Theoretical Approaches To Sri Lankan History and The Early Portuguese Period

Modern Asian Studies 38, 1 (2004), pp. 190–226.
 2004 Cambridge University Press

DOI:10.1017/S0026749X04001052 Printed in the United Kingdom
Theoretical Approaches to Sri Lankan History

and the Early Portuguese Period1
A L A N S T R A T H ER N
Clare Hall, University of Cambridge
In the past twenty years or so the history of Sri Lanka has become a
site of vibrant controversy, largely because the current ethnic conflict
has loaded any kind of reflection on the historical boundaries of polit-
ical, ethnic or religious identity with an immediate emotional charge.
The intellectual reverberations of post-colonialism and the vigorous
contributions of anthropologists have added rich strata of theoretical
thinking. However, despite one or two calls to the contrary, the
periods of Portuguese (1505–1658) and Dutch influence (1658–
1796) in the island have tended to moulder on the periphery of these
debates.2 The purpose of this article is to bring some of this thinking
to bear on the evidence from the sixteenth century in order to stimu-
late fresh perspectives on both the events of that time and the
models themselves. With the arrival of the Portuguese and their
increasing involvement in the affairs of the island during the long
reign of Bhuvanekabahu VII (1521–51), the darkness of the Kotte
period is suddenly illuminated by wonderfully detailed flashes of
events. The flurry of letters written by contemporary Portuguese
1
This article originated in some questions put to me by Susan Bayly. For cheer-
fully reading through draft copies and offering advice, I am indebted to Bayly,
Nicholas Davidson, Michael Roberts, Joan-Pau Rubiés, C. R. de Silva, and Jonathan
Walters. I would particularly like to thank Walters for his attentive and challenging
comments.
2
This must be partly a result of post-Orientalism’s obsession with the construct-
ivist power of British hegemony. Yet the island of Sri Lanka had already been sub-
ject to nearly 300 years of European interference before the British took power, as
pointed out by Michael Roberts, ‘Sri Lanka: Intellectual Currents and Conditions
in the Study of Nationalism’, in Michael Roberts (ed.), Sri Lanka. Collective Identities
Revisted, Volume 1 (Sri Lanka, 1997), pp. 2–4, and John D. Rogers, ‘Post-Orientalism
and the Interpretation of Pre-modern and Modern Political Identities: The Case of
Sri Lanka’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 53 (1994). All this should not imply that we
lack excellent accounts of these periods. See, for example, K. M. de Silva (ed.),
University of Peradeniya History of Sri Lanka, Volume II (Peradeniya, 1995) [henceforth
UPHSL].
0026–749X/04/$7.50+$0.10
191
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192 ALAN STRATHERN
settlers, officials and missionaries, and the attentions of Portuguese

chroniclers such as João de Barros, Diogo do Couto, Gaspar Correia
and Fernão de Queirós bring quite new forms of evidence into the
historian’s purview.
These sources have long yielded up a narrative history of the six-
teenth century but more could be done to show what they reveal
about how the boundaries around (a) the Sinhalese state, (b) ethnic
identity, and (c) religious identity were drawn at this time. Moreover
we ought to consider if they were also being re-drawn under the influ-
ence of the increasingly aggressive interventions of the Portuguese.
One aspect of this essay is then to compare Portuguese and Sinhalese
understandings of these matters. What is interesting about the six-
teenth century is that we are confronted with a form of imperialism
quite different to the direct territorial control of the lowlands
pursued by all European powers after 1598. Before that time the
Portuguese wielded influence through the institutions of alliance and
vassalage. For twenty years Bhuvanekabahu profited from this
arrangement as a loyal vassal enjoying protection against the belli-
gerent advances of his brother Mayadunne (1521–81). In the 1540s
this alliance was undermined as the Portuguese extended diplomatic
relations to many lesser princes in the Sri Lankan interior.3 This
period is the focus of our attention, but we will also make some
observations about the later sixteenth century.
Sri Lanka’s past has thrown up so many different axes of debate,
with allegiances clustered in such diverse ways, that one hestitates
to categorize writers according to intellectual or political camps. A
number of models pertaining to statehood in particular do stand out
clearly enough to be identified here: modernity theory, drawing on
Gellner and Anderson; the notion of Indic (as contrasted with
western) kingship, deriving inspiration from Geertz and Stein;
Tambiah’s concept of the galactic polity; the Asian early modern
period proposed by Subrahmanyam and others. Equally our discus-
sion of ethnicity will refer to a number of arguments that can be
fairly described as ‘nationalist’. However, much of the time it is more
useful to eschew such direct attributions or characterizations in
favour of two opposing abstractions, the theoretical impulses of
‘traditionalism’ and ‘historicism’.
The ‘traditionalist’ view is concerned to emphasize the continuity,
coherence and idiosyncrasy of Sri Lankan history. It draws on excep-
3
Alan Strathern, ‘Bhuvanekabahu VII and the Portuguese: Temporal and Spir-
itual Encounters in Sri Lanka, 1521–1551’ (Oxford University D.Phil. thesis, 2002).
SRI LANKAN HISTORY 193
tionally long-lived, if not exactly continuous, indigenous tradition of
historical writing. As early as the sixth century A.D. the Buddhist
monks of the Mahavihara fraternity were composing the Pali chron-
icle known as the Mahavamsa, a text that apparently drew on earlier
works (the Dipavamsa) and would receive later additions (the
Culavamsa).4 These texts elaborated a religious and political
worldview coherent enough to be referred to as the ‘vamsa ideology’,
although features of it are discernible in other literary works such
as the Sinhala language chronicle, the Rajavaliya.5 According to these
texts the Buddha had visited the island of Lanka and, just before he
drew his last breath, had ordained it as the true home and guardian
of his doctrine, the dhamma.6 Just as the Buddha had somehow taken
possession of Lanka, so it was the destiny of the Sinhala kings to
conquer and rule over the whole island. These rulers would prevail
over a unified state and indeed a whole society that was dedicated to
the preservation and cultivation of Buddhist ideals. In the words of
one writer this mythology exhibited a ‘constant strain to identify the
religion with the state and the Buddhist state in turn with a Buddhist
society.’7 Traditionalism takes this worldview to be representative
of a Sinhalese culture that prevailed throughout the island for two
millennia.
The ‘historicist’ approach is concerned to emphasize discontinuit-
ies, to make supposed strucutres of the very longue durée contingent
on smaller moments of history. It demands a more critical view of
the monastic texts, rendering them reflections of the particular con-
ditions of their production rather than embodiments of ‘Sinhala cul-
ture’ per se: this is literature which is polemical rather than repres-
4
Wilhelm Geiger (ed.), The Mahavamsa or the Great Chronicle of Ceylon, translated
from the German into English by M. H. Bode (New Delhi, 1993).
5
A. Suraweera (trans.), Rajavaliya (Sri Lanka, 2000). The term ‘Buddhist His-
tory’ preferred by Obeyesekere seems to have the same functions as ‘vamsa ideology’,
see Gananath Obeyesekere, ‘Buddhism, Nationhood and Cultural Identity: A Ques-
tion of Fundamentals’, in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds), Fundamental-
isms Comprehended (Chicago, 1995). In the introduction to Tessa J. Bartholomeusz
and C. R. de Silva (eds), Buddhist Fundamentalism and Minority Identities in Sri Lanka
(New York, 1998), the editors argue that the Mahavamsa fulfils many of the func-
tions of fundamentalist scripture in Sri Lanka today.
6
Jonathan Walters, ‘Buddhist History: The Sri Lankan Pali Vamsas and Their
Community’, in Ronald Inden, Jonathan Walters, and Daud Ali (eds), Querying the
Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia (Oxford: New York, 2000),
p. 147, has questioned whether the Mahavamsa can sustain this dhammadipa reading.
7
S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity
in Thailand against a Historical Background (Cambridge, 1976), p. 521.
194 ALAN STRATHERN
entative, prescriptive rather than descriptive. Arguably, there was no

coherent ‘vamsa ideology,’ but only a number of different ideological
perspectives developed at different times within a fluctuating polit-
ical context. This allows one to attempt to tease apart the conflation
of state, people and religion. One can describe many evolutions and
transformations in the nature of the state and the extent of its
dominion across the centuries; undermine the notion that a coherent
sense of ethnic identity was a significant factor in Sri Lankan history
before the nineteenth century; and question the hegemony of Thera-
vada Buddhism as the ground of Sinhala culture in favour of a more
fluid and accommodating mixture of religious forms.
It is not difficult to see how one could make these analytical
approaches do political work. After all, history has become a matter
of fairly widespread public debate in Sri Lanka. However, it should
not be assumed that, say, ‘traditionalism’ is merely a polite short-
hand for fundamentalism or nationalism. Scholars with quite other
sentiments have displayed this theoretical impulse when dwelling on
the monastic literature and its interconnections with Sinhalese cul-
ture in the broadest sense, while it is quite possible to espouse a form
of chauvinism that rests on different versions of the past. Indeed
traditionalism and historicism form two ends of a spectrum and it
makes little sense to describe a given work as either one or the other.
These terms are not intended as guides to contemporary scholarship
but as ways of pursuing our sixteenth-century material.8
Models of State
Throughout the sixteenth century, the kings of Kotte considered

themselves to be emperors, or ‘world-conquering’ cakravartis. This
much is evident from their decrees.9 But, following the prompting of
historicism, was this simply a piece of terminological driftwood float-
8
Because such ‘empty’ terms have been chosen, there will be countless under-
standings of both which are not intended here. For my use of ‘historicism’, see
Collins English Dictionary (1991). The terms have something in common with (but
are broader categories than) the ‘primordialist’ and ‘modernist’ approaches referred
to by Rogers, ‘Post-Orientalism’, pp. 10–23. Jonathan Spencer, ‘The Past and the
Present in Sri Lanka’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37 (1995), p. 360,
contrasts primordialism with constructionism.
9
See the four sannas (controversially) attributed to Bhuvanekabahu VII by P. E.
Pieris, ‘The Date of King Bhuvaneka Bahu VII’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
Ceylon Branch, 22 (1910–12), pp. 169–80.
ing in an epoch that denuded it of meaning? What kind of imperial
pretensions did it invoke? Walters has argued that Sinhala imperial
rhetoric was first given proper articulation as part of a project to
assert an overlordship that would cross the seas and subsume South
India, although the term cakravarti was not used until the tail-end of
this dynamic in the late twelfth century.10 Then centuries lapsed.
The paradigmatic cakravarti figure for our epoch was Parakramabahu
VI (1411–66). He subdued the entire island, an extremely rare feat
by this time, and went no futher. For Bhuvanekabahu, already in his
fifties when he took the throne in 1521, the world of Parakramabahu
VI was but a generation or two away.11
The significance of the language of universal empire was therefore
reduced: it was now empolyed to refer to a quite unusual conception
of bounded hegemony, in which the domination of the island of
Lanka was the precondition and even the fulfilment of the cakravarti
ideal.12 It was routinely associated with the more transparent title of
trisinhaladhisvara (lord of the three Sinhalas, the whole island) and it
seems as if there was a higher form of coronation ritual
(svarnabhiseka) that could only be claimed by those with rightful
dominion over the territories of Lanka. Until fairly recently, many
works of history described the rise to power of Bhuvanekabahu and
his brothers Mayadunne and Rayigama Bandara in the palace coup
of 1521 as signifying the ‘division of Kotte’ into three separate king-
doms. It is now clear that Bhuvanekabahu assumed the imperial title
and the royal centre at Kotte, while his two brothers were given
Sitavaka and Rayigama as sub-kingdoms.13
These arrangements are illuminated by a rare item of artistic
evidence from the Kotte court, an ivory travelling box with detailed
pictorial relief-work. It was made by a Sinhalese artist, either in anti-
10
Walters, ‘Buddhist History’, pp. 132–45.
11
Fernão de Queyroz, The Temporal and Spiritual Conquest of Ceylon, trans. S. G.
Perera (New Delhi, 1992), p. 293.
12
See K. W. Goonewardena, ‘Kingship in Seventeenth-Century Sri Lanka’, Sri
Lanka Journal of the Humanities, 3 (1977), p. 13, which stresses the continuing rele-
vance of the svarnabhiseka ideal. Steven Collins, Nirvana and other Buddhist Felicities.
Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 20, 85, suggests that this sense
of territorial boundedness may be referred to as ‘a kind of proto-nationalism’.
13
This is confirmed by a closer reading of Sinhalese and Portuguese sources:
Suraweera (trans.), Rajavaliya, pp. 72–3; Queyroz, Conquest of Ceylon, pp. 101, 264,
263; Duarte Barbosa, The Book of Duarte Barbosa, trans. M. L. Dames, 2 vols (London,
1918–21), ii. p. 117. For the boundaries of these kingdoms, see C. R. de Silva, ‘The
First Portuguese Revenue Register of the Kingdom of Kotte, 1599’, Ceylon Journal
of Historical and Social Sciences, 5 (1975).
196 ALAN STRATHERN
cipation or commemoration of the embassy that Bhuvanekabahu

sent to Lisbon in 1542 in order to induce Dom João III to recognize
Dharmapala as the heir apparent to the Kotte throne.14 The most
splendid depiction is that of Bhuvanekabahu at the moment of his
coronation. The choice of this scene is significant for it allows Maya-
dunne and Rayigama Bandara to be present: they are in attendance,
mundane mortal size, waiting in the wings. The stratification of
power is emphatic. Indeed the claim later made by the Portuguese
Crown that all of Sri Lanka came under its rightful dominion was
based on Dharmapala’s bequest of this title to Philip II.15 A letter
from Bhuvanekabahu to the Portuguese court in 1543 is unambigu-
ous. He pointed out that ‘the kingdoms of Candia [Kandy] and
Jafanapatao [Jaffna] belonged to my kingdom and were part of my
dominions’, and asked for help to bring them back under his rule—
ambitions which are problematic for the normal characterisation of
him as ‘weak’ and unaggressive.16
What happened to this indigenous imperial rhetoric when the Sin-
halese kings became vassals (of the Portuguese) themselves?
Returning to the Munich casket, we see that etched into one of the
frontal panels is an image of Dharmapala paying homage to Dom
João III, his hand clasped by those of his liege, the ritual establish-
ment of vassalage. In another panel Dharmaphala receives his crown.
What is striking, indeed unique, about this representation, is that it
depicts a distinctively Buddhist conical crown. All other Asian princes
who we know were crowned in this way knelt to receive a gold crown
fashioned in Portugal.17 The remaining carvings are filled with
14
Amin Jaffer and Melanie Anne Schwabe, ‘A Group of Sixteenth-Century Ivory
Caskets from Ceylon’, Apollo, 445 (1999) and P. de Silva, A Catalogue of Antiquities
and Other Cultural Objects from Sri Lanka (Ceylon) Abroad (Colombo, 1975). It can be
deduced that the casket was made before the murder of Prince Jugo in late 1544,
given that the latter is represented standing on one side of his mother, Padma.
15
See António Vasconcelos de Saldanha, ‘O Problema Jurı́dico-Polı́tico da Incor-
poração de Ceilão na Coroa de Portugal: Os Donativos dos Reinos de Kotte, Kandy
e Jaffna (1580–1633)’, Revista de Cultura, 13–14 (1991). A Portuguese observer tells
us that Dharmapala was styled ‘Great king like his grandfather’, Dom Afonso de
Noronha to Dom João III, Cochin, 27 January 1552, in Georg Schurhamer and E.
A. Voretzsch (eds), Ceylon zur Zeit des Konigs Bhuvaneka Bahu und Franz Xavers, 1539–
1552, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1928), ii, p. 58.
16
Bhuvanekabahu to Dom Luis, Kotte, 28 November 1543, in V. Perniola (ed.),
The Catholic Church in Sir Lanka. The Portuguese Period, Vol. 1, 1505–65 (Dehiwala,
1989) [Henceforth ‘Perniola’], p. 48. These references also affirm the particularly
Lankan focus of Bhuvanekabahu’s imperial vision.
17
António Vasconcelos de Saldanha, Iustum Imperium. Dos Tratados como Fundamento
do Império dos Portugueses no Oriente (Lisbon, 1997), p. 588.
images of Bhuvanekabahu’s divine and worldly sovereignty. The
iconography appears to assert that one could be emperor and vassal
at the same time, that association with the Portuguese did not under-
mine the dignity of the Kotte dynasty but somehow upheld it.
Jonathan Walters has argued that under the lingering shadow of
the Cola and Vijayanagar empires in the thirteenth, fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, the Sri Lanka kings formulated ‘a new kind of
identity . . . one that it not undermined by submission to more power-
ful emperors.’18 Could it be that a vision of a politically unified Sri
Lanka co-existed with memories of an acceptable subordination to
an external power? If so, the paradoxical accommodation to/expres-
sion of overlordship carved into the ivory reliefs of the Munich
Casket had been long foreshadowed. It was an equivocal understand-
ing that was ill suited to the harsher realities of the Portuguese
presence that would be revealed in the 1540s.
Historicism is less concerned with the existence of an ideal of
political unity than with what kind of unity was presupposed. This is
addressed by the model of the ‘pre-modern state’ sketched out by
Nissan and Stirrat.19 Combining the theoretical reflections of several
well-known scholars, they describe an entity defined by the sacred
overlordship of the centre rather than by the demarcation of terri-
torial boundaries. Beyond the core lands, various regions and diverse
ethnic groups enjoyed considerable autonomy. As Nissan and Stirrat
put it:
The pre-modern state consists of a series of dissimilar groups articulated
about the centre, possibly in dissimilar ways. The modern state ideally con-
sists of like individuals connected to one another and to the state in ident-
ical fashion. The space of the pre-modern state can be culturally, politically
and legally heterogeneous; that of the modern state is ideally homogeneous.
Whilst in the pre-modern state the centre is stressed and made sacred by
being hedged around with taboos, in the modern state boundaries are
stressed and made the arena of taboo.20
Note that this model, drawing as it does on the work of Ernst
Gellner, is ostensibly about the ‘pre-modern state’ in general. As
such, it could apply to the Portuguese Empire as much as to the
Kingdom of Kotte. But Nissan and Stirrat’s primary concern is South
and South-East Asia, the specialism of the other three cited authorit-
18
Walters, ‘Buddhist History’, p. 145.
19
Elizabeth Nissan and R. L. Stirrat, ‘The Generation of Communal Identities’,
in Jonathan Spencer (ed.), Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict (London, 1990).
20
Nissan and Stirrat, ‘Generation of Communal Identities,’ p. 26.
198 ALAN STRATHERN
ies, Benedict Anderson, Stanley Tambiah, and Burton Stein. It is

confusing for us that they thereby draw from a pool of scholarship
that has also been the source for theoretical constructions of an
Oriental template of rulership, implicitly or explicitly opposed to its
Western counterpart.21 Their model is reminiscent of Clifford
Geertz’s work on the pre-colonial Balinese courts, for example, which
are described as edifices directed towards a symbolic or cosmic per-
fection that actually detracted from the wielding of political power.22
We are left pondering a tension between two kinds of generalization,
pre-modern vs. modern and east vs. west.
Tambiah has criticized Geertz for ‘the deep rupture he creates
between expressive action . . . and instrumental action.’23 However,
his own extensive writings on the ‘galactic polity,’ which he sees as
having prevailed in the Theravada regions of pre-colonial South and
South-East Asia, make use of a cognate principle.24. What his model
captures—and what might be obscured by the interests and pre-
suppositions of our Portuguese sources—is the sense in which the
overlord placed great significance on the presentation of fealty and
certain services from his vassals while neglecting the implementation
of an administrative machinery to directly exploit or control their
lands.25 The cakravarti’s dominion was conceived of as, ‘conforming to
the mandala pattern of partitioning and replicating of powers
between the king of kings and the lesser kings, who once they have
subjected themselves, are allowed to remain in vassal status.’26 One
21
This is particularly the case for Burton Stein’s work on Vijayanagar. See Joan-
Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes
(Cambridge, 2000), pp. 28–34, and Craig J. Reynolds, ‘A New Look at Old South-
east Asia’, Journal of Asian Studies 54 (1995), pp. 425–30.
22
C. Geertz, Negara (Princeton, 1980).
23
S. J. Tambiah, ‘A Reformulation of Geertz’s Conception of the Theatre State’
in S. J. Tambiah, Culture, Thought and Social Action (Harvard, Mass., 1985), p. 318.
24
Cognate, but more balanced: Tambiah, World Conqueror, pp. 102–32; Culture,
Thought, Chapter 7. ‘Galactic polity’ is intended to displace the word ‘state’, which
is assumed to be inextricably associated with the phase of modern European history
that brought us the notion of ‘nation-state’, see S. J. Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed?
Religion, Politics and Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago, 1992) p. 172. Yet historians and
sociologists do routinely discuss pre-modern political structures as ‘states’, including
absolutist monarchies, dynastic empires and feudal systems.
25
That is, when the galactic polity is in its, more normal, ‘weak’ state. It is clear
that this model is intended to be relevant to all pre-colonial Sri Lankan kingdoms.
When Tambiah has used a Sri Lankan case-study he has turned to the Kandyan
Kingdom of the seventeenth to nineteenth century, see Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed,
pp. 173–5.
26
S. J. Tambiah, ‘At the Confluence of Anthropology, History and Indology’, Con-
tributions to Indian Sociology 21 (1987), p. 203.
result was that if the centre was weak, the peripheral territories were
liable to be sucked into the embrace of competing ‘pulsating centres’,
only to be regained if the centre began to expand once more.
The arrangements of 1521 are well served by this imagery: Maya-
dunne and Rayigama Bandara were given the titles of kings (rajas)
and they were left to rule over and appropriate the resources of their
territories as they saw fit. This reliance on other members of the
royal family was an ancient Sinhalese practice that sometimes
amounted to shared sovereignty. Cristovão Lourenço Caração, a
Portuguese scribe who was present in the last years of the reign of
Vijayabahu (1513–21), tells us that although his two brothers had
‘retired’ from the succession the king himself rarely left the city
of Kotte, never failed to consult his brothers before any important
undertaking, and left one in command of the army.27 But not all
Portuguese observers were as perspicacious as Caração. From the
earliest reports of the island one picks up a sense of confusion in the
face of a slightly bewildering fragmentation of political power.28 In
subsequent accounts we find that alongside a flickering awareness of
Bhuvanekabahu’s imperial title there remained a tendency to
imagine that Kotte had actually been divided into three sovereign
entities in 1521.29 The pragmatic implications of his overlordship
were far from evident.
From the perspective of the Kotte court, on the other hand,
Bhuvanekabahu’s overlordship was properly expressed though an
insistence on the symbolic presentation of fealty. This helps to
explain its policy towards the breakaway state of Kandy over several
generations. When its founder, Senasammata Vikramabahu (1469–
1511) proclaimed himself trisinhaladhisvara and cakravarti, the kings
of Kotte launched repeated attacks on him with the overriding aim
of simply forcing him to withdraw those proclamations, which he
did.30 When Jayavira (1511–52) began to assert his independence in
the early 1540s Bhuvanekabahu’s invasion of his lands was then an
entirely traditional response.31 And what did he indend to do with
27
Genevieve Bouchon (ed.), ‘A Letter: Cristóvão Lourenço Caração to D. Manuel,
Cochin, 13 Jan 1522’, Mare Luso Indicum, 1 (1971), p. 167.
28
See Jorge Manuel Flores, Os Portugueses e o Mar de Ceilão: Trato, Diplomacia e
Guerra (1498–1543) (Lisbon, 1998), p. 87.
29
D. Ferguson (ed. and trans.), The History of Ceylon from the Earliest Times to 1600
A.D. as related by João de Barros and Diogo do Couto (New Delhi, 1993), pp. 72–3.
30
UPHSL, pp. 141–3.
31
A. Ferreira to Dom João de Castro, Ceylon, 5 October 1545, Perniola, p. 68.
200 ALAN STRATHERN
the highland territories? To create, in effect, a new sub-kingdom, by

placing them under the rule of a disgruntled prince who had just
been disinherited and threatened to disrupt the succession.32
However, as Joan-Pau Rubiés has recently argued, attempts to cap-
ture a particularly Indic model of kingship tend to involve an over-
schematization of both east and west.33 If there was a disjuncture
between Portuguese and indigenous viewpoints it was less significant
and more subtle than one might expect.34 The Estado da Índia, the
Portuguese Empire in the east, does fit the ‘pre-modern state model’
in some ways. Dom Manuel (1495–1521) and Dom João III (1521–
57) considered that they had political and spiritual responsibilities
to all Christians within and beyond their jurisdiction, regardless of
their ethnic or political identities. Recent scholarship has illumin-
ated the conceptual and practical imprecision of the boundaries of
the early Estado.35 Its presence was established through the institu-
tions of alliance and vassalage; rarely was any attempt made to
incorporate subordinate polities into the administrative machinery
of the Portuguese state. Significantly, the languages of vassalage
employed by the Sinhalese and by the Portuguese were roughly com-
mensurable: both stressed the importance of a ritual of obeisance;
both were expressed in personal and familial idiom as much as in
legalistic terms; both stressed that the vassal was obliged to render
services to his liege but were flexible as to how formal and onerous
those services would be. For both the King of Portugal and the King
of Kotte, symbolic fealty could be an end in itself.36
In prising open the difference between Dom João, ‘king of kings’
and Bhuvanekabahu, cakravarti, we must begin by recongizing that
the Portuguese imperium was more properly a vehicle for what we
commonly understand by imperialism. It tilted at expansion without
32
Gaspar Correia, Lendas da Índia, trans. D. Ferguson in Ceylon Antiquary and Liter-
ary Register, 4 (1935–6) [henceforth ‘Correia’] p. 323, is the only source for this.
The Prince was probably Jugo.
33
Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, pp. 30–3 and Chapter 7.
34
As we have seen, the Portuguese could understand the notion of nominal or
non-intrusive vassalage and many Portuguese sources did acknowledge that
Bhuvanekabahu was emperor. There were also broad European analogies for the
practice of bestowing largely autonomous fiefdoms on younger brothers.
35
Luı́s Filipe F. R. Thomaz, ‘Estrutura Polı́tica e Administrativa do Estado da
Índia no Século XVI’, in Luı́s de Albuquerque and Inácio Guerreiro (eds), II Sem-
inário Internacional de História Indo-Portuguesa (Lisbon, 1985); Saldanha, Iustum
Imperium.
36
Luı́s Filipe F. R. Thomaz, ‘L’idée Imperiale Manueline’, in Jean Aubin (ed.),
La découverte, le Portugal et l’Europe (Paris, 1990).
limits, propelled by the desire to monopolize and exploit oceanic
trade. The name given to its eastern thrust gives us a clue. O Estado
da Índia is normally translated as ‘the State of India’, but estado has
the connotations of ‘estate,’ which indicates its precise meaning: the
interests of the Portuguese Crown of Asia. This is not best viewed as
the intrusion of a western mentality into the east. There has been
a growing feeling that South and South-East Asia experienced an
‘early-modern period’ of its own.37 This manifested itself in many
ways, including the development of ideologies of universal empire
and an increasing willingness to exploit a burgeoning grass-roots
commercialism actively and intrusively. Kotte displayed one or two
of the features of the port-based, commercially oriented polity that
was coming to prominence.38 But, while its kings sought to protect
and extend certain economic rights, their authority and power was
drawn from the hinterland rather than from the seas.39 The entre-
preneurial activity of the Portuguese, on the other hand, was barely
contained by their formal language of international relations. In
practice, the institutions of vassalage tended to become associated
with a penetrative form of economic exploitation. There was one
major legal mechanism that facilitated this. Treaties of vassalage or
alliance normally left the sovereignty of the indigenous ruler intact
outside the walls of the feitoria or trading settlement, with one crucial
qualification: all Portuguese operating outside the feitoria would
remain under the Estado’s jurisdiction. This was a simple reflection
37
Or even that Iberian expansion was one manifestation of a global or Eurasian
early modern period. If this is a form of historicism, it is one that undercuts the
obsession with modernity. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘State Formation and Trans-
formation in Early Modern India and Southeast Asia’, Itinerario, 12 (1988), and the
various essays in Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997) and Daedalus 127 (Summer 1998).
38
It has been argued that the location of the royal centre of Kotte close to Col-
ombo was determined by the desire to take advantage of the developing cinnamon
trade, see Sirima Kiribamune, ‘Trade Patterns in the Indian Ocean and their
Impact on the Politics of Medieval Sri Lanka’, Modern Sri Lanka Studies, 2 (1987).
39
Bhuvanekabahu was very concerned about his revenue from the ports, he
desired to place the highly contested Manar pearl-fishery under his control, and the
Portuguese settlers in his realms certainly felt the effects of a ‘fiscally penetrative
state’, complaining as they did about the burdensome customs duties, see Memorial
of King Bhuvanekabahu for Dom João III, Kotte, 1541, and The Portuguese of
Ceylon to João de Castro, Ceylon, 27 November 1547, in Perniola, pp. 14–20; 238–
40. However, As Flores, Os Portugueses, pp. 92–5, has argued, the administrative
structures of Kotte were overwhelmingly focused on extracting surpluses from the
land. Anne M. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century
Lankan Monastic Culture (Princeton, 2001), argues that the eighteenth-century Kand-
yan kingdom does not fit easily into the ‘early modern paradigm’.
202 ALAN STRATHERN
of the inequalities of power and it was a principle to which Bhuva-

nekabahu mournfully acquiesced. As his ambassador stated in 1551,
‘the Portuguese enjoy as much liberty in his [Bhuvanekabahu’s]
realm as if they were on their own farms and houses.’40 This repres-
ented a very specific and limited form of state expansion but one
that nonetheless threatened the sovereignty of other rulers.
This is where the survival of the encompassing cakravarti ideal
becomes relevant: it makes little sense to ask whether Kotte had any
mechanism of expansion that could be analogous to the Portuguese
version, because the peripheral territories were already conceptually
incorporated.41 We suggested that the cakravarti ideal had acquired a
static or defensive quality by the sixteenth century. Bhuvanekabahu’s
hegemony resists categorization as ‘imperialism’ because the vassal
territories were not differentiated enough from the centre symbolic-
ally, and were not impinged upon enough politically.42 The coherence
of ‘larger Kotte’ is particularly apparent. After all, Bhuvanekabahu
did not just, to use phraseology beloved by Dom Manuel, profess
irmandade (brotherhood) with two of his sub-kings; they were actually
his brothers by birth. The dispute over the dynastic imperial title is
the root of the ongoing wars between ‘core Kotte’ and Sitavaka that
dominate much of the sixteenth century. As a result what is most
compelling about this period is not the rivalry of ‘pulsating centres’,
but a struggle for access to the legitimating traditions of one centre.
These issues shift into focus when we move away from Bhuvaneka-
bahu’s relationship with the troublesome rajas and to his government
of the core lands of Kotte on which he depended for his revenue.
The notion of ‘ceremonial sacred kingship’ has to be qualified by
reference to the complex departmental and territorial administrative
system deployed in the Kotte kingdom—later used as foundation of
colonial bureaucracies—in which the king could exercise a remark-
able degree of direct control over the use of land.43 What kept it
40
Sri Ramaraska Pandita to Queen Catherina, Cochin, 28 January 1551, Perni-
ola, p. 279.
41
That is, they were conceptually incorporated according to the perspective of the Kotte
court. For the king of Kandy, Bhuvanekabahu was only ‘formerly emperor’, see Fr.
Simão de Coimbra to Dom João III, Goa, 25 December 1546, Perniola, p. 200. If
we can believe Queyroz, Conquest of Ceylon, p. 210, Mayadunne had set himself up
as an alternative emperor in 1527.
42
See Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Cornell, 1986), for the distinction between
hegemony (control over foreign policy) and imperialism (control over internal
policy).
43
W. Siriweera, ‘Land tenure and Revenue in Medieval Ceylon (A.D. 1000–1500),
The Ceylon Journal of Humanities and Social Studies, 2 (1972); UPHSL, pp. 24–31, 43–
8. Tambiah (in for e.g. Buddhism Betrayed, pp. 173–5) also addresses the Sinhalese
geographically limited was the erection of sub-kingdoms and these
were resorted to primarily as a means of averting succession crises.
Succession was nearly always a matter of dispute in Kotte, largely
because it was never established whether the title should pass from
brother to brother or from father to son.44
It was in these core territories that the Portuguese had their big-
gest impact. In the late 1530s and 1540s some Portuguese had
moved beyond Colombo into the Kotte hinterland and other port
towns on the south-western seaboard. Since they remained under the
sovereignty of the Estado they could not be assimilated in the tradi-
tional manner. Bhuvanekabahu’s letters are not just concerned with
the undermining of his monarchical dignity (though that is an
important theme); they are full of all kinds of infringements of his
sovereign rights.45 The Portuguese were taking land by force, enfor-
cing protection rackets, driving out trading competitors and commit-
ting all sorts of crimes with impunity. Bhuvanekabahu could no
longer fulfil his obligations to his subjects of protection and justice.
As he wrote to the Portuguese Governor: ‘These are the men who
ruin my country and make themselves kings of it without being able
to bring prosperity to it.’46 The Portuguese were failing to qualify
for lordship themselves, assuming power without any corresponding
concern for the ethical law or the welfare of the people.
What Bhuvanekabahu could not countenance was the notion that
the Portuguese could acquire land without rendering the traditional
services which the usage of that land entailed. Indeed he managed
to induce Dom João to pass a decree to the effect that casados should
‘pay the rents and fulfil the customary obligations to which were
subject those who sold the lands.’47 Unwittingly, unaware of the full
implications of ‘customary obligations’, the Portuguese king had
thereby decreed that his subjects were also, in one sense, subjects of
the King of Kotte. In theory, they could be obliged to present them-
administration system, and, given his concern to balance symbolic and pragmatic
action, my analysis does not veer too far from his ‘galactic polity’ model. However,
one wonders whether his emphasis on the logistical limits of the administration
capacity is as important as the simple fact of contested succession suggested here.
44
G. P. V. Somaratna, ‘Rules of Succession to the Throne of Kotte’, Aquinas
Journal 8 (1991), pp. 17–32. Somaratna concludes that the succession of only one
of the nine Kotte kings was undisputed.
45
See the letters of Bhuvanekabahu in Perniola, passim. Although drafted by Por-
tuguese scribes, they offer a consistent, idiosyncratic, and arguably faithful view
from Kotte.
46
Bhuvanekabahu to Dom João de Castro, Kotte, 17 November 1546, Perniola,
p. 136.
47
Decree of Dom João III, Almeirim, 13 March 1543, Perniola, p. 28.
204 ALAN STRATHERN
selves as militiamen at Bhuvanekabahu’s command.48 But such

decrees were routinely ignored. More worrying still was the phenom-
enon of Sinhalese converting to Christianity and placing themselves
under the protection of the Estado in order to avoid being punished
for a crime, to escape from slavery or their obligations as subjects
and land-holders. As Bhuvanekabahu realized, they were using reli-
gious identity as a mean of altering their political identity. ‘Once
they become Christians they are not ready to recognize my right
over them and to pay what they owe according to our laws.’49 The
conclusion is that Bhuvanekabahu’s sovereignty may have had a
blurry geography but it was conceptually ‘hard-edged’. Rooted as it
was in the dominion and organization of land and labour, it could
not but conflict with the extra-territorial thrust of Portuguese
imperialism.
In this early phase of Portuguese imperialism, we do not yet see a
politico-economic transformation—something akin to an ‘early
modern period’—shaping Sri Lanka.50 What we see instead is an
indigenous vision of titular overlordship coming into conflict with a
penetrative imperialism that destabilized the vassal’s sovereignty.
The Sitavaka kings, Mayadunne and particularly Rajasinha I (1581–
93), sometimes pursued a more exploitative form of overlordship,
but, in ‘galactic polity’ style, it was probably the result of placing
their kingdoms on a permanent and resource-hungry war footing,
rather than an imitation of Portuguese techniques.51 But could the
West start to influence forms of knowledge before it had bodily
apprehended the institutions of state?
Ethnic Identity
Kotte was clearly a state-formation that incorporated many ethnic

groups. Bhuvanekabahu claimed tutelage over the Hindu traders and
soldiers of ‘core Kotte’, the Tamils of Jaffna, the aboriginal veddas,
the Muslim Mappillas and perhaps even the Portuguese. The ques-
48
This was a common form of service owed for the usufruct of land.
49
Bhuvanekabahu to Dom João de Castro, Kotte, 12 November 1545, Perniola,
pp. 94–5.
50
We have to wait until the post-1598 colonization of the lowlands to see a
real transformation of the island’s economy towards the production of agricultural
surpluses for trade, for example, UPHSL, p. 176.
51
See UPHSL, p. 145, for Rajasingha’s levies on Kandy.
tion is to what extent were such groups incorporated hierarchically?
A consideration of the Buddhist triumphalism of the Mahavamsa or
the anti-Tamil invective in those portions of the Culavamsa written
during the wars with the Cola empire of the tenth to thirteenth
centuries, would suggest a strong hierarchicalism.52 But how reflect-
ive and effective do we take those texts to be? A number of scholars
have reacted against the minimalist interpretation of these texts by
drawing on a profound appreciation of holism, perhaps revivified by
the ‘practice theory’ of the 1980s and 90s. Bruce Kapferer,
Gananath Obeyesekere and Michael Roberts have seen the tropes of
the vamsas echoed in the rituals, songs, folk traditions and everyday
behaviour of Sinhalese past and present.53 However subtle their
accounts of the transformations of these tropes over time—and they
each do this in very different ways—they reflect a central feature of
traditionalism, that there are signficant continuities in the way the
Sinhalese have thought about and incorporated outsiders throughout
their history.
Kapferer, for example, has proposed that ever since the sixth cen-
tury A.D. the Sinhalese state has been incorporating other peoples in
‘hierarchical subordination to Sinhalese Buddhists.’54 This would
make the Sinhalese kingdoms radically different to a polity such as
Vijayanagar, whose emperor presided over a collaboration of distinct
elite groups with diverse ethnic and religious identities.55 Yet the
historicist impulse reminds us that the historical record is too long
and too arbitrary for us to assume the determinative force of these
myths. And they constitute but one element of a multivocal textual
heritage. On closer inspection the vamsa works portray South Indians
in many other non-subordinate roles.56 Indeed it has been argued
52
Michael Roberts, ‘Review Essay: Nationalism, the Past and the Present: The
Case of Sri Lanka’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 16 (1993), p. 14; R. A. L. H. Guna-
wardana, ‘The People of the Lion: The Sinhala Identity and Ideology in History and
Historiography’ in Spencer (ed.), Sri Lanka, pp. 162–4.
53
Roberts, ‘Review Essay’; Obeyesekere, ‘Buddhism, Nationhood’; Bruce Kap-
ferer, Legends of People, Myths of State (Wahington, 1988).
54
Kapferer, Legends, p. 7.
55
See Rubiés. Travel and Ethnology, p. 236. Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed, p. 175, in
direct response to Kapferer’s arguments, has downplayed the ‘hierarchicalism’ of
galactic polities, preferring to stress their ability to incorporate new groups of out-
siders in a variety of different and productive ways.
56
Obeyesekere, ‘Budhhism, Nationhood’, pp. 240–1; Jonathan Walters, ‘Multi-
religion on the Bus: Beyond ‘Influence’ and ‘Syncretism’ in the Study of Religious
Meetings’, in Pradeep Jeganathan and Qadri Ismail (eds), Unmaking the Nation: The
Politics of Identity and History in Modern Sri Lanka (Colombo, 1995).
206 ALAN STRATHERN
that if these texts do display ethnic sentiment, it must have been

confined to a tiny literate elite.57 Gellnerian modernism has clearly
left its mark on this picture of pre-modern political centres claiming
dominion over disparate local communities who shared little
common culture and no sense of a common identity.58 The work of
Gunawardana and others in revealing the modernity of the kind of
ethnic sentiment that we see in Sri Lanka today represents a very
significant academic advancement. It has not stopped a lively debate
about the history of the Sinhala identity that proceeds apace for
obvious political reasons, but also because there is little agreement
as to what ethnic identity actually is.
Sometimes a narrow definition is adopted, so that ethnicity
becomes an axiomatic and primordial identity that is rooted in
beliefs of shared blood and ancestry.59 It is difficult to find historical
evidence that will elicit these features and that used to indicate such
a Sinhalese identity is sparse and controversial.60 In this sense an
identity based on jati (‘kind’ later glossed as ‘caste’) was no doubt
more primordial.61 The problem occurs when some commentators,
having ruled out ethnic sentiment in ths way, proceed as if they had
nullified the historical relevance of more generously defined collect-
ive sentiments. Cultural features can be constructed as markers of
a felt community without the attendant beliefs in blood, although
these beliefs are powerful ways of expressing and strengthening that
sensation of community. Cultural boundaries may be most thor-
oughly politicized when they become coterminous with that of the
state. But this does not exhaust the scenarios in which a group can
sense that its interests are opposed to those of another group. One
57
R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, Historiography in a Time of Ethnic Conflict: Construction
of the Past in Contemporary Sri Lanka (Colombo, 1995), p. 4, refers to this as ‘archaic
ethnicity’.
58
Nissan and Stirrat, ‘Generation of Communal Identities’ p. 26. See E. Gellner,
Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983) p. 11.
59
Obeyesekere, ‘Buddhism, Nationhood’, pp. 242ff, and Gananath Obeyesekere,
‘On Buddhist Identity in Sri Lanka’, in Lola Romanucci-Rossi and George A. de Vos
(eds), Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict and Accommodation (London, 1995), pp. 230–3,
discuss ‘axiomatic identity’. Sheldon Pollock, ‘India in the Vernacular Millennium:
Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500’, Daedelus (1998) counters the Gellnerian
thesis by reference to a Eurasian vernacular millennium in the second millennium
A.D., but nonetheless rules out the development of ethnic identity—as defined by
shared memories and beliefs of common descent—in South Asia at this time.
60
Was the Vijayabahu story used as an origin myth for the whole group of Sin-
hala speakers? Gunawardana, ‘People of the Lion’ argues against.
61
Rogers, ‘Post-Orientalism’, p. 17.
of the most powerful forces here, as demonstrated by a recent article
on the Anglo-Saxons, is the experience of war.62 Or we could take
the case of the Portuguese, whose identity was hardened during the
wars against the muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, and in
competition with their overbearing Castilian neighbours.
Indeed, much could be gained from a thorough comparison with the
role of ethnicity in medieval and early modern European history. It is
clear, for example, that while unambiguous myths of common descent
are often fairly difficult to establish for medieval Europe, the concep-
tion of a people (gens) based on a shared language, religion and territ-
ory did matter.63 And that these categories need not correspond to the
boundaries of the state. Particularly in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies, we see the rise of dynastic agglomerations in which extremely
various regions, clinging nevertheless to their traditional political and
legal customs, were placed under the rule of one prince. The Habsburg
territories under Charles V (1519–46) present a classic example. The
willingness of the Sinhalese to accept rulers of non-Sinhalese origin is
therefore a typical feature of monarchical societies rather than a note-
worthy idiosyncrasy.64 In this context it need not be surprising to find
a consciousness of a broad cultural identity, but we cannot assume too
much about how politically significant that identity would be. In other
words, we need to ask what was it about a given historical context that
might render Sinhala-ness salient and conceived of as superior, that
might even resurrect the hierarchical logical the vamsas and make it
newly meaningful?65
According to an important work forthcoming from Michael
Roberts, this process was set in motion by continued warfare against
62
Bryan Ward-Perkins, ‘Why did the Anglo-Saxons not become more British?’,
English Historical Review, 115 (2000).
63
See Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe (Harmondsworth, 1994), pp. 197–9,
201–4, and Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300
(Oxford, 1997), pp. 250–62. The importance of language, above all, and also reli-
gion, cannot be over-stressed. If the Sinhalese could define themselves by these
differentiating features they could also draw—potentially—on ideas of homeland
and a sense of communal divine election, two strong reinforcing factors of group
identity according to A. D. Smith, National Identity (London, 1991), pp. 231–37).
64
Rogers, ‘Post-Orientalism’, p. 17, and Nissan and Stirrat, ‘Generation of Com-
munal Identities’, p. 23, emphasize this feature as noteworthy.
65
This approach has been explicitly criticized in Kapferer, Legends, pp. 46–8, as
reducing mythic logic to a ‘cultural resource’ to be picked up and manipulated by
‘rational actors’. However, his presentation of mythic logic as structuring a Sin-
halese ontology slips into an alternative pitfall: if this ontology already determines
what is meaningful how does that ontology change? Again, we encounter the diffi-
culty in capturing a genuine reciprocity of structure-agency.
208 ALAN STRATHERN
the Portuguese and Dutch in the ‘Kandyan period’ (1590s–1815),

which produced a strictly hierarchical approach to ethnicity.66 The
roots of this process reach back into the history of Sitavaka, a polity
founded on an expansionist policy that brought Mayadunne and his
son Rajasingha I (1581–93) into ceaseless conflict with the Portug-
uese. After this the Portuguese assumed direct rule of the lowlands
and attempted to conquer Kandy. The Kandyan kings pursued a lar-
gely defensive policy until the long and aggressive reign of Rajasinha
II (1635–87), who deliberately revived the project of his Sitavaka
namesake. It is in this climate that we see a new kind of literature
appear, the hatan kavyas or war poems, vigorous and bloody pro-
clamations of martial values and monarchical eulogy expressed in a
vernacular idiom with few of the features of classical Sinhala
poetry.67 The earliest is the Sitavaka Hatana, composed circa 1585,
which displays a turn of phrase for which it is difficult to resist the
label ‘patriotic.’
These verses display a sense of rightful ownership of Sri Lanka,
but it is in the later Kandyan poems, the Rajasinha Hatana (circa
1638) and the Maha Hatana (circa 1658), that the ‘politicization of
cultural difference’ becomes unavoidable. The Portuguese are much
less than human beings in these poems; they are animals, demons,
pollutants, and they are—crucially—beef-eaters and alcohol-
swiggers. Above all, the political pretensions of the Portuguese are
illegitimate: they do not belong in Lanka. At times the Portuguese
are compared with the long-past invaders from South India.68 This
literature cannot be attributed to the usual monastic culprits: it was
secular idiomatic poetry that was meant to rouse men to action in
the Kandyan regions, and perhaps also in the occupied low country.
This brings into particular clarity the problem with the idea that
‘archaic’ ethnicity was something confined to the literate elite. These
were not images that were intended to remain in the world of texts:
66
Roberts, ‘Review Essay’, p. 144: ‘there was room for heterogeneity and syncret-
ism, but they were valued on a hierarchical scale.’ See also Michael Roberts, Sinhala
Consciousness in the Kandyan period, 1590s–1818: The Sinhalese and Others, Volume I
(Forthcoming), Chapter 7. C. R. de Silva, ‘Islands and Beaches: Indigenous Rela-
tions with the Portuguese in Sri Lanka after Vasco da Gama’, in Anthony Disney
and Emily Booth (eds), Vasco da Gama and the Linking of Europe and Asia (New Dehli,
2000), p. 287, reaches a similar conclusion.
67
See Roberts, Sinhala Consciousness; UPHSL, pp. 475–6; C. R. de Silva, Ethnicity,
Prejudice and the Writing of History: G. C. Mendis Memorial Lecture (Colombo, 1984), p. 4.
68
Roberts, Sinhala Consciousness, Chapter 7, quoting the Rajasinha Hatana.
they were supposed to seep out, through recitation, song and hearsay
to a wider community.
By this time Portuguese commentators were well aware of the
hatred they aroused in Sri Lanka.69 That fact is also evident in parts
of the Sinhala-language chronicle tradition, the Rajavaliya, composed
at this time, which express an unmistakable anger against the Portu-
guese and those who associated with them.70 For the Portuguese had
not just been fighting the Sinhalese, they had been waging a war
against Buddhism itself. Hence Bhuvanekabahu VII is condemned:
he ‘had handed over the country to foreigners having introduced
unlawfulness to the people and contempt upon the Sasana (the
Buddhist ‘Church’).’71 In short, this period witnesses a flourishing
anti-foreigner discourse that was highly conducive to a contrasting
sensation of Sinhala-ness. The question remains as to what extent
this discourse moved beyond the military campaign and the composi-
tion of chronicles to prevail in other arenas of life. To what extent
did it start to influence the use of other ethnic groups as political
allies, or attitudes to religious identity, or the appeal of Portuguese
culture? These are questions to which we shall return in the epilogue.
After this detour through comparative history and the later history
of Sri Lanka we can apply the same approach to the early sixteenth
century. How would this context be conducive to a construction of
an aggressive assertion of the Sinhalese identity? In the centuries
following the Cola wars, an intermittent warfare between the Tamils
in Jaffna and the rather weak Sinhalese polities of the South gave
way to a peaceful Kotte overlordship under Parakramabahu VI.
Parakramabahu prevailed over a court culture that was perhaps the
most cosmopolitan the island had yet produced.72 People from the
subcontinent were commonly to be found performing all sorts of
roles: they were relatives, allies, royal brides, courtiers, purohitas,
brahmins, merchants and mercenaries. The Kotte kings were largely
dependent on Malabar mercenaries for their armed might. The intel-
69
Fr. S. G. Perera (ed.), The Expedition to Uva made in 1630 by Constantino de Sa de
Noronha (Colombo, 1930), p. 45: F. Mendes da Luz (ed.), ‘Livro das Cidades e Forta-
lezas da Índia’, Boletim da Biblioteca da Universidade de Coimbra, 21 (1953), p. 75.
70
C. R. de Silva, ‘Beyond the Cape: The Portuguese Encounter with the Peoples
of South Asia’, in Stuart B. Schwarz (ed.) Implicit Understandings (Cambridge, 1994),
pp. 309–21, describes the complicated construction of this text.
71
Suraveera (ed.), Rajavaliya, pp. 74–7.
72
Gunawardana, ‘People of the Lion’, p. 66.
210 ALAN STRATHERN
lectual centres of Tamil India exerted a great cultural pull, trans-

forming the literary habits and religious sensibilities of the literati.
This remained the status quo in Bhuvanekabahu’s reign. His closest
religious official and most trusted ambassador was a brahmin.73 Tamil
appears to have been an official court language, to judge by the fact
that Bhuvanekabahu’s letters drafted in Portuguese were authenti-
cated by a concluding sentence in that language.74 When two Jesuits
composed the first European reports on Sri Lankan religion in the
year after his death, they described a world copiously populated by
confusing varieties of Hindu sadhus and yogis, as well as bhikkhus.75
There could be no question of a wholesale denigration of Tamil
civilization.
All this tells us little about how salient the Sinhala identity was at
the time that the Portuguese arrived in Colombo. It may even be that
the Europeans represented a form of otherness that would throw
Sinhala-ness into starker relief. But it does suggest that this sense
of Sinhala-ness was not readily inflated into instinctive xenophobia.
The coastal inhabitants of Kotte were well used to bands of foreign
merchants settling on their shores, including the monotheistic
Muslims from the Middle east or Malabar. The Portuguese were
another such trading group, if an exceptionally belligerent one, who
replaced the Muslims as the key merchant community represented
at court.76 We cannot assume that those who came from the sea
would be instinctively repudiated or that their exotic nature would
be taken as threatening in itself. This brings us into conflict with
some accounts of the early Portuguese period influenced by national-
ist readings.
A recent example is Rambukwelle’s history of the Portuguese
period.77 It displays a most basic nationalist predisposition in imagin-
ing that any foreign intrusion in the past was met by hero-king res-
istors, of which Bhuvanekabahu VII, an ally and vassal of the
Portuguese for thirty years, is counted as one. Likewise Mendis
73
Sri Ramaraksa Pandita to Queen Catherina, Cochin, 28 January 1551, Perni-
ola, p. 278.
74
The letters of Bhuvanekabahu in Perniola, pp. 185, 186, 251, 253.
75
E. Morais to the Jesuits at Coimbra, Colombo, 28 November 1552, A. Dias to
G. Barzaeus, Colombo, 15 December 1551, in Perniola, pp. 318–38.
76
De Silva, ‘Beyond the Cape’, pp. 321–2.
77
P. B. Rambukwelle, The Period of the Eight Kings (Colombo, 1996). See an earlier
book, Commentary on Sinhala Kingship (Viajaya to Kalinga Magha) (Dehiwala, 1993) for
an extreme deployment of traditionalism.
Rohandeera, in a determined effort to rid Sri Lankan history of the
stain of acquiescence to the Portuguese, has argued unsuccessfully
that Dharma Parakramabahu, the first to offer obeisance, was not
really king at all, but a ‘fake king’ set up by the Portuguese, whereas
the ‘true king’ at that time retained his independence.78 A more
common trope is the characterization of Bhuvanekabahu as a weak
and vacillating ruler, implicitly derived from the fact that he
accepted Portuguese overlordship. In truth, he was simply suc-
cumbing to the realities of the Portuguese naval presence as many
other rulers in coastal cities had done all across Asia. The Portuguese
empire was led by the nose into the Sri Lankan interior in the 1540s;
internal fault lines opened up before the probing Portuguese adven-
turers and drew them in.79 By the end of that decade almost every
major Sri Lankan ruler and many lesser pretenders had asked to
become a vassal of the Portuguese Crown, including the Kings of
Kandy and Sitavaka, the prince of the Seven Korales, the chiefs of
Trincomalee and Batticaloa, the brother of Sankili, King of Jaffna,
and three disinherited princes of Kotte.80 They all wanted what
Bhuvanekabahu had, the protection of the most powerful force in
maritime Asia.
This immediately undermines a second proposition, that Maya-
dunne, the founder of the military machine of Sitavaka, can be rep-
resented as being primarily and initially motivated by some kind of
nationalist desire to ‘rid the land of the foreigner’. No doubt he
wanted absolute power in Sri Lanka, but he was not discerning as
to how that would be achieved. Throughout the 1540s and 1550s
Mayadunne repeatedly asked to be a Portuguese vassal, a title which
78
Mendis Rohandeera, ‘Dharma Parakramabahu IX: The False King of Ceylon
Inflated by Portuguese Historians—A Historiographical Perspective’, Vidyodaya
Journal of Social Sciences, 7 (1996). His case is undone by its neglect of Portuguese
evidence which unequivocally establishes that Rohandeera’s ‘real king’, Vijayabahu,
was a vassal in the period of 1518–21, see ‘Inquiry set up in Ceylon by Lopo de
Brito Regarding the Tribute and the Cinnamon, Colombo, 1522’, in Genvieve Bou-
chon, ‘Regent of the Sea’: Cannanore’s Response to Portuguese Expansion, 1507–1528
(Dehli, 1988), pp. 190–205.
79
C. R. de Silva, ‘Political and Diplomatic Relations of the Portuguese with the
Kingdom of Kotte during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century’, Revista da Cultura,
13/14 (1991).
80
Various letters in Perniola: pp. 62, 154 (Seven Korales: the ruler whose territ-
ory adjoins Jaffnapatam); pp. 62, 154, 287 (Trincomalee); pp. 154, 211–3, 220,
229 (Batticaloa); pp. 221, 229 (King of Vellassa and ‘Cauralle’); pp. 60–4 (King of
Kandy) p. 166 (The son of the King of Kandy, Karillayade); pp. 101–9 (the Kotte
Princes).
212 ALAN STRATHERN
81
he eventually won. He was not loyal of course. The role of vassal
was merely one that was useful to play on certain occasions. As we
shall see, the 1550s did produce a rebel leader with a decidedly
anti-Portuguese agenda: Vidiye Bandara. But Mayadunne had other
ambitions; he sided with his Portuguese liege and helped to crush
the rebellion.
A third proposition is more complex, that Bhuvanekabahu’s rela-
tionship with the Portuguese meant that he suffered from a
deepening loss of authority in the eyes of his subjects. The bullying
of the Portuguese settlers in the coastal towns undoubtedly alienated
some of the local populace, but this does not allow us to assume that
all internal opposition to Bhuvanekabahu was the result of ‘the
people’ objecting to foreign influence.82 It makes more sense, follow-
ing an historicist emphasis on class, or a ‘galactic-political’ evocation
of perennial rebellion and contested succession, to imagine the move-
ments of disgruntled noble factions. In the early 1540s various off-
spring of Bhuvanekabahu saw their hopes dashed by Dharmapala’s
ratification as heir, and began to cause trouble. Bhuvanekabahu had
one put to death; two others escaped to Goa, along with many fol-
lowers.83 This was compounded by the erosion of Sinhalese influence
at court by Portuguese officials and advisors.
The nationalist viewpoint of these events was not born fully-
formed in the ‘age of mature colonialism’, the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.84 It certainly owes something to the work
of P. E. Pieris (Ceylon: The Portuguese Era, published 1913–14), who
was a classic man of his time, a passionate gentleman-scholar and
vocal patriot.85 However, a certain empiricist discipline could also be
a feature of scholarship at this time and Pieris remained much more
81
Nuno Álvares Pereira to Dom João de Castro, Kandy, 13 October 1545; Maya-
dunne to Dom João de Castro, Ceylon, 26 October 1547; Afonso de Noronha to
Dom João III, Cochin, 16 January 1551, in Perniola, pp. 82, 230–1, 267–8.
82
This opposition is most clearly apparent in the narrative of Correia (see, for
example, p. 267). Also see Afonso Mexia to Dom João III, Colombo, 30 December
1528, in Flores, Os Portugueses, pp. 247–9.
83
Prince João to Dom João III, Goa, 15 November 1545; João de Beira to Martin
de Santa Cruz, Goa, 20 November 1545, in Perniola, pp. 106, 121.
84
The phrase, ‘mature colonialism’ is taken from John D. Rogers, ‘Historical
Images in the British Period’, in Spencer (ed.), Sri Lanka, p. 92.
85
P. E. Pieris, Ceylon: The Portuguese Era, 2 vols (Sri Lanka, 1913–14). See J. Will
Perera, ‘His Patriotism: An Appreciation’, in Sir Paul Pieris Felicitation Volume
(Colombo, 1956). Pieris’ views are very close to that of the British Colonial official
and orientalist H. C. P. Bell, see Bell’s Report on the Kegalla District (Colombo, 1904),
p. 5.
closely bound to this sources, which he rooted out with enthusiasm,
than many of his successors.86 In particular he was indebted to the
work of a late seventeenth-century Jesuit writing from Goa, Fernão
de Queirós. It has rarely been acknowledged what a great histo-
graphical impact Queirós’ work has had. It found an effective vehicle
in Pieris’ work, which sometimes reads like a free translation of
Queirós.87 And it is Queirós who provides easily the best evidence
for a nationalist reading. It is only from Queirós that we learn that
Mayadunne proclaimed himself emperor in 1539 and portrayed him-
self as a ‘Liberator’ who ‘was anxious to extinguish in Ceylon the
name of Christ and the power of the Portuguese.’88
We should not underestimate how active and intrusive Queirós
was in shaping, even inventing his material in accordance with a
series of polemical objectives.89 By the time he was writing, the
Sinhalese were known as the instigators of the fiercest and most
long-lived resistance to the Portuguese anywhere.90 Queirós was not
an uncomplicated racist, and therein lies the problem with his text.
In true Tacitean fashion, he endowed the Sinhalese with the dignity
of seventeenth-century Portuguese conceptions of national and
spiritual destiny. Subsequent writers have often read Queirós as if
he were a contemporary source for the early sixteenth century. This
reading then appeared to be confirmed by the Sinhalese evidence of
an equally late date: the ringing condemnations of the Rajavaliya or
the bloodthirsty credos of the hatanas. If the raw materials of the
nationalist interpretation lie in the mid-to-late seventeenth century,
and are assembled with some delicacy in the early twentieth, then it
is in post-independence Sri Lanka that we see their crudest reformul-
ation. The efforts of scholars such as C. R. de Silva and Jorge Flores
in subjecting the history of Portuguese influence to a more sophisti-
cated form of inquiry do not seem to have filtered down to a signifi-
cant stratum of popular publishing in Sri Lanka or transferred across
86
Pieris’ nationalist sympathies were qualified by his Christian faith and his
respect for Portuguese sources, which some current writers appear to dismiss out
of hand.
87
See Fr. S. G. Perera’s Introduction to Queyroz, Conquest of Ceylon, pp. 23–4*.
88
Queyroz, Conquest of Ceylon, pp. 223, 262, 280, 334–6.
89
Alan Strathern, ‘Re-reading Queirós: Some Neglected Aspects of the Conquista’,
Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities 26 (2000); T. Abeyasinghe, ‘History as Polemics
and Propaganda: An Examination of Fernao de Queyroz ‘‘History of Ceylon’’ ’,
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Sri Lanka), 20 (1980–1).
90
Hence Queirós (Conquest of Ceylon, pp. 296, 306) represents the Sinhalese as
liable to an intense hatred for the Portuguese from the very beginning.
214 ALAN STRATHERN
to neighbouring academic disciplines. Accounts of Bhuvanekabahu’s

reign regularly reiterate the judgements of Pieris, Queirós and the
Rajavaliya.91
Religion
In a skilful negotiation of traditionalist and historicist impulses, John

Holt has argued that Sinhalese Buddhism can be seen as providing
a pervasive ideological strucutre of the longue durée, but one that is
exceptionally tolerant and welcoming of diverse religious forms.92
These new practices and deities are assimilated to an overarching
Sinhala Buddhist conceptual framework. Any number of gods of
Hindu tradition might be acknowledged or given a place in the
Buddhist pantheon, but in the process they are stripped of soteriolog-
ical significance. Only the Buddhist dhamma can show the way to
liberation. The gods are not liberated themselves and what power
they have to help or harm human beings is solely concerned with the
business of this worldly affairs (laukika). This model is reminiscent
of Obeyesekere’s work on Sinhalese folk traditions that appear to
have the function of mediating traffic across ethnic or cultural
boundaries. The ubiquity of myths and rituals that promote or
explain the incorporation of immigrant groups as Sinhala Buddhists
suggests the same sort of paradox, of boundaries that are both signi-
ficant and constantly traversed.93 Buddhism, like Sinhala-ness, is
therefore capacious yet defined, an umbrella made of strong material
but of extreme extension. Of course, if we accept a strong form of
holism we should not be surprised to find the same logic structuring
the different processes of political, ethnic and religious
incorporation.94
91
G. Malalasekera, The Pali Literature of Ceylon (1928: reprinted Kandy 1994),
pp. 258–61; N. E. Weerasooriya’s Ceylon and her People, Volume I (Colombo, 1970);
K. C. Sankaranarayam, The Keralites and the Sinhalese (Madras, 1994), P. 59; G. Pana-
bokke, History of the Buddhist Sangha in India and Sri Lanka (Sri Lanka, 1993), pp.
192–207; Rambukwelle, Period of Eight Kings. The latter explicitly acknowledges his
dependence on Pieris and Queirós.
92
John Clifford Holt, ‘The Persistence of Political Buddhism’ in Bartholomeusz
and De Silva (eds), Buddhist Fundamentalism, p. 194; John Clifford Holt, Buddha in
the Crown: Avalokitesvara in the Buddhist Tradition of Sri Lanka (Oxford, 1991).
93
Obeyesekere, ‘Buddhism, Nationhood’, pp. 241–4, refers to this process
whereby outsiders are made into Sinhala-Buddhists—acceptable co-inhabitants of
Lanka—as sasanization.
94
This is most systematically elaborated by Kapferer, Legends of People.
The metaphysics outlined by Holt describe how Buddhists perceive
other religious practices whether they appropriate them or not: the
latter are unlikely to pose a challenge to the truth of the dhamma. We
have already indicated how sixteenth-century Kotte was populated by
many unassimilated groups, with different religious needs. Particu-
larly around the court, then, we find religious communities living
side-by-side and in amongst each other and the king was patron of
them all. But it would be wrong to assume that the field of ‘multi-
religion’ in Sri Lanka was so straightforward, for there did exist
textual traditions of repugnance at religious practices beyond the
pale of Theravada doctrine, the attacks on Mahayanic or Hindu
(particularly Saivite) ideas.95 There were times when Sinhala Buddh-
ism was felt to be under threat. Immediately we find ourselves back
in the traditionalist-historicist dilemmas of the ethnicity debate. Do
we imagine that these texts reflect a religion continually concerned
with protecting its rather rigid boundaries? Or do we see their
authors as lone swimmers battling against a ceaseless tide of reli-
gious diversity? In casting our eyes back to the Kotte of preceding
reigns do we alight on the figure of Sri Rahula, enthusiastically parti-
cipating in all manner of popular and intellectual forms of devotion
and reflection, or do we turn instead to his successor as rajaguru,
Vidagama Maitreya, and his vitriolic condemnation of brahmanic
cults? It seems again that we have a heritage of many voices.96
But we should not mistake this for an absence of heritage itself.
Contrast it with Portuguese Catholicism and the disparate voices of
Sinhala Buddhism quickly merge into a more harmonious chorus. If,
therefore, we examine the encounter between the first Catholic mis-
sion to Sri Lanka and the court of Kotte, it is the disjuncture between
an essentially exclusivist viewpoint and an essentially inclusivist one
that is so striking.97 When the six discalced Franciscans arrived in
95
See Bardwell L. Smith, ‘Varieties of Religious Assimilation in Early Medieval
Sri Lanka’, in David J. Kalupahana and W. G. Weeraratne (eds), Buddhist Philosophy
and Culture: Essays in Honour of N. A. Jayawickrema (Colombo, 1987), pp. 261–3;
Walters, ‘Multireligion on the Bus’; Charles Hallisey, ‘Devotion in the Buddhist
Literature of Medieval Sri Lanka’ (Chicago University PhD thesis, 1988), pp. 179–
84; H. Bechert, ‘The Beginnings of Buddhist Historiography: Mahavamsa and Polit-
ical Thinking’ in Bardwell L. Smith (ed.), Religion and the Legitimation of Power in Sri
Lanka (Chambersburg, 1978), p. 5.
96
H. B. M. Ilangasinha, Buddhism in Medieval Sri Lanka (Dehli, 1992), pp. 110–
12, 200–18.
97
See Alan Strathern, ‘Os Piedosos and the Mission in India and Sri Lanka in the
1540s’, in the forthcoming proceedings of the D. Joã0 III e o Império conference
(Lisbon and Tomar, 4–8 June, 2002).
216 ALAN STRATHERN
1543, Bhuvanekabahu offered them financial support. He was seek-

ing to establish himself as a patron of the Catholic Church in the
same way that he attended to the religious needs of all the other
communities in his kingdom. But the friars rejected his advances.
What was needed was not the recognition and protection of the king,
but his total inner allegiance. Their relationship never recovered
from that blow.
Yet was Bhuvanekabahu’s tolerance here characteristically Buddh-
ist? A larger question looms up at us: to what extent can we even
say that Buddhism was the foundation of the legitimating ideology
of the Kotte monarchy?98 From a traditionalist perspective these
questions make little sense. One of the strongest features of the
vamsa literature and other Sinhalese texts is the mutual dependence
and inter-twined destinies of the State and the Sasana. Whatever
else he does, the king must be a Buddhist and he must act as the
fountainhead of Buddhism throughout his kingdom. He cannot
simply patronize the Sangha; he must take responsibility for its con-
tinuing vitality and discipline. He ought to govern according to a
strict set of Buddhist ethics, as a dhammaraja, for the karmic destiny
and prosperity of his whole kingdom depend upon it. If he neglects
his duties, if he fails to protect and cultivate Buddhism, if he forsakes
Buddhism altogether, then the ground of his authority will have
slipped from under him.
Tambiah has argued that such ideas form part of a recognizable
Buddhist political ideology that was already sketched in by the earli-
est Buddhist scriptures. There we find an ‘elective and contractual
theory of kingship’ expressed in a myth about the origins of king-
ship.99 He tells us that these principles shaped the history of Thera-
vada kingdoms in South and South-East Asia for hundreds of years.
They precipitated a grandiose, even absolutist, vision of the ruler as
a ‘world conqueror.’ But this vision could hardly be matched by the
powers or virtues of historical kings, who were now vulnerable to
98
The notion of religion as ‘legitimizing’ power, after enjoying much attention
(Smith (ed.), Religion and the Legitimation) has received criticism of late (Pollock,
‘India in the Vernacular Millennium’, p. 44; Blackburn, Buddhist Learning, pp. 103–
4), for reducing culture to an epiphenomenon of politics or the product of conscious
manipulation. One need not fall into either of these traps in order to accept that
much of the ideological apparatus surrounding kingship obviously serves to make
the exercise of power seem acceptable. Nor need this approach fold into a simple-
minded functionalism, given that the means of legitimizing power may also serve
to undermine it.
99
Tambiah, World Conqueror, p. 13.
normative rebellion if they failed to play their role. This is one reason
(among many) for the ‘traditional co-existence of divine kingship
and political insurrection.’100 If we are to take Tambiah seriously
(and his arguments are more nuanced than this brief summary
suggests), then Theravada political thought cannot be easily assimil-
ated to the scheme of the ‘pre-modern state’ in which authority is
legitimated from above.101 For this would fail to capture the sense in
which the king was accountable, answerable to the Sangha or indeed
the whole community of Buddhists over which he presided.102
Tambiah has received a great deal of criticism from scholars who
argue that his model eviscerates the various evolutions and appropri-
ations of Buddhist thought in different times and places.103 Beyond
this trumpeting of diachrony, what might the ‘historicist’ response
to Tambiah be? First, that it is naı̈ve to imagine that the classical
conceptions developed in ancient Pali texts act as blueprints for polit-
ical configurations centuries hence. Second, that if one can find
echoes of these principles in contemporary texts, it does not follow
that they had a life outside of these texts among ‘the people’. Third,
that these ideas were just one element of an exceedingly eclectic
jumble of traditions which were used to elevate the figure of the king
of Kotte. The highly developed brahmanic theories of kingship had
been absorbed, which also contained elaborations of the moral and
cosmic reciprocity between the monarch and their social order.
Equally there were multiple ways of stressing the divinity of the king,
as a bodhisattva or an avatar of Visnu, or his ksatriya caste status and
exalted ancestry.104 These sit uneasily with a ‘contractual’ construc-
tion of kingship. Lastly, it will not do to give the inherited ideologies
100
Ibid., pp. 122, 523.
101
This is a feature of Nissan and Stirrat’s model, in ‘Generation of Communal
Identites’, p. 24
102
For a classic statement of this, see K. Ariyasena, ‘The Concept of the State
as Reflected in the Pali Canon,’ in Kalupahana and Weeratne (eds), Buddhist Philo-
sophy and Culture, p. 105; the Pali texts, ‘again and again insist that political author-
ity becomes valid only on the basis of two factors which go hand-in-hand, namely
the common consent of the people and the observance by the Universal Monarch of
the ten principles’. Kapferer, Legends of People, p. 70, argues that, ‘hierocracy and
democracy exist in complementarity in Buddhist notions of the ideal king.’
103
See the criticisms of Senviratne, Reynolds, Carrithers, Keyes in Contributions
to Indian Sociology, 21 (1987).
104
Nur Yalman, ‘On Royalty, Caste and Temples in Sri Lanka and South India,’
in H. L. Seniviratne, Identity, Consciousness and the Past (Oxford, 1997), although
Yalman makes it clear that caste status was seen as inextricably bound up with
one’s efficacy as a dhammaraja.
218 ALAN STRATHERN
of the past so much power: they will bend before the shifting config-
urations of power, which will always make them anew.
Putting this debate to the test of sixteenth-century evidence is a
complex matter and we can only gesture towards some of the more
important points. As it happens, the historiography of the sixteenth
century has tended to propose that the Buddhist identity and
responsibilities of the king were fundamental to his legitimacy and
that they could only be neglected with disastrous consequences. It is
often overlooked that the Sinhalese-language chronicle, Rajaratnaka-
raya, written in mid-sixteenth-century Kandy, asserts this principle
in a very strongly worded form that echoes the fourteenth-century
Pujavaliya.105 There is also an assumption of continuity with epochs
that have elicited stronger evidence.106 Writers on the Kandyan king-
dom have found many echoes of the principle of contractual or condi-
tional kingship.107 In the abhiseka or ritual consecration of the king,
for example, there was a general summons to the capital in which
representatives of the four castes took turns to admonish the king.
Amongst other texts, the seventeenth-century Rajavaliya also rams
home the dhammaraja imperative.108
105
Rajaratnakaraya, ed. S. De Silva (Colombo, 1930), pp. 5–6; E. Upham (trans.,
ed.), The Mahavánsi, the Rájá-ratnácari, and the Rájávali, forming the Sacred and Historical
Books of Ceylon, 3 vols (London, 1833), pp. 1–4. Given that the Rajaratnakaraya seems
to have been written in the 1540s it may even represent a monastic warning to the
King of Kandy not to flirt with Christianity.
106
See M. B. Ariyapala, Society in Medieval Ceylon (Colombo, 1968), pp. 44–84, for
a merging of classical and medieval sources on kingship. See Obeyesekere, ‘On
Buddhist Identity’, p. 234, on the Pujavaliya.
107
In, for example, the ritual of the ‘mock-election’ which the Englishman John
Davy would describe in the eighteenth century. L. S. Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kindom
of Sri Lanka 1701–1761 (Colombo, 1988), pp. 262–3; Goonewardena, ‘Kingship in
Seventeenth-Century’, p. 26; H. L. Seneviratne, Rituals of The Kandyan State
(Cambridge, 1978), pp. 94–7.
108
Suraveera (ed.), Rajavaliya, begins with an account of the mahasammata, and
portrays subsequent kings as constantly subject to the criticism of their spiritual
advisors or even to immediate retribution for unethical behaviour. It has been
argued that two kings in the twelfth century were denied full royal titles because
they were not Buddhist, (Sirima Kiribamune, ‘Buddhism and Royal Prerogative in
Medieval Sri Lanka’, in Smith, Religion and the Legitimation of Power), while the down-
fall of Vira Alakesvara, the fourteenth-century regent of Kotte, has been atrributed
to his neglect of traditional religious duties, see Ananda S. Kulasiriya, ‘Regional
Independence and Elite Change in the Politics of Fourteenth-Century Sri Lanka’,
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 2 (1976). The case of
the Nayakkar dynasty in eighteenth-century Kandy is much debated, but John Clif-
ford Holt, The Religious World of Kirti Sri: Buddhism, Art, and Politics in Late Medieval
Sri Lanka (New York, 1996) argues that a programme of Buddhist patronage was
fundamental to the dynasty’s legitimacy.
There is a better reason to hold to the traditionalist emphasis on
Buddhist kingship: it appears to be a natural explanation for the
evidence from Portuguese sources that rulers (such as Bhuvaneka-
bahu, the King of Kandy, Dharmapala) held back from conversion
for fear of losing their authority in the eyes of their subjects. This
explanation is partly the product of missionary rhetoric. Queirós’
recreation of Bhuvanekabahu’s reasoning is particularly suspect,
while his account of Dharmapala’s fate is influenced by his master
narrative of spiritual–temporal conflict with the forces of Sitavaka.109
But the broad lines of Queirós’ narrative of this time are supported
by other sources. In contemporary letters form 1552, both the Cham-
berlain of Kotte and an old Portuguese casado make explicit connec-
tions between the political stability of the kingdom and the religious
affiliation of the young prince.110 The legitimacy of Dharmapala’s
rule does seem to have been dealt a grevious blow by his conversion
to Catholicism in 1557. The tooth relic—a concretization of Buddh-
ist legitimacy—was smuggled out of Kotte by bhikkhus fleeing to Sita-
vaka. It would play a central part in the political struggles of the
next few decades. All this is reminiscent of the difficulties faced by
Jayavira, the King of Kandy some years before. He actually
attempted to keep his baptism secret for some time, yet when a
Portuguese expeditionary force arrived he was persuaded to make a
public declaration. In the words of the leader of that expedition,
‘When this was known the country began to revolt.’111 The king then
claimed that his conversion was a sham.
This is not to say that the historicist questions have all been
answered. If the Buddhist identity was so crucial, how do we explain
all those Sri Lankan princes who asked for baptism as part of the
contract of Portuguese vassalage?112 Did they all hope that the Portu-
guese would quietly forget that element of the bargain? Were these
kings simply misunderstanding the significance of Christian conver-
sion, as if it meant simply the addition of a new god to the wordly
pantheon? There were, however, princes who took baptism and were
109
See Strathern, ‘Re-reading Queirós’; Queyroz, Conquest of Ceylon, pp. 238–42,
258–62, 266–7, 335.
110
Afonso de Noronha to Dom João III, Cochin, 27 January 1552, Perniola, pp.
296–8.
111
André de Sousa to Dom João de Castro, Kandy, 27 May 1546, Perniola,
p. 152.
112
See various letters in Perniola, pp. 62 (Prince of the Seven Korales, Chiefs of
Trincomalee); 160 (King of Kandy); 300 (Vidiye Bandara); 211 (King of
Batticaloa).
220 ALAN STRATHERN
educated in the exclusivist implications of this act. The most plaus-

ible explanation for their actions is that they imagined that the rules
of the game were about to change, that the fact of Portuguese mari-
time dominance would create a world of Christians: new ideologies
of legitimization were becoming appropriate. Although Jayavira held
back from open conversion it appears that one or two of his suc-
cessors did not. From the extremely murky history of late sixteenth-
century Kandy we get flashes of the fragile Christian rule of Karyali-
yadde (1552–82, baptised as Dom João circa 1563).113
If we have gone some way to establishing a link between the aban-
donment of pre-existing religious traditions and a loss of legitimacy,
we cannot yet assert that those traditions were ultimately Buddhist.
It is a crucial point that the same issues appear to surround the
conversion of the Hindu rajas of the Malabar coast of India. The case
of the Raja of Tanor, for example, contains all the ingredients of the
story of the King of Kandy.114 The raja likewise dithered over making
his baptism public, eventually did so, suffered from the consequences
and precipitated a major theological debate among the Portuguese—
an early precursor of the Malabar and Chinese rites debates in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—by requesting for his faith to
be kept secret. In the principalities of Malabar conversion to Chris-
tianity often resulted in an immediate loss of caste status. This
appears to offer a strong contrast with the situation in Sri Lanka,
where caste was not given a sacred grounding in this way and does
not appear to have been such an obstacle to the evangelical effort.
But can we assert this so confidently for the Sinhalese kings? The
royal family claimed a caste status held by no others on the island,
one which explicitly invoked Indian origins.115 The historical record
has left us only one description of a letter written by Bhuvanekabahu
that was not addressed to the Portuguese. It was sent to the King of
Kandy in an attempt to pull him back from conversion, and its most
emphatic argument, as reported by a friar, was ‘That he could not
believe that someone of so exalted a caste and so discerning should
wish to dishonour himself and commit so serious a mistake as to
become a Christian, and that from being a king he would become a
113
See Martin Quéré, ‘Christianity in Kandy in the Portuguese Period’, Aquinas
Journal, 4 (1987).
114
Various letters in A. da Silva Rego, Documentação para a História das Missões do
Padroado Português do Oriente, 12 vols (Lisbon, 1947–1958), iii, pp. 407–9; iv,
pp. 284–314, 348–55, 567–8.
115
The kings claimed to be ksatriyas of the Suryavamsa caste.
116
parea [Pariah, one without caste]’. This scrap of evidence is by no
mean sufficient to resolve a debate that involves so much empathetic
speculation about the thought processes of long dead kings. But is
worth reflecting on the fact that it gestures towards the Indic tradi-
tions of royal elevation and ancestry as having immediate con-
sequences for the king’s legitimacy rather than his identity as a
Buddhist dhammaraja.
Epilogue: Some Thoughts on the Later Sixteenth Century
Reflections on the way in which forms of power organize how we

think about ourselves and the world around us have led a productive
life in the recent historiography of Sri Lanka. There has been an
understandable tendency to equate forms of power with the exclusive
hegemony of the state or even the nation-state. It is certainly true
that the most profound impact of the Portuguese derives from their
occupancy of the lowlands after 1598, and that this was in turn
rather less significant than the more systematic dominion of the
British. But we should not ignore the influence of less coherent and
comprehensive (if no less violent) forms of power and the ways in
which ideas can traverse political boundaries and germinate in new
settings. Early Portuguese imperialism was not a force which
respected pre-existing boundaries, or even which operated within the
legalities of its own numerous tratados (treaties), principally because
it was a movement of private enterprise as much as any state-
directed project, and it was an expression of evangelical intentions
as well as a strategy for securing political control.
Or rather it drew its boundaries in a quite different way, one
which was simultaneously rampantly incorporative and clearly hier-
archical. From the very beginning it had established a strong link
between political relationships and religious identity. Dom Manuel
I and Dom João III conceived of their empire as a means of
spreading the faith. Vassal or allied princes should ideally be
Christians and all those who were converted had a claim on their
protection. The ideological distance between East and West was
116
Simão de Coimbra to Dom João de Castro, Goa, 18 December 1546, Perniola,
p. 206, echoed by Nuno Álvares Pereira to Dom João de Castro, Kandy, 29 May
1546, Perniola, p.164, who reports that Bhuvanekabahu could not ‘believe that this
is true of a man of such noble blood, and of a descendent of the solar dynasty of
which there is none more pure in the country.’
222 ALAN STRATHERN
not so vast that this fact could not be readily appreciated by

opportunists in the territories it impinged upon, would-be princes
who desired to upset the diplomatic status quo, or more ordinary
people escaping some perceived tyranny. Cultural (if not ethnic)
identity was also gathered in. It was quickly concluded that reli-
gious conversion could only be really effective if the person was
torn from their previous way of life and furnished with a new
identity, the markers of which were, of course, Portuguese: the
Portuguese cap or carapace, a Portuguese name, Portuguese god-
parents, all the paraphernalia of the Catholic life.117
Bhuvanekabahu’s reign can be seen as the brewing of the storm,
that moment when certain traditions of tolerance—ethnic, reli-
gious—were only just beginning to seem inadquate in the face
of the new forms of power—temporal, spiritual—pursued by the
Portuguese. The changing atmosphere is revealed by the vibrant
and desperate career of Vidiye Bandara.118 As Bhuvanekabahu’s
son-in-law and commander of his military forces he had been a
key figure in the Kotte court which pursued a pro-Portuguese
policy throughout the 1530s and 40s. But when the old king died
in 1551, Bandara refused to comply with the more aggressive
policies of the new Viceroy Afonso de Noronha. He was taken
captive in 1552, and in an unsuccessful attempt to win his release
he converted to Catholicism. The following year his wife engine-
ered his escape from prison. Vidiye Bandara embarked on an
intense military campaign, that whatever its self-aggrandising
aims, was unmistakably informed by a hatred of the Portuguese
and their faith. He apostatized with a vengeance, targeting Chris-
tian Churches, burning them down, martyring Franciscans, and
forcing converts to give up their new identity. This was not (or
not just) a Buddhist campaign. According to the report of one
horrified missionary, the previously Hindu Paravas who had con-
verted were ordered to ‘shave their beard and apply ashes on their
forehead and become pagans again.’119
The storm issued a louder thunder-clap when the young vassal
Dharmapala decided to accept baptism in 1557. The consequences
for his kingdom were immense. It portended an attack on the reli-
117
De Silva, ‘Beyond the Cape’, pp. 110–1.
118
Trindade, Conquista Espiritual, iii, pp. 92–3; Couto, History of Ceylon, pp. 157–
77; Queyroz, Conquest of Ceylon, pp. 306–26.
119
A. Anrriquez to I. Loyola, Punnaikayal, 31 December 1555, Perniola, p. 346
(See also pp. 337, 342).
gious culture of the vast majority of his subjects, a programme of
the demolition of Buddhist and Hindu sacred structures, the banish-
ment of bhikkhus and brahmins. It would be extroardinary if this had
no impact on the way in which the Sinhalese themselves thought
about the world. Nor were the Portuguese influential only as a force
of violence. One of the more neglected aspects of Portuguese expan-
sion, only just beginning to receive examination, is the role of the
renegade.120 Many Portuguese exchanged an unrewarding allegiance
to the Estado da Índia for the service of an Asian prince.121 Queirós
tells us of one Afonço Rasquinho who had joined the Sitavaka camp
and took part in a debate as to whether Mayadunne could take the
title of emperor while Dharmapala (now baptised as Dom João) was
still alive. This man,
. . . having apostatized from the Faith tried to prove that Dom João had
ceased to be King from the time he received baptism, for just as when
Catholic Princes become heretics, they lose the throne or state of which
they were Lords, in the same way if one who is pagan becomes a Christian,
he incurs the same penalty, and with greater reason, because the guilt is
greater: a Law and theology quite worth of a Renegade.122
This is a quite confounding piece of evidence. If we can place any
trust in it and the surrounding narrative of the debate, it would
suggest that Sitavaka did come to employ a rhetoric which asserted
a strong link between a Buddhist identity and royal legitimacy, but
it was a rhetoric that owed as much to the infiltration of Christian
legalisms as to the evocation of a living vamsa ideology.123 Yet Afonço
Rasquinho (if he ever existed), Vidiye Bandara and Dharmapala
were not the harbingers of a coherent new episteme. As the sixteenth
century progresses and we become more reliant on the narrative of
Queriós, so it becomes more urgent to distinguish his late seven-
120
D. Couto, ‘Quelques observations sur les renejats portugais en Asie au xvieme
siecle’, Mare Liberum, 16 (1998).
121
In mid-sixteenth century Sri Lanka few became renegades per se, but many
did attach themselves opportunistically to indigenous courts, for example, Nuno
Álvares Pereira in Kandy, Jorge de Castro at Kotte, and Diogo de Noronha at Sita-
vaka. Queyroz, Conquest of Ceylon, p. 81, tells us of one other renegade, Paul Chainho.
122
Queyroz, Conquest of Ceylon, p. 335.
123
This is a very big ‘if.’ As always with Queirós, our interpretation is moored
between his demonstrably ‘creative’ use of evidence and the fact that he had access
to many sources now lost to us. My hunch is that Queirós presentation of this
whole debate is greatly influenced by the subsequent legal debates surrounding the
legitimacy of Dharmapala’s bequest of Sri Lanka to Philip II. In a sense the whole
Conquista is an attempt to prove the destined rightness of the Portuguese presence
in Sri Lanka.
224 ALAN STRATHERN
teenth-century Portuguese vision of spiritual and temporal unity

from the more subtly changing and diverse worldviews of the
Sinhalese.
These find expression in the kingdom of Kandy that emerged
from Sitavaka domination in 1592.124 Its (re-)founder had spent
the last ten years fighting for the Portuguese, had married a
Portuguese orphan in Goa and baptized as Dom João D’Austria.
As such he represents another means by which Portuguese ideolo-
gists were propagated beyond the boundaries of the state. He was
one of a generation of princely heirs deliberately educated by
Franciscans so that they would carry with them the seeds of
Christianity to whatever position of power they might eventually
assume.125 But when he took the throne of Kandy with the name
Vimaladharmasuriya I, he apostatized and not only pronounced
himself a Buddhist but embarked on an extensive project of
Buddhist patronage and regeneration.126 It is difficult to escape
the conclusion that this signified an attempt to establish a reli-
gious legitimacy to his kingshp when his dynastic claims to it were
so weak. Who knows what his own beliefs were by this stage? The
Dutch ambassador at his court, Joris Van Spilbergen, observed
that the Queen ‘Dona Catharina visits no pagodas. Dom Ioan
[D. João a.k.a Vimaladharmasuriya] does it mostly to please the
Singales.’127 In fact Spilbergen’s diary is fascinating evidence of the
Portuguse style of his court, attended by Portuguese renegades,
decked out in Portuguese and Spanish regalia.128 That aesthetic
persisted through the reign of Senerat and even into that of the
terrible Rajasinha II, who had, it is important to recall, been
educated by friars himself. While Queirós was preparing for his
Conquista, the British captive Robert Knox was concluding his
account of the Kandyan kingdom under Rajasinha’s rule. He fam-
ously wrote,
As they are not bigoted in their own Religion, they care not of what religion
strangers dwell among them are of. They do believe there is a plurality of
124
UPHSL, pp. 146–59.
125
W. L. A. Don Peter, Education in Sri Lanka Under the Portuguese (Colombo, 1978,
pp. 190–2; Quéré, ‘Christianity in Kandy’.
126
Pieris, Portuguese Era, pp. 396–9.
127
K. D. Paranavitana (ed.) Journal of Spilbergen, The First Dutch Envoy to Ceylon,
1602 (Sri Lanka, 1997), p. 44.
128
Paranavitana (ed.), Journal of Spilbergen, pp. 29–31; C. R. de Silva, ‘Algumas
Reflexões sobre o Impacto Português na Religião entre os Singaleses durante os
Séculos XVI e XVII’, Oceanos, 34 (1998), p. 113.
Gods and more than they know of, for all nations have a free liberty to use
and enjoy their own Religion . . 129
In late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Kandy we see,
then, the following: the Portuguese constructed as inherent polit-
ical enemies; the Dutch as political allies; a Lusitanized court
accepting aspects of Portuguese culture as voguish or attractive;
the development of a literature of vigorous anti-Portuguese ethnic
sentiment, a recognition of the importance of Buddhist identity
and discourse of royal legitimacy; a profound toleration of Portug-
uese Catholicism and other religions.130 And all these strands
moved in and out of prominence as the years went by. A dia-
chronic study of possible identities in the Kandyan period would
elicit this kind of interplay.
While the efforts made to oppose the cruder historical narratives
currently in public circulation deserve our admiration, we do have to
be careful not to accept the fundamentalist terms of debate, namely,
that current policy is properly dependent on an interpretation of some-
times very ancient history. It is a depressing fact that political polemic
rarely demands a consistent use of these interpretations. In nationalist
rhetoric ‘our people’ can be triumphant or oppressed, gloriously con-
scious of their rightful place in history or tragically neglectful of it.
Dharma Parakramabahu IX, the first king to become a vassal of the
Portuguese, has received the following nationalist glosses: he has been
seen as a symbol of weakness and a decayed Sinhala civilization in the
face of western aggression; as the first of a long line of hero kings who
was sometimes duped by the dastardly imperialists; as not really king
at all, but a mere fiction of Portuguese texts. One recent article
addressed this point by calling for history to be dehistoricized.131 If we
129
Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon, ed. J. H. O. Paulusz,
2 vols (Dehiwala, 1989), ii, p. 219. On Kandyan toleration see also, K. W. Goone-
wardena, ‘Dutch Policy towards Buddhism in Sri Lanka: Some Aspects of its Impact:
c. 1640–1740’, in K. M. de Silva et. al. (eds), Asian Panorama: Essays in Asian History
Past and Present (New Delhi, 1990).
130
These do not ‘sum up’ Kandyan ‘culture’, but merely gesture to some of its
apparently incoherent or contingent strands. For example, one has to balance
Knox’s comments on religious tolerance with later examples of anti-Saivite literat-
ure and anti-Catholic actions. Incidentally, one key fact not digested here is the
conversion of Rajasinha I to Hinduism and his persecution of Buddhism in the late
1580s. Vimaladharmasuriya’s return to Buddhism may have derived from an obser-
vation of what befell Rajasinha as a non-Buddhist monarch.
131
David Scott, ‘Dehistoricising History’, in Jeganathan and Ismail (eds), Unmak-
ing the Nation, ultimately makes the same point about divorcing current policy from
arguments about the past, but flags it with this unhelpful phrase.
226 ALAN STRATHERN
want an ideal to pursue, it is better, less opaque, more frutiful—if more

banal—to say that politics should be dehistoricized, and of course, vice
versa.132
132
There is an important sense in which every account of the past is ‘political.’
It is equally difficult to deny that political agendas can be pursued with greater or
lesser sensitivity to the integrity of historical evidence.

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Modern Asian Studies 38, 1 (2004), pp. 190–226.

 2004 Cambridge University Press

Theoretical Approaches to Sri Lankan History

Clare Hall, University of Cambridge

settlers, ofﬁcials and missionaries, and the attentions of Portuguese

entative, prescriptive rather than descriptive. Arguably, there was no

Throughout the sixteenth century, the kings of Kotte considered

cipation or commemoration of the embassy that Bhuvanekabahu

ies, Benedict Anderson, Stanley Tambiah, and Burton Stein. It is

the highland territories? To create, in effect, a new sub-kingdom, by

of the inequalities of power and it was a principle to which Bhuva-

selves as militiamen at Bhuvanekabahu’s command.48 But such

Kotte was clearly a state-formation that incorporated many ethnic

that if these texts do display ethnic sentiment, it must have been

the Portuguese and Dutch in the ‘Kandyan period’ (1590s–1815),

lectual centres of Tamil India exerted a great cultural pull, trans-

to neighbouring academic disciplines. Accounts of Bhuvanekabahu’s

In a skilful negotiation of traditionalist and historicist impulses, John

1543, Bhuvanekabahu offered them ﬁnancial support. He was seek-

educated in the exclusivist implications of this act. The most plaus-

Epilogue: Some Thoughts on the Later Sixteenth Century

Reﬂections on the way in which forms of power organize how we

not so vast that this fact could not be readily appreciated by

teenth-century Portuguese vision of spiritual and temporal unity

want an ideal to pursue, it is better, less opaque, more frutiful—if more

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