Why the last king of Kandy had to spend his final years in an Indian fort

On a warm February morning in 1816, large crowds gathered by the seaside in Pulicat, north of Madras. Word had spread in the town that the king of Kandy was arriving on a ship along with his royal entourage. The crowds anticipated a spectacle and a spectacle is what they got.

Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, who had spent the month-long journey from Colombo on board the HMS Cornwallis, mostly just wearing a sarong, decided to dress in full regalia before getting off the ship in India.

“It would be difficult to describe this dress,” William Granville, a British civil servant who was tasked with looking after Sri Vikrama, wrote. “He wore enormously white trousers of satin striped yellow, green and red, with a multitude of gold buttons down their outward seams from the hip to the ankle. A white satin waistcoat richly embroidered with gold flowers, a gold band encircled the edge round the neck. The sleeves were short, widely puffed and slashed after the Spanish fashion.”

Sri Vikrama had been the last holdout against European imperialism in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon. But once the British fully occupied the island, he was deposed and exiled to India.

When he stepped off the HMS Cornwallis, Sri Vikrama “wore a wide point lace ruff, round his neck, and beneath it a most beautiful lace tippet, starched which hung in the shape of a semi-circle down his back and over his shoulders,” Granville continued. “His head was adorned with a white satin Kandyan cap. The top of his cap rose like a cone, and was surmounted by a small spire, to which were attached several horizontal gold crosses, one above another, and from the points of each cross hung some beautiful gems, rubies, emeralds and sapphires.”

The crowd watched in admiration as the bejewelled king and his royal entourage of 60 people came on to the shore. Thousands rushed to pay homage. “One cannot fully understand the enthusiasm of the crowds, unless we recognise that by the 1800s under Lord Wellesley’s campaigns much of South India fell under British control or hegemony and hence the public adulation of the captive king who represented that political tragedy in a related nation with historical ties and marriage alliances with Telugu and Tamil peoples,” Gananath Obeyesekere, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, wrote in his book The Doomed King: A Requiem For Sri Vikrama Rajasinha.

Starting from 1816, the 35-year-old king, the last sovereign of the kingdom of Kandy, spent 17 years in exile in Vellore Fort. This was a steep fall for a man who reigned over vast tracts of lush, fertile land and was responsible for the construction of the Octagonal Pavillion of the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, as well as the city’s central lake.

Fall of Kandy

“The circumstances that produced the deposition of Sri Vikrama Rajasinha were both local and global,” Australian historian Robert Aldridge wrote in the essay Out of Ceylon: The Exile of the Last King of Kandy. “In Ceylon, the kingdom of Kandy – several other kingdoms had disappeared in the wake of the Portuguese invasion – was a Buddhist polity that traced its ancestry back for two and a half millennia on an island with a rich cultural past evidenced by the archaeological sites at the earlier capitals of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa.”

Sri Vikrama was the last of the four kings of the Nayakkar Dynasty. “In 1739, the last Sinhalese king of Kandy died without an heir; the new king, Vijaya Rajasinha, his brother-in-law, began the Nayakkar dynasty,” Aldridge wrote. “The Nayaks originally came from Madurai, in southern India, and there is considerable historiographical debate about the degree to which the new rulers were indigenized in Kandy.”

The Nayak rulers spoke Tamil and Telugu and were Shaivites, but on the island, they were noted for fulfilling their responsibilities as defenders of Buddhism.

“As far as Sri Vikrama was concerned, as with all Lankan kings, consecration implied minimally the following features: first, consecration rites with Buddhist monks chanting pirit were accompanied or followed by the astrological calculations of Brahmin priests or purohitas,” wrote Obeyesekere.

By the time of Sri Vikrama’s consecration in 1798, a large part of the island had been under European occupation, first by the Portuguese, then the Dutch and finally the British.

“Although an unrealistic aspiration, Sri Lankan kings, from the time of European invasions beginning in 1506, refused to recognise the legitimacy of the foreign conquest of the island, who, from their viewpoint, were on sufferance,” Obeyesekere said.

The British East India Company took over the Dutch possessions on the island by the end of the 18th century and appointed a British governor. With their sights set on the Kandyan kingdom, the new occupiers waged a war on it in 1803 and made their first attempt at deposing Sri Vikrama. Fortunately for him, they made no meaningful gains in the war.

The next decade was filled with tensions between the Kandyan kingdom and the British, who looked to take advantage of internal political fissures in the kingdom.

“Sri Vikrama Rajasinha had already alienated many of the Sinhalese chiefs, limiting their powers and the revenues they received, while the influence of his ‘Malabar’ relatives had grown ever greater at court,” Aldridge added. “The sangha had also been offended by royal actions, including plans to shift several temples and their monastic communities outside Kandy, urbanistic projects seen as an effort architecturally to ‘Hinduize’ the capital.”

In 1811, a plot was hatched by Pilima Talawe, the Kandyan chief minister and one-time mentor of Sri Vikrama, to assassinate the king. When it failed, Talawe was executed and his nephew Ehelepola appointed the chief minister. It turned out Ehelepola too eyed the crown and plotted to assassinate the king. When this plan failed as well, he fled Kandy into British territory. Sri Vikrama took revenge on the chief minister by executing his wife and three children.

This killing was used as one of the excuses by the British to stage a full-scale invasion of the kingdom in 1815 in what is called the Second Kandyan War. Fought mainly with Indian soldiers, the war lasted just 40 days.

The city of Kandy fell to the British in February 1815. “They arrived to find that the king had fled his capital, but soon they captured him not far away,” Aldridge wrote. “Hidden in a village house with two of his queens, he was taken captive on 18 February 1815 by a group of Ceylonese, led by one of the rebel noblemen, with only a minor scuffle – the queens suffered some injury when their earrings were torn off by irregulars, though the king faced the distinct possibility of greater harm, as he was bound with vines and dragged across a meadow. Senior British figures propitiously arrived and tried to restore order; they gave some Madeira to the king and claret to the queens to lift their spirits.”

Imprisonment and exile

Kandy was annexed to the Crown territories under an agreement with ministers from the kingdom in what is called the Kandyan Convention of 1815.

Sri Vikrama and his family were taken to a large house in Colombo that was specially fitted to accommodate them. There they lived in comfort for a year before the final decision was made to expel them to Vellore.

Sri Vikrama was put on the HMS Cornwallis on January 24, 1816, for Pulicat. The small cabin and the lack of privacy on the ship upset the deposed king, who had no idea what awaited him in the same fort in India where Tipu Sultan’s sons were imprisoned at one time. “Nevertheless, it is striking that although in deep distress at his fate during the long voyage to Madras he did manage to maintain his good humour and composure for most of the trip, in spite of moods of depression and the ups and downs of his emotions,” Obeyesekere added.

After arriving in Pulicat, the entourage was moved to Vellore. The family was given a privy purse from Ceylon and had fairly decent accommodation in Vellore Fort. The authorities in the fort were instructed by General Robert Brownrigg, governor of Ceylon, to treat the deposed king as a prisoner of war, “without splendour or honours”, with the caveat that “he should live in comfort though in perfect retirement”.

Sri Vikrama lived a mostly uneventful life in Vellore for 17 years.

“Any hopes of return faded, if he had ever, unrealistically, nursed such aspirations,” Aldridge added. “He celebrated the coming-of-age of his daughters and the birth of a son, mourned the death of his mother, quarrelled with his relatives, and entreated the British for various comforts.”

He died of complications related to dropsy (malfunction of the digestive power of the liver) at the age of 52 in January 1832. Two years later, most of the exiles – with the exception of the king’s son and close family – were allowed to return to Ceylon. The king’s descendants continued to receive pension, first from the British authorities and later from the government of independent Ceylon until the 1960s.

Sri Vikrama Rajasinha’s legacy is deeply contested in Sri Lanka with several contradictory accounts of his reign. Some see him as a benevolent ruler and some as a tyrant. Gananath Obeyesekere’s scholarly book, which analyses British and Sinhalese sources, gives a much clearer picture of the complicated man.

The Kandyan ruler’s fate as an exile far away from his kingdom was shared later by the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, who was forced to live out his life in Rangoon, and Burma’s last king Theebaw Min, who spent the last three decades of his life in Ratnagiri.

Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His Twitter handle is @ajaykamalakaran.