has often, in other parts of Asia, followed the destruction or abandonment of irrigation works. Within a century of its spread to this island it would have added a further and insuperable obstacle to the reoccupation of the once productive areas of the dry zone; indeed it defeated all attempts at large-scale resettlement of the dry zone till the late 1930s. Thus malaria, coming in on the heels of the destructive invasions of the mid-thirteenth century and thriving on disused irrigation works, played a critically important part in multiplying obstacles to resettlement.
The drift of Sinhalese power to the south-west was no doubt actuated by a search for security, but there was the attraction of economic potential as well. The coastal regions of the western and northern seaboard had from the early years of the Anuradhapura kingdom supported scattered but economically viable trade settlements. Through the centuries these settlements not only survived but also expanded with the increase in the volume of trade transacted between Sri Lanka and the states of the Indian Ocean. They would have attracted people—especially traders—from the main centres of population. With increasing political instability at the centre of Sinhalese power, these settlements would have had a more compelling attraction. Thus the shift of Sinhalese population to the south-west was not a movement to some unknown and unexplored regions of the island but to familiar localities which offered not merely security but also potential for a more than modest livelihood.
In the second half of the fourteenth century, the fortunes of the Sinhalese reached their nadir. True, the writ of the Gampola kings appears to have run in Rohana as well as on the western seaboard, but for a short period in the fourteenth century, Jaffna under the Āryacakravartis was the most powerful kingdom on the island. As we shall see in the next chapter, when Sinhalese power on the island declined, the Tamils moved southwards to exact tribute from the south-west and central region—their tax collectors were at work on parts of the Gampola kingdom. The Tamil kingdom maintained a steady and relentless pressure on the Sinhalese, especially in the border territories which now extended as far south as the Four Kōralēs, close to Gampola itself but not easy of access because of its rugged hills and forests.
By the middle of the fourteenth century, the Jaffna kingdom had effective control over the north-west coast up to Puttalam. After an invasion in 1353, part of the Four Kōralēs came under Tamil rule and thereafter, over the next two decades, they probed into the M•tale district and naval forces were despatched to the west coast as far south as Panadura. They seemed poised for the establishment of Tamil supremacy over Sri Lanka and were foiled in this by the defeat inflicted by the forces of the Gampola kings in 1380. They were also embroiled with the powerful Vijayanagar empire in a grim struggle for survival against the latter’s expansionist ambitions across the Palk Straits. Indeed, the impact of south India on the Tamil kingdom of the north was not restricted to culture and religion but deeply affected its political evolution as well, for it was drawn irresistibly into the orbit of the dominant south Indian state of the day.
As the next chapter will show, the Gampola kingdom6 presented an air of decrepitude, especially in its political structure in contrast to the vigour and dynamism of its northern adversary. There was, for instance, a curious system of sub-kings or co-rulers: when Bhuvanekab•hu IV (1341–51) was king at Gampola, his brother Par•kramab•hu V (1344–59) ruled at Dadigama less than 30 miles away as the crow flies; and in 1359, Par•kramab•hu V and Vikramab•hu III (1357–74) were co-rulers. This division of authority could scarcely have improved prospects of successfully protecting the border districts of the kingdom from incursions from the north, even if the diffusion of power was a calculated response to the latter. But nothing illustrated more vividly the parlous position to which the Gampola kings had been reduced than the rise in importance of influential chief ministers, who became in time more powerful than the kings they served. The first of these was Sen•dhilaṅk•ra in the time of Bhuvanekab•hu IV. The exploits of Sen•dhilaṅk•ra link the fortunes of the Gampola kings in the Kandyan Hills with those of their northern adversary. They also laid the foundations of the kingdom of Kotte, soon to be the principal Sinhalese kingdom.
His career paved the way for the later rise of the Alagakkōn•ra family to eminence. The Alagakkōn•ras were traders who had migrated to the island from Vanchipura in south India—one of several such families to migrate—in the wake of the Muslim invasions. 7 The first phase in their ‘Sinhalization’ would appear to have been through their conversion to Buddhism. By the middle of the fourteenth century, this family wielded considerable political power and had kinship ties with the Gampola kings when Alake•vara, a descendant of Ni••aṅka Alagakkōn•ra, married a sister of Vikramab•hu III. Their status and political influence reached its peak when Alake•vara organized the successful resistance against the threat from the north in the reign of Bhuvanekab•hu V (1371–1408). Undeterred by the panic-stricken flight of their king, the Sinhalese army, rallied by Alake•vara, attacked and dispersed the Tamil forces. As a result, he became the de facto ruler of the kingdom although Bhuvanekab•hu V remained on the throne.
The Jaffna kingdom’s expansion southwards had been checked, but the Sinhalese had no reason to believe that this had been halted for good. On the contrary, they assumed that pressure from the north would persist. The capital of the Sinhalese kingdom was moved once more, this time from the mountains to the west coast near Colombo, where Ni••aṅka Alagakkōn•ra had built the fort of Jayavardhanapura (Kotte). Once again the shift of the capital was evidence of the continuing weakness of the Sinhalese kingdom, and once more the reasons for the move were essentially defensive: to protect the west coast with its rich cinnamon resources, which the Tamil kingdom was so anxious to gain control of.
For the Sinhalese, the sudden abatement of the pressure from the north, which coincided with the shift of the capital to the western littoral, was an unexpected bonus. But their respite was brief and this time the danger came from a distant land across the seas—China under the Ming emperors.
In the early fifteenth century, seven powerful naval expeditions, great fleets of junks, under the command of Zheng He visited the ports of the Indian Ocean in both the eastern and western seas demanding tribute and obedience to the Chinese emperor.8 On Zheng He’s first visit to the island in 1405, the Sinhalese king was Vīra Alake•vara who had succeeded Bhuvanekab•hu V—the last ruler of his line. Zheng He’s objective was to take back the dalad•, the tooth relic. Chinese interest in the dalad• was nothing new. In 1284, the great Kublai Khan himself had despatched a mission to the island for the same purpose;9 it had returned to China with its main aim unaccomplished but, seemingly and fortunately for Sri Lanka, without a sense of grievance. Zheng He was no more successful in his quest than the representative of Kublai Khan but unlike the latter he went back aggrieved by the treatment he had received and five years later he led another expedition which seized the Sinhalese king, Vīra Alake•vara, his queen and some of the notables of the kingdom and took them as prisoners to China. Quite apart from their political and religious objectives, Zheng He’s expeditions had commercial ones as well: they reflected the importance attached by the Chinese to Sri Lanka as a centre of inter-Asian and international trade.
Vīra Alake•vara was eventually released and returned to the island but there was never any serious hope of his recovering the throne after the humiliation of a foreign captivity. (No Sri Lankan ruler of the past, save Mihindu V, had suffered a similar fate but in his case it was the consequence of a staggering military defeat at the hands of a powerful invading army.) In 1414, the captives returned to the island—among them the Chinese emperor’s nominee to the Sinhalese throne—but they came back to a more settled and tranquil political atmosphere than anyone had the right to expect after Zheng He’s telling demonstration of Chinese strength and Sinhalese weakness.
In 1411, Par•kramab•hu VI began what was to be a very long reign of fifty-five years. In its first phase, his capital was at Rayigama, close to Kotte but somewhat towards the interior. By 1415, he established himself at Kotte—having in the meantime speedily eliminated the protégé of the Chinese emperor—and founded what came to be called the Kotte kingdom.10 The fifty-five years of his reign were rich in incident and achievement. We are concerned here with its political aspects. His greatest achievement was to check what seemed to be a well-nigh irreversible trend—the break-up of the Sri Lankan polity. He was the first Sinhalese king since the days of Par•kramab•hu I and Ni••aṅka Malla to bring the whole island under his rule, and the last ever to do so. But in retrospect, the half-century of his rule was no more than a sudden eruption of flame from a dying fire, for Par•kramab•hu VI, the founder of the Kotte dynasty, was also its sole great figure. Within forty years of his death, the Kotte kingdom, weakened by internal disputes, faced the formidable challenge of the Portuguese in the first phase of Sri Lanka’s long encounter with Western colonialism, an encounter that lasted till the middle of the twentieth century.
In the early years of his reign, Par•kramab•hu VI was confronted with a dual threat from the traditional adversaries of the Sinhalese, the Jaffna kingdom in the north and from south India in the form of the expanding Vijayanagar empire. The Vijayanagar thrust was successfully repulsed in about the twentieth year of his reign and from that he moved on to an invasion of Jaffna which was by this time a Vijayanagar satellite. The Vanni principalities, a buffer zone between the kingdom of Jaffna and Kotte, the northern part of the old R•jarata, were first subdued in order to prevent any possibility of an attack from the rear once his forces had reached the Jaffna kingdom. Tradition has it that the Sinhalese population in the Jaffna kingdom rose in revolt against their Tamil rulers before Par•kramab•hu VI’s invasion. Nevertheless, invasion of the northern kingdom was a daunting proposition and the first such was repulsed. The second achieved its objective: it succeeded in putting to flight the Jaffna king, who sought refuge in south India and did not return for two whole decades. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Jaffna kingdom was under Sinhalese rule. Sapumal Kum•raya, the adopted son of Par•kramab•hu VI, was installed on the throne of Jaffna.
The mountainous core of the island—the nucleus of the Gampola kingdom—was virtually under the control of Par•kramab•hu VI. But in the last years of his reign he faced an insurrection there led by Jōtiya Sit•na. Although this insurrection was comprehensively crushed—a prince of the Gampola royal house was appointed in place of Jōtiya Sit•na to administer the area on behalf of the Kotte king—it is nevertheless significant for being the first expression of a Kandyan claim to autonomous status and distinct identity.
The administrative arrangements made for the central region—the Udarata—after the rebellion there brings us to the crucial flaw in Par•kramab•hu VI’s system of government. There was no innovation in or expansion of the machinery of government to consolidate the re-establishment of an island polity. What Par•kramab•hu VI did was to place subjugated regions under their former rulers who then acted as vassals of Kotte, or installed new rulers with wide powers falling just short of semi-independent status. The fact is that the Kotte kingdom under Par•kramab•hu VI was an inherently brittle structure in which centrifugal forces were kept in check by the personal influence and authority of a gifted ruler.
As happened so often in Sri Lanka’s history, a disputed succession—following Par•kramab•hu VI’s death—destroyed the life’s work of an extraordinarily resourceful ruler. His nominee to the throne—his grandson—succeeded him at Kotte, but could hardly hold his own against the more dynamic Sapumal Kum•raya who moved in to do battle for the throne. The struggle was short and decisive. Par•kramab•hu VI’s grandson was killed and Sapumal Kum•raya took over at Kotte with the title of Bhuvanekab•hu VI. But this struggle for the throne led inevitably to a relaxation, if not the disappearance, of control over the outer provinces of the kingdom.
The first to benefit from this were the northerners. Jaffna successfully re-established itself as an independent kingdom under Parar•jasēkaram (1479–1519). The Tamil kingdom developed a more distinct and confident Hindu culture that drew its inspiration from south India. More ominous, however, was a determined bid by the Udarata—the Kandyan region—to stake a claim to an independent political role of its own. As we shall see, the foundation of the Kandyan kingdom may be traced back to the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The absorption of the Kandyan region into the Kotte kingdom under the energetic Par•kramab•hu VI did not extinguish separatist tendencies among the Kandyans; on the contrary it may have helped to transform these into a proto-nationalism. With his death and the rapid decline of the power of Kotte in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in the wake of disputed successions and prolonged political instability, the Kandyans were afforded the opportunity to assert their independence from the control of the ruler at Kotte.
When Bhuvanekab•hu VI died in 1477, the authority of Kotte was restricted to the south-west and a small area of the north-west. The Jaffna kingdom was independent and Kotte was in no position to re-establish its control over the Udarata. Par•kramab•hu VI’s legacy had been spent within a decade of his death.
Political instability, the bane of Sri Lanka’s history throughout this period, had an inevitably debilitating effect on the economy. In the Sinhalese kingdom of the south-west and the central mountainous core of the island, rain-fed agriculture—the cultivation mainly of rice—was the norm and this subsistence agriculture was the bedrock of the economy. The agricultural surplus available to the state would seem to have been quite modest in comparison with that of the more expansive epochs of the hydraulic civilizations of the past. This and the instability and insecurity so characteristic of these centuries could hardly have been conducive to the irrigation works in the parts of the dry zone still under the control of the Sinhalese kingdom being maintained and kept in repair. The meagre evidence11 available to us would appear to indicate that there was at this time a distinct decline in agricultural production.
Economic activity did, however, develop on new lines. In general, trade rose higher in the scale of the ruler’s priorities than ever before. For instance, with the increased demand for spices in Europe after the Crusades, the island’s cinnamon, which grew luxuriantly in the forests of the south-west littoral, became an important item in its export trade. By far the larger share of the profits of the cinnamon trade was absorbed by the state, which as a result became less dependent on revenue from grain than in the past. One needs to guard against the danger of exaggerating the importance of cinnamon as a source of revenue. Before the sixteenth century, and indeed even at the end of that century, the yield from this source was well below that from other items of export such as elephants and areca nut, while the export trade as a whole, despite its increasing importance, was much less productive than the traditional sources of revenue such as land taxes and revenue from grain.12
The land tenure system of this period was, in fact, another point of continuity with the past. The description of its features contained in previous chapters is by and large valid for this period as well, with one notable and obvious difference: water rates ceased to be a source of revenue.
The island’s foreign trade had three significant features. Sri Lanka was still a lucrative and strategically important location in the east-west trade of this period. Second, there were the island’s own direct commercial links with Malacca, which controlled much of the south-east Asian and China trade. (Zheng He’s incursions into the Indian Ocean appear to have been motivated, in part at least, by a desire for some leverage in this Asian maritime trade and his expeditions to Sri Lanka had, as we have seen, commercial objectives quite apart from religious and political considerations.) There was next the island’s Indian trade, its commerce with Calicut, the Coromandel Coast, Gujarat—itself a major trade centre—and Bengal. Sri Lankan merchants were engaged in trade along the coasts of India from Cambay to Bengal.
This external trade was conducted largely through the ports of the west coast: Kalpitiya, Puttalam, Salavata (Chilaw), Kammala, Negombo, Colombo, Kalutara, Beruvala and Galle. The main items of export were areca nut, elephants, gems and cinnamon, and the principal imports were cloth and dry fish.
The east-west trade of the period was dominated by the Arabs and their international trade links gave the Arab settlers resident in Sri Lanka an advantage over their potential competitors, including of course, the island’s indigenous traders in Sri Lanka’s external trade. Their most formidable rivals for this latter were the Chetties, the bankers of south India. The Arab traders were also, on occasion, advisers to Sinhalese rulers on foreign trade; in 1283, for instance, Bhuvanekab•hu I’s mission to the Egyptian court was planned and carried through by Arabs living in Sri Lanka.
One significant consequence of the growing importance of trade was a slow but perceptible increase in the use of money in the economy. By the end of the fifteenth century, the economy’s monetization was already under way.13 No doubt the process was facilitated by the profits which came to the indigenous traders. Equally, if not more important, was the cash which the people at large earned by the sale of areca nut, the most important item in terms of value in Sri Lanka’s foreign trade.
As foreign trade grew in importance, Arabs appear to have settled in larger numbers in the coastal areas and the ports whence they gradually moved into the interior in pursuit of their trading interests. They maintained their identity largely through their religion and the customs associated with it,14 but as a result of intermarriage between them and the local population, they became Indo-Arab in ‘ethnic’ character rather than purely Arab.
If this expansion in the Moorish population added one more element to Sri Lanka’s plural society, the accommodation of groups of recent immigrants from south India and their absorption into the caste structure of the littoral saw the emergence of three new Sinhalese caste groups—the Sal•gama, the Dur•va and the Kar•va. They came to the island, in this period, in successive waves of migration which continued well beyond it into the eighteenth century. The disparity in the extent to which segments of each of these castes have been assimilated within the social system would suggest that the length of their contact with Sinhalese society has varied. The process of assimilation was facilitated by their adoption of the culture of the region to which they had migrated.
Their position in the caste hierarchy has varied with the times. Similarly, there were also notable changes in occupational roles, though all three of them had the common characteristic of very tenuous links, if any, with traditional agriculture. Thus in the Jeyavansa, a Sinhalese poem believed to have been written in the fifteenth century, the Sal•gamas are referred to as weavers, but with the passage of time their caste occupation came to be that of peeling cinnamon and preparing it for the market. How and when this transformation came about we do not know, but the easy accommodation of these migrant groups and their indigenization underlines the resilience and remarkable flexibility of the caste structure of the Sinhalese areas of the littoral region.
A study of Buddhism during this period reveals the operation of two seemingly contradictory trends. There was, first of all, a very noticeable deterioration in the morale and discipline of the sangha, and Buddhism itself confronted surprisingly powerful pressure from Hinduism. The efforts of a number of kings and ministers, including the Dambadeniya kings Vijayab•hu III (1232–36) and Par•kramab•hu II, the ministers Sen•dhilaṅk•ra and Alake•vara under the Gampola kings and Par•kramab•hu VI of Kotte, the greatest of the rulers of this period, failed to stem the rot. Indeed, Sen•dhilaṅk•ra took the drastic step of purging the sangha of worldly and corrupt bhikkhus, and during the period of the Gampola kings the post of sanghar•ja, chief of the bhikkhus or the primate of the Buddhist order, was created as a means of restoring harmony within the sangha and instilling a sense of dedication among the bhikkhus. That none of these measures was really effective was due mainly to the political instability and turmoil of these centuries.
Significantly too, doctrinal disputes had little or nothing to do with the tensions among the bhikkhus of this period. The struggles between orthodoxy and the Mahayanists had long since been resolved by the absorption within the ‘official’ form of Buddhism of some of the doctrines, rituals and deities of heterodoxy. The cult of the tooth relic, for instance, retained the importance it had acquired in the Polonnaruva period. Indeed the possession of the tooth relic was regarded as essential to the legitimate exercise of sovereignty over the island. Special shrines were built to house it and customs evolved to regulate the ritual and public celebrations in its honour. Every year the tooth relic was taken out and carried in procession round the capital city and it was exhibited to the people on auspicious days.
Along with the veneration of Mahayanist deities, the worship of Vedic and post-Vedic Hindu deities was firmly established as part of the religious practice of Sri Lanka Buddhism. Thus the shrine of Upuluvan (Varuna) at Devinuvara, originally built in the seventh century AD, was restored by Par•kramab•hu II, who also celebrated the annual Äsala festival of that god. A new centre of the cult of Upuluvan, which became well-known in later centuries, was established at Alutnuvara in the Four Kōralēs by Par•kramab•hu IV (1302–26). By the fifteenth century, Upuluvan had been elevated to the status of the national god of the Sinhalese. There were at the same time three other major deities—Saman, the God of Adam’s Peak; Vibhī•aṇa, and Skanda. The shrine at Kataragama, dedicated to Skanda, had by the end of this period become one of the major centres of religious worship on the island. Its fame had spread beyond the shores of the island, as far away as Thailand. The inscriptions of the fourteenth century refer to these four gods—Upuluvan, Saman, Vibhī•aṇa and Skanda—as the guardians of the island and their images, along with those of some other minor deities, were installed at Lankatilaka and Gadal•deniya as attendants of the Buddha. The Pattini cult, an important part of the religion of the Sinhalese up to recent times, is referred to for the first time in the reign of Par•kramab•hu VI.
This Hindu influence in Sri Lanka was nurtured by groups of Brahmans, whose numbers increased during these centuries. They enjoyed the patronage of the rulers (they enjoyed special favour with Par•kramab•hu VI) and the support of the people. In contrast, the sangha’s influence with the kings and nobility of Kotte declined steadily after the death of Par•kramab•hu VI and the upper crust of Sinhalese society was fast becoming Hindu in outlook. Hindu shrines proliferated in the Kotte kingdom. The shrine of Munnesaram near Salavata (Chilaw) received the support of Par•kramab•hu VI. There were also the famous Hindu shrines in the areas under Tamil control—the Kandaswamy Kovil at Nallur, Jaffna, and the one at Trincomalee.
For Buddhism, then, this was a period of trouble. As the ‘official’ religion it shared in the vicissitudes of the state, with recurrent episodes of accelerated deterioration coinciding more or less with periods of political instability and intermittent revivals when strong rulers imposed their authority on the country. The most notable examples of the latter were Par•kramab•hu II and Par•kramab•hu VI. During the small patches of stability against a large canvas of political decline, unstable conditions and a general loss of vitality, dynamic rulers could infuse the official religion with renewed vigour. But the limits of this renewal must be emphasized: it was a series of intermittent flashes rather than a sustained or prolonged effort; and the official religion had long since ceased to be purely Theravada.
Despite all this, however—and this is the second trend—Sri Lanka enjoyed enormous prestige abroad as the home of Theravada Buddhism. Buddhism had disappeared in India, its original home, and its holy places there were no longer accessible to devotees on account of the Muslim invasions. Sri Lanka, thus, came to be regarded by the Buddhists of Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia as a second—one might even say, surrogate—holy land of Buddhism because of the relics of the Buddha preserved at the island’s major centres of Buddhist worship.
Of the art and architecture of this period very little has remained. There are the ruins at Yapahuva, with fortifications surpassed only by those of Sigiri in their refinement and power. The most impressive of the remains of this massive rock fortress is a porch leading to a building on a terrace at the foot of the rock on the eastern side (which is believed to have been the palace) and the stairway giving access to the porch. In its design this stairway has much in common with those of the Khmer pyramids in Cambodia. There is evidence also of south Indian—Dravidian—influence.
The two most notable monuments of this period are the temples of Lankatilaka and Gadaladeniya, both completed around 1344 in the time of Bhuvanekab•hu IV of the Gampola dynasty. The former is a natural development from the Polonnaruva architecture. Gadaladeniya, not far from Lankatilaka is in the Dravidian style of south India, but with a stupa in place of a •ikhara. Apart from its base and door frames, Lankatilaka is entirely a brick construction. At Gadaladeniya the inner shrine is built almost entirely of stone, while brick is used only for the •ikhara. Both shrines, each in its own way, embody the syncretistic nature of the official religion of the day. Nowhere else is the intrusion of Hindu practices, with their tolerant accommodation within the ‘official’ version of Buddhism, more acutely demonstrated than in these shrines.
If the fragmentation of the Sri Lankan polity had a deleterious effect on religion and was not conducive to any remarkable achievement in art and architecture, it scarcely affected development in literature. Indeed, Sri Lanka in these centuries provides one more example of that paradoxical situation, seen so often in history, of literature thriving amidst conditions of political turmoil. Two themes are noteworthy, poetry flowered after some stolid, unimaginative work in prose literature; and second, and more significantly, religious prose gave way to secular poetry—the sande•a k•vya.
The first phase in this literary achievement was in the reign of the Dambadeniya kings, Vijayab•hu III and Par•kramab•hu II, but more especially under the latter who was a scholar in his own right. During his reign there was a resolute effort to foster Buddhism and promote learning. The king himself is regarded as the author of the Kavsilumina, an extensive poem based on the Kusa J•taka story and conforming in large measure to the requirements of a mah•k•vya. The Pūj•valiya (written around 1266) is the earliest classical Sinhalese prose work whose date of composition can be definitely fixed. Belonging to the same period but probably earlier than the Pūj•valiya was the Saddarma Ratn•valiya, a compendium of Buddhist stories based mainly on the Pali Dhammapadatthakath•; the author retells the stories of the Dhammapada commentary in the language and idiom of the people. In doing so he captures the imagination of his readers and listeners as much by a delightful lucidity of style and charming humour as by the moral tone of the stories and their didactic purpose.
The reign of Par•kramab•hu IV at Kurunegala was marked by the appearance of literary works of a historical and legendary character, based on popular objects of veneration such as the tooth relic and the sacred bo-tree. The Dalad• Sirita, the story of the sacred tooth relic, was composed at the request of Par•kramab•hu IV. The translation of the J•takas in the form of the Pansiya-panas-j•taka pota, is by far the most powerful and pervasive single influence in the literature of this period and probably the greatest single literary achievement of the century. The thread woven through all the stories in this collection is the working of the karmic law, how the bodhisattva perfected himself in a series of births. These stories have remained an endless source of moral edification and pleasant diversion to successive generations of the Sinhalese people.
In the Gampola kingdom a new literary genre, marking a departure from traditional poetry, came into its own: this was the sande•a k•vya,16 the origins of which are to be found in K•lid•sa’s celebrated Meghadūta (the Cloud Messenger) in northern India. It gained popularity in south India around the fourteenth century and there it developed its own special characteristics. The Sinhalese sande•as were composed about the same time, among the earliest of these being the Tisara and Mayura sande•as. The sande•a poems reached their maturity in the Kotte kingdom in the cultural efflorescence of the reign of Par•kramab•hu VI. Sri R•hula Mah• Sthavira, the most distinguished bhikkhu in the kingdom, and the foremost scholar of his day, was the author of the Paravi and Sälalihini sande•as, the latter a work of greater elegance and refinement than the former. The Gir• and Hamsa sande•as (authorship unknown) also belong to the Kotte period. The sande•a poems were manifestly secular in spirit and tone, in contrast to the conspicuous religiosity of earlier literary works and, as a result, they are a useful source of information on the social and political conditions of the country.
The K•vya•ekhara, a full-fledged mah•k•vya and a work of considerable distinction, also belonged to the Kotte period, but the Crowning achievement in its poetry was the Guttila d• kava—traditionally attributed to Vättävē thera—the story of the Guttila J•taka. Although it contains some features of the traditional ornate poem, it is its mellifluous simplicity that has made it a thing of enduring joy.
In striking contrast to poetry, prose works as a whole were both undistinguished and unimaginative. Even the Saddharma Ratn•karaya, which represents the last substantial work in the Pūj•valiya tradition, showed a decline in literary skill.
The Kotte period, especially the reign of Par•kramab•hu VI was the high-water mark of achievement in Sinhala literature. Thereafter, for several centuries—indeed till the eighteenth century—there was nothing of any significance.