Engaging Obeyesekere’s Wide-ranging Studies of the Kandyan Kingdom

Richard Simon, reviewing … The Many Faces of the Kandyan Kingdom by Gananath Obeyesekere &  The Doomed King: A Requiem for Sri Vikrama Rajasinha by Gananath Obeyesekere

In the deepening twilight of his career, the anthropologist and historian Gananath Obeyesekere published three books about the Kingdom of Kandy based mostly on lectures he had given earlier at the Sri Lanka branch of the Royal Asiatic Society and elsewhere. All are works of frank historical revisionism, seemingly designed – as was often the case with Prof. Obeyesekere – to stir controversy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Doomed King, subtitled ‘A Requiem for Sri Vikrama Rajasinha’ and published in 2017, was the first of the three to appear, though from internal evidence it seems to have been written (‘assembled’ may be a better word) some time after the second book, The Many Faces of the Kandyan Kingdom, which came out in 2020. As the author makes clear in his introduction to The Doomed King, these publications were aimed squarely at the local market. I do not know whether any attempt was made to publish them abroad.

I confess that I have not troubled to read The Creation of the Hunter, the third and last book in the series, which seems to be an attempt to explode the popular view of the Vedda people, who inhabited some of the more remote parts of the kingdom, as forest-dwelling wild men. What other exciting conclusions he reaches in the process, I have no idea. That subject has much less appeal to me than the history of Kandy and its kings, and it would be a great discourtesy on my part to review a book devoted to a matter in which I have so little interest. The Kingdom of Kandy is a different matter.

The reviews, for reasons that will become clear as you read on, are presented in the order I wrote them.

1.        Hill-Country Cosmopolis: The Many Faces of the Kandyan Kingdom

In this slender but fact-filled volume, the author presents an alternative and, to my mind, more plausible view of the Kingdom of Kandy in its heyday than the perspective afforded by modern Lankan historians and scholars. The latter must, of course, hew closely to Sinhalese-Buddhist ‘nationalist’ orthodoxy if they hope to obtain academic publication or preferment in our country. The effect of this censorious regime on national life has been stifling, not only to the study of history but in every intellectual and cultural field from fine art to marine archaeology. Music, perhaps, has suffered most grievously of all.

Gananath Obeyesekere fought this ethno-political orthodoxy all his life. His weapons were academic brilliance and social eminence, and though he could never have hoped to win, he did much to keep open a space, albeit a cruelly limited one, in which Lankans who cherish creativity, reason and tolerance might carry on their work and feel free to speak their minds. Who still defends that space, who will help keep it open now that his powerful example is no more?

In the view of the nationalist orthodoxy, the Kandyan Kingdom throve whenever it was a strict Buddhist theocracy that piously rejected foreign and secular influences, and was finally laid low only when it could no longer resist these alien forces and conspiracies. Obeyesekere challenges this narrative, whose principal champion in recent years was the late Prof. Lorna Dewaraja, countering many of her claims with evidence to show that Kandy was never a strictly Buddhist regime but, for most of its history, a diverse, multicultural polity in which people of many races and religions lived together amicably and whose kings, while remaining ‘good Buddhists’, were tolerant and even accepting of other cultures and faiths. Those kings, moreover, were educated cosmopolites with a well-documented taste for sellam – that is, recreations of a decidedly erotic and decadent nature – good Buddhists though they may have been.

Obeyesekere blames the rise of what, elsewhere, he famously dubbed ‘Protestant Buddhism’ for the capture and confinement of modern Sinhalese thought and culture, which has created this distorted ‘nationalist’ view of the Kandyan past and of Lankan history in general. Though one may sympathize with his thesis, it is hard for the non-expert to judge how well he makes his case in this particular book. Yet even a lay person – one, at least, who has spent more time on the study of human nature than the average Lankan academic – can see that the Kandyan polity Obeyesekere evokes in his book is a more realistic and credible conception than the artificial, idealised entity imagined by the nativist orthodoxy.

This book is certainly not one of Obeyesekere’s major works. Apart from being, as I say, rather slender, it is also very selective in its presentation of material, often causing the reader to wonder what, if any, the evidence for the other side of the argument might be. It also bears those telltale marks of an elderly scholar’s work, uneven self-editing and a tendency to gloss over matters that, while familiar to the author through decades of study, may demand more explanation[*] for the benefit of nonspecialist readers than he has remembered to provide.

A much more serious editorial error is that of context. This book can only make sense as an extension of Prof. Obeysekere’s body of historical work and his long, largely personal effort to counteract, by means of his great scholarship and worldwide reputation, the damage propagandists and ideologues have done to our people’s knowledge and interpretation of their own history. Sadly, no effort has been made, by either author or publisher, to make this connexion explicit. As a result, the book begins and ends mysteriously, with no scene-setting in the introduction and no thematic conclusion at the end. None of the publicity for it that I have seen makes any mention of its true context. Perhaps someone has been playing it safe. For readers familiar with Obeyesekere’s work this is not a fatal flaw, but readers who come to the book knowing little or nothing of his record will surely be mystified and, very likely, bored.

 

2.        The Doomed King: A Requiem for Sri Vikrama Rajasinha

In this work, Gananath Obeyesekere confronts readers with what may be, to some of us, a radical thesis: that Sri Vikrama Rajasinha,[†] the last King of Kandy, was not the mad, whimsically sadistic monster of popular conception but a benevolent, temperate and popular monarch whose greatest joy was building and beautifying his capital city. His evil reputation is false, the work of malcontent Kandyan nobles who wished to depose the king and replace him with one of themselves – and of the British, in particular Governor Sir Robert Brownrigg and his chief political officer John D’Oyly, who wanted to add Kandy to the British Empire with the least possible expense of blood and treasure and created a false narrative about the king’s misgovernment and wickedness as a pretext for doing so.

Prof. Obeyesekere makes his case by impugning the truthfulness of pretty much every account of Rajasinha, his rule and deposal ever published in Sinhala, Tamil or English. The Doomed King is a book of many parts, and each part is focused on rubbishing some previously published work and its authors. He begins with John Davy, a highly reputed scientist and military officer whose encyclopaedic Account of the Interior of Ceylon gives a description of Kandyan affairs in Rajasinha’s time, and of his downfall. Davy is widely lauded for the accuracy of his observations and the humanity of his vision, but Prof. Obeyesekere accuses him of having credulously swallowed the tall tales of the king’s enemies, among them the very Kandyan chiefs who sold Sri Vikrama to the British. The claim that Davy’s widely-praised objectivity mysteriously deserted him when it came to this one subject is so awkward that even the author has trouble making himself swallow it, but he manages to wash it down by suggesting that Davy was not just gullible, but was knowingly repeating the untruths he had heard because he was an admirer of Brownrigg and wanted to promote his chief’s career (as well as his own) by making a moral case for the overthrow of Rajasinha. Yet though he reads more than can reasonably be warranted into the conventional sentiments expressed on the dedication-page of Davy’s book and reports that he has ‘not found any reliable source’ to verify the reports of floggings and impalements attributed to the king therein, he gives us no actual evidence of Davy’s hypothetical untruthfulness.

The next chapter is an analysis of two contemporary Sinhala anti-Rajasinha ballads of a type known as hatan kavi, written by Buddhist monks aligned to the nobles’ party. These, he says, have much the same provenance as the ‘lies’ told to Davy. He subjects them to a kind of politico-literary analysis, on the basis of which he states that the king’s alleged crimes were either fictitious or else not crimes at all, but benevolent acts of royal policy to which the Kandyan chiefs, for their own wicked and selfish reasons, were opposed. Again, he offers no evidence of his own for this. Only in Part vii do we read of two Sinhala sources that celebrate Rajasinha – though one of the two, the Sulu Rajavaliya, only praises his early reign, agreeing with other writers that he went to the bad after he had been some time on the throne; while the other, a kavi kola or libel[‡] in verse, was published in the temperance era, a century or more after the fall of Kandy.

Later chapters concentrate on more recent publications. Part v presents the reader with a platoon of straw men nicely lined up for the author to knock down. The Kandyan Wars (1973), a popular work by a British military historian, draws upon conventional sources and is quickly dismissed as ‘a horror story uncritically culled from a variety of accounts.’ The ‘cultural geographer’ James Duncan (The City as Text, 1990) gets his Rajasinhas mixed up and is sternly rebuked for bad scholarship. Prof. Obeyesekere’s fellow anthropologist Michael Roberts gets hammered for confusing his iddhi with (I think) his mana. The worst drubbing of all is reserved for Brendon and Yasmine Gooneratne, whose somewhat speculative biography of John D’Oyly, titled That Inscrutable Englishman, is treated as if it were a work of formal history and is then ridiculed for not actually being one. When the chaff settles, only the king’s partisans are left standing.

There is one contemporary account, however, that Prof. Obeyesekere does not contest, at least not in the usual way. This is the Diary of John D’Oyly – the single most important British source on political affairs in Ceylon during the five years preceding the fall of Kandy. D’Oyly, who had arrived in the island in the days of the very first British governor, Frederick North, became, under North’s successors, what our author calls a ‘spymaster’ running an extensive network of agents[§] inside the Kandyan kingdom. I have not read D’Oyly’s long and rather tedious journal, so I am content to accept the professor’s exegesis of it. He is duly cautious in his approach, not always taking statements in the Diary at face value but suggesting that what was written down may not, for ‘diplomatic’ or cultural reasons, be an accurate record of the events it describes. This is, of course, exactly how one ought to read the diary of a master spy; but for all his caution, Prof. Obeyesekere relies more on the Diary to reconstruct the tragedy, as he deems it, of Sri Vikrama Rajasinha than he does on any other source. Indeed, the narrative arc of The Doomed King seems to follow that of D’Oyly as it passes from one subject to another: the chapters on the king’s ‘royal circuits’ or progresses around the kingdom, his military drills, his urban building projects and their ‘cosmic’ symbolism are mainly derived from the Diary, though other authors are also consulted.

D’Oyly’s journal ends a few weeks after the fall of Kandy, so Prof. Obeyesekere turns to other writers to assemble his account of Rajasinha’s capture, treatment, conduct in captivity and allied matters. Editorial inattention is evident in these chapters as the author wanders from subject to subject, confusing his tenses and his singulars with his plurals as he goes along. Some of his conclusions are, arguably, mountains grown from molehills: for example, Kandyan chiefs’ requests for Jaffna mangoes and other luxuries unavailable in Kandy, passed on to D’Oyly through his agents, are inflated into a claim that lust for ‘imported’ goods among the Kandyan elite gave some of them cause to betray their king. Perhaps it did have some such effect; but the chiefs surely had more pressing motives for their rebellion.

As for the British, I do not doubt for a moment that D’Oyly and Brownrigg were, as the professor insists, bent on suborning the Kandyan nobility and leveraging their cooperation to topple the king. I am happy to accept his assertion that D’Oyly was spreading propaganda and disinformation against Rajasinha through his agents. What I am not prepared to believe, however, is that D’Oyly’s efforts in this line were, as he insists, the actual cause of popular animus against Sri Vikrama Rajasinha – that it was the British who created and propagated the image of the king as a ‘Tamil usurper’ and sold it to the Kandyans.[**] This, frankly, beggars belief. How in the world could a white man sitting in Colombo have turned public opinion in the kingdom so easily and completely against Rajasinha unless the people already had cause for complaint against him? It is easy to accept that D’Oyly encouraged the chiefs to move against the king by offering them armed support and material incentives; but to invert popular sentiment in a foreign, hostile country on such a scale, purely by word of mouth, was – in the view of this retired advertising and public-relations strategist – impossible in an age when few could read or write and mass media were unheard of. John D’Oyly was ahead of his time in many ways, but that he was such a public-relations genius as to be capable of changing the minds of the entire Kandyan nation, chiefs and common folk alike, by remote control through word of mouth, is absurd.

The keystone of Prof. Obeyesekere’s argument is his ‘deconstruction’ and ‘reconstruction’ of what he calls ‘the pounding episode’. This refers, of course, to what is generally held to be Sri Vikrama Rajasinha’s most heinous crime: the ghastly fate he reportedly imposed upon the chief rebel’s wife and children.

According to ‘tradition’, as well as to Davy and various supposed eyewitnesses, Ehelapola’s wife was forced by the king to watch the beheading of all her children (the youngest still a baby at the breast) and afterwards to pound their severed heads to pulp in a mortar (vangediya) before being bound hand and foot by her captors, dragged through the streets of Kandy and thrown into Bogambara Lake to drown. Every Lankan child knows the story, yet according to Prof. Obeyesekere the whole thing is a fabrication. He is, of course, obliged to admit that the king really did execute Kumarihami and her children, but he says the vangedi incident never happened, nor was the lady ever thrown in the lake. He traces the origin of the vangedi story to a Dutch ‘gunner’ named Thoen, who had ended up a prisoner in the Kandyan kingdom and later settled down there with a Muslim woman whom he met and married in the course of his wanderings. But this Thoen, says the professor, was no more a witness to what happened than anyone else; he was imprisoned elsewhere at the time, but pretended to have watched the execution when he was interviewed by Sir Robert Brownrigg after his later liberation by the British. The governor then repeated the tale to others (including Davy), who propagated it until it came to be accepted as established fact.

I have, of course, no idea whether or not this is true. Prof. Obeyesekere does have at least one great historian on his side: Sir Paul Pieris, who, in Tri Sinhala: the Last Phase (1939) is similarly sceptical about the vangedi incident. It would be a relief, I suppose, if these gentlemen were right; one does not like to think such an atrocity ever really happened. But even if the vangedi story is nothing but a bloodthirsty fantasy, that does not alter the fact that Rajasinha massacred a family of innocents in a fit of royal pique.

The last three ‘parts’ of The Doomed King are an exercise in digression worthy of Tristram Shandy. Rajasinha is out of the picture by Part vi, on his way to India and life in exile, but our author is still in iconoclastic form. A chapter on the ‘problematics of the Kandyan Convention’ contrasts Sinhalese and British interpretations of the agreement and expatiates upon the difficulties these created; a long chapter on flags debunks the modern nativist legend of the tearing-down and desecration of the royal standard of Great Britain[††] by a monk named Variyapola Sumangala, something the author is convinced never happened; it then goes on to rebut the claim that anything called a flag of Lanka ever existed. The lion ensign taken by Brownrigg as a trophy was insignificant, he says; it was not even King Rajasinha’s personal standard.

Part viii, the last in the book, contains just two chapters. The first is titled ‘The Latter Fate of Sinhalé’ and describes, in brief, the later social and environmental impacts of the fall of Kandy and the establishment of British rule over the whole island; the second, to which I shall shortly return, is titled ‘Finale: Ups & Downs in the Long Voyage into Homelessness.’ The book then ends with an eight-line poem in Sinhala, ‘Requiem for Sri Vikrama Rajasinha’, printed with an English translation. It is attributed to no author, so one must suppose it was composed by Gananath Obeyesekere himself.

Neither of these parts, as far as I can see, provides any support for the argument of the book. In between them, however, comes Part vii, whose three chapters demand our close attention. The first, titled ‘The Other Faces of John D’Oyly,’ contains a series of, basically, personal allegations against the so-called superspy. It is based mostly on the Gooneratnes’ research as published in This Inscrutable Englishman. We learn that D’Oyly was a poor linguist, a bad writer in both English and Sinhala, a devotee (like most upper-class Englishmen) of blood sports, queer (a notion raised on no firmer grounds than the fact that he had little to do socially with his British colleagues), and so on. A musky aroma of obsession rises from these pages, but they tell us nothing that might help us understand why or even how D’Oyly came to be the pivotal historical figure he was. We learn that he was ‘stern with his agents,’ who were later, like him, ‘sidelined by the army’; but nothing of real substance. The Rebellion of 1817–1818 undid all that D’Oyly had achieved diplomatically, and after it was quelled the First (and only) Baron Kandy simply vanishes from history.

Chapter Two covers the Sulu Rajavaliya and other ostensibly positive accounts of Rajasinha, but its scholarly excursions add nothing to the case against the traditional image of the king. It is Chapter Three, ‘The Historical Tragedy of a Betrayal,’ that is key to Prof. Obeyesekere’s revisionist argument.

Its crux concerns the defection of the king’s chief officer, the Maha Nilame Ehelapola. Yet again the key source is D’Oyly. In the conventional story of the fall of Kandy, hearing of the fate of the nilame’s family finally sealed his decision to turn against Rajasinha – and constituted, moreover, his main reason for doing so. Prof. Obeyesekere, having promised repeatedly in earlier chapters to prove to us that the king in fact executed Kumarihami and her children after Ehelapola had gone over to the British, finally gives us, in this chapter, his ‘proof’. As one has come to expect by this time, it is debatable at best.

On 14 May 1814, we learn, D’Oyly reported to Brownrigg that the nilame and some of his troops, in their game of hide-and-seek with the king’s men in the jungles of Sabaragamuwa, had crossed over into British territory. Kumarihami and her children were, apparently, put to death only on 21 May, a whole week later. So the betrayal, says Prof. Obeyesekere came first; the killings were merely punishment for it.

But there is a difficulty. Having crossed the border, Ehelapola did not at once surrender, though he and D’Oyly had been in touch through their agents for months. He met with no British personnel, and it was not until he finally reached the port of Kalutara several days later that he made his formal surrender and alliance. By then, his wife and children had been dead for weeks.

The presence of Ehelapola’s troops or even the nilame himself in British territory certainly does not constitute a defection. Guerrilla forces and even armies often take temporary refuge from their enemies in foreign territory, with or without the knowledge and approval of the ruling power. As for whether or not the killing of his family affected Ehelapola’s decision to break with the king, recall that Kumarihami and the children had already been the king’s prisoners (that is, hostages) for two whole months. If Rajasinha’s character was as it is generally represented to have been, the nilame may well have given them up for lost.

The professor also addresses the question of why these innocents were put to death. In strategic terms it was an act of pure stupidity: Ehelapola’s family, as hostages, were clearly more useful to the king after the Maha Nilame’s defection than before. The professor’s explanation is that Rajasinha had got it into his head that Ehalapola (hiding in the jungle on the very edge of Kandyan territory) was planning an attack on the hill capital to rescue his family – and so he forestalled the attack by doing away with them! Readers may decide for themselves just how plausible they find this.

The final chapter in Part vii, ‘Spaces for Forgiveness: Legality & Morality in Political Discourse,’ presents the author’s justification for his proposed rehabilitation of Sri Vikrama Rajasinha. The king’s actions, evil as they were by all decent standards, were legal under Kandyan law, he says; besides, they were bagatelles compared to the atrocities perpetrated by other, much greater Sinhalese monarchs, by Kandyan chiefs like Ekneligoda, and of course by the British – whose bloody recapture of Calcutta and atrocities during the Sepoy Rebellion are reprised, along with other well-known imperialist crimes. This kind of whataboutism adds nothing to the author’s case, but is sure to gratify some of his readers.

It has taken me nearly a month to complete this review. How I wish I had never begun it. Criticising the work of one of our nation’s greatest scholars is not likely to win me many friends or raise my credit among those – our current Prime Minister among them – who have reviewed the book positively. Nor will it make me popular among my own friends, most of whom (I believe) endorse the prevailing anti-Western, anti-colonialist postmodernism that has driven out, almost completely, the traditional ideals of political neutrality and scholarly objectivity from what I understand are still called the social ‘sciences’.

That Prof. Obeyesekere endorsed this emotive, revisionist view of things is not news to me. Much of his work in his prime was an attempt to build an alternative history of colonialism from the testimony of the colonized, making of it a counterweight to the works of Western imperialists and their modern-day apologists. This is a very important task, morally and politically as well as academically, and one I heartily endorse, though with one caveat only: the alternative narrative, if I am to take it seriously, must present at least as much reliable, falsifiable evidence as the heroic saga constructed by the empire-builders. There is nothing of the sort to be found in The Doomed King.

‘That which is nonrational,’ Gananath Obeyesekere once wrote, ‘is not necessarily irrational.’[1] No-one with a flicker of faith or poesy in them could reasonably disagree, and I certainly do not. But I do object, firmly, when a revered academic treats the nonrational as if it were rational – that is, puts forward claims based on myth, confabulation or personal opinion as if they were statements of fact. On the interpretation of facts we may freely disagree, but when there are no verifiable facts to be had, then the only rational conclusion I can approve is that the question be left open.

The Doomed King is extremely selective about its ‘facts’ and their sources. Any that provide support for the ‘official story’ (the term, beloved of conspiracy theorists, seems appropriate here) are examined with deep suspicion and ultimately dismissed as disinformation, propaganda or plain bad scholarship. The author puts them to one side and presents us, instead, with his own narrative. He gives scant evidence for the latter, instead reinterpreting the facts of the official story until they seem to support it. Like the Roman historian Livy, he asks quis enim rent tam veterem pro certo adfirmet – ‘who can affirm for certain what happened so long ago?’ – and receiving no answer, states that history can never be anything more than a war of conflicting narratives, each promoting a point of view that is relevant, ultimately, not to the past but to the present, all claiming with equal or nearly equal validity to be true. Stop being naïve and trying to find out what really happened, is the message: you will never succeed. Instead, just choose a story that appeals to you and stick to it. After more than two hundred years, who could possibly prove you wrong?

This way of looking at things is pervasive today in the liberal arts and social sciences. It also infects the world of popular culture and politics: an intellectual (if you can call it that) revanche that bears with it a multitude of consequences, potentially undoing the achievements of the Enlightenment, endangering the corpus of human knowledge, clouding the future of civilization and denying truth itself. But it is a far bigger, more serious issue than can be tackled in a book review, so I shall leave it alone for the present.

Allow me, instead, to close by offering my own humble opinion of Prof. Obeyesekere’s thesis. It is based on material he quotes, but whose significance seems to have escaped him.

The last chapter of Part viii, which concludes the book, is titled ‘Finale: Ups & Downs in the Long Voyage into Homelessness’. It gives a somewhat fond description of the Doomed King’s final journey into exile based on the testimony of a civil servant, William Granville, who accompanied Rajasinha and his sixty-person retinue to India aboard a ship named the Cornwallis.[2] In contrast with the flattering portrait presented earlier by another official, Henry Marshall, who stressed the king’s ‘dignity and self-composure’ in captivity, Granville, on the month-long voyage to Madras, saw a very different man. Describing the state of depression into which Rajasinha sank at the beginning of the journey, he notes (my italics) that ‘we had [earlier] discovered that he was very liable to sudden elevations and depressions of the mind.’ These were no minor mood swings but great sweeps of the emotional pendulum. For the first three days at sea he maintained a resentful silence; on the fourth he relieved his feelings by giving one of his queens a severe beating, and had to be warned that if the act was repeated he would be separated from his women for the duration of the voyage. Astonishingly, Prof. Obeyesekere makes light of this act of royal cruelty, suggesting that the king must have thought the victim was making eyes at the sailors.

The tedium of the unexpectedly lengthy voyage irked Rajasinha, who, says Granville, ‘was in a very depressed state of mind; sighed deeply and uttered many melancholy expressions,’ though he would suddenly perk up and become ‘kind and friendly.’ Once he even cooked dinner for the ship’s officers.[‡‡] But as the days at sea dragged on he grew obsessed by the idea that he was not being taken to Madras after all but to England, a thought which terrified him.

Some days later there was another ugly spasm of violence: Granville, informed that the king was running amok, hastened to the royal cabins and found Rajasinha ‘hacking and hewing to pieces a spare bedstead’ placed on deck to allow him to enjoy the sea-breeze when his cabin grew too hot. He was ‘boiling with rage, roaring and swinging the hatchet with great fury,’ but happily made no move to attack any person, and allowed Granville to disarm him without protest. The cause of his rage, the Englishman learned, was that he had been ‘disgraced by one of his attendants’, whom he had caught lying on the bed reserved for him. ‘His only request was that [the bedstead] might be destroyed and thrown overboard without a moment’s delay.’ This done, the king’s quiescent mood slowly returned.

‘Sri Vikrama would not be human,’ Prof. Obeyesekere observes, ‘if he was not upset and disturbed in mind, if not in body, at his sudden fall from power and divinity…’ This is surely true; and besides, the lèse-majesté of polluting the royal bedstead was an act that would infuriate any monarch. Yet despite these mitigating considerations the king’s behaviour still seems hysterical, almost insane. One is well aware of the arrogance and folly of foisting half-baked psychiatric diagnoses on historical characters (‘mad King George’ and all the rest), yet a quotation from the Mayo Clinic’s patient-information web page on bipolar disorder seems, at this juncture, apposite:

Bipolar disorder, formerly called manic depression, is a mental health condition that causes extreme mood swings. These include emotional highs, also known as mania or hypomania, and lows, also known as depression… When you become depressed, you may feel sad or hopeless and lose interest or pleasure in most activities. When your mood shifts to mania or hypomania, you may feel very excited and happy (euphoric), full of energy, or unusually irritable. These mood swings can affect sleep, energy, activity, judgment, behavior and the ability to think clearly.

Episodes of mood swings from depression to mania may occur rarely or multiple times a year. Each bout usually lasts several days. Between episodes, some people have long periods of emotional stability. Others may frequently have mood swings from depression to mania or both depression and mania at the same time.[3]

Despite the compliments he pays the king’s intelligence, courtesy and appearance, and even his manners when neither depressed nor enraged, Granville’s portrait of the king on his voyage into exile seems quite in keeping with the conventional picture of Rajasinha as cruel, impulsive and mad. It is certainly nothing at all like the gentle, benevolent monarch of Prof. Obeyesekere’s imagination. The professor does, indeed, admit the ‘impulsiveness’ of Rajasinha’s behaviour, but he does not seem to recognise what a catastrophic trait this is in a ruler – it terrifies the people, drives ministers and counsellors to distraction, propagates administrative confusion and is ruinous to the prosperity of the realm. It gives even otherwise competent rulers a reputation for madness: viz. the examples of Nero and Ivan ‘the Terrible’. Prof. Obeyesekere does not seem to realise what a terrible liability it is; he seems to regard the king’s capriciousness as a minor, almost irrelevant detail of his character. On the contrary, it could well be the key to the character and reign of Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, explaining his grotesque and terrible reputation quite satisfactorily. There is no need to blame restive radalayas, scheming British imperialists or the anti-‘Tamil’ bias of versifying Kandyan monks; the Doomed King, it seems safe to suggest, wrote his own tragedy.

END NOTES

[*] And citation; it would be good to be able to identify the sources of some of Prof. Obeyesekere’s deductions.

[†] I use Prof. Obeyesekere’s preferred spelling of the name, as it appears in The Doomed King.

[‡] I use the word in the sixteenth-century sense: a published bill or pamphlet (odee, 1985 ed.)

[§] Among D’Oyly’s spies were Buddhist monks, Kandyans of high and low caste, Malay and Muslim traders who fared back and forth between Kandy and the coast, and low-country Sinhalese including members of the mudaliyar class. Whatever the truth about Rajasinha, it seems as if Lankans of many different constituencies opposed him.

[**] Rajasinha was the fourth in line of his dynasty, the Nayakkars, whose forebears were from Madurai, India, but who had ruled the kingdom of Kandy for nearly a century before he was deposed. Contemporary Sinhala propaganda against him identifies him as Tamil (Tamil was the court language) and is apparently permeated by anti-Tamil hate speech.

[††] Not, as is often but erroneously stated, the Union Jack.

[‡‡] Or rather, supervised his servants as they prepared the food.

[1] Quoted in ‘Anthropologist Bridged East and West,’ New York Times, 30 Mar 2005.

[2] Granville, W., ‘Deportation of Sri Vikrama Rajasinha.’ Ceylon Library Register (clr) 3.11, Nov 1934.

[3] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/bipolar-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20355955 (visited 2ii26).