Secret Kandy Part 1 | Down City Streets

Kandy’s deeper history is a byzantine tale of kings, caste, money, and religion. Here, history is not dead; not even sleeping or dazed. It is instead ever on the lookout. So what should you look out for?

Proper guidebooks to Kandy lay out, in fine anatomical detail, the history, economy, and topography of the place, its sites and services listed in a proper, functioning order. Sadly, this book does not do that. It is an improper guide, the documentation of a personal quest (sometimes a struggle) to understand a little of what really makes Kandy, Kandy; what is most especially worth seeing; and why.

Kandy’s inimitable reputation belies the fact that the city is barely 500 years old, an adolescent in Sri Lankan terms, given that the country’s recorded history goes back with stylish ease for at least 2,500 years. Not that anyone dares tell Kandyites this particular fact. Kandy regards itself – and to be fair, is remarkably considered by much of the rest of the country – as Sri Lanka’s genuine soul. It's heart.

This characteristic is not something acquired merely because it houses the island’s most precious possession – the tooth of Lord Buddha. It is also due to the city’s record of withstanding wave after wave of colonial invasions. Kandy was the last island kingdom to fall to foreigners. By the time of its formal capture, in 1815, it had already resisted and survived over 300 years of colonial rule that had engulfed the rest of the island. For over 3 centuries, the kingdom held firm. In doing so, it was able to foster, protect, and develop the distinctive Singhala culture that had once permeated the entire island. It kept the light burning.

But it was ever a culture under threat. From the arrival of the first European soldiers, administrators, priests, businessmen and planters in 1505, the country’s priorities changed radically. Everything became secondary to making money – first from cinnamon and other spices; then from coffee and tea.

No one has yet attempted to put a value on the goods the colonists shipped from the island. Still, given that 90% of the world’s cinnamon came from here, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the money Sri Lanka generated for its occupiers was significant. Very big. And, the author of a recent book on crooks and thieves remarked: “all money corrupts, and big money corrupts bigly.”

As the rest of the country was turned into a cinnamon-producing farm, Kandy stood out as a Sinhalese citadel, offering shelter to the rest of the country for all but the 133 years the British occupied it. This, more than anything else, is what makes Kandy so very important across the island. In a multicultural country still working out how best to present itself, this particular legacy remains essential.

It is, all the same, a city that demands your full attention, if you are ever to get beneath its interminable congestion; edifices inspired by recent Soviet style planning decisions; and traffic plans that donkeys could better. As stressed pedestrians pirouette on impossibly narrow pavements, cars hoot past on wide roads, once shaded by mara trees – before health and safety got to work. If ever there is a city weeping for love and attention, for common sense and courteous urban planning, it is Kandy. It is a city that has fallen victim to the grim concerns of business, bureaucrats, traffic warlords, and the unfulfilled promises of passing politicians.

Nor is it a mecca for hardened shoppers. This most addictive of modern hobbies may have replaced religion in most other countries, but here, in this most religious of cities, it takes a back seat. Niche boutiques are few, though there is no shortage of shops stocked with the essentials. An old bazaar, the Kandy Bazaar, sells everything from bananas to bags, batiks to bangles. Kandy City Centre, a ten-storey mall in the city centre built in an almost inoffensive architectural style, offers a more sophisticated range of items. Bucking the trend is Waruna’s Antique Shop, a cavernous Aladdin’s Cave of marvellous discoveries, its shelves and drawers stuffed with ancient flags, wood carvings, paintings, jewellery, and curios.

And then there is the very Sri Lankan approach to specialised products. Every so often, as you travel the island, you hit upon a village dedicated to the obsessive production of just one item. There is one that only does large ceramic pots. Another is lined with cane weavers. One, more perilously, is devoted to the creation of fireworks. Down south is one for moonstones; another for masks. And in Pilimathalawa, next to Kandy, is one dedicated to brass and copper. The ribbon village of shops and workshops keeps alive an expertise that goes back to the kings of Kandy, for whom they turned out bowls, ornaments, religious objects, and body decorations. Three hundred years later, the craftsman remains, melting and moulding, designing and decorating, stamping and sealing, engraving and polishing.

A surer path to satisfaction is to park your purse and your cravings for new clothes, shoes, phone accessories, or mass-produced ornaments and head to Kandy’s Royal Bar & Hotel. This old walawwa is typical of many of the buildings that haunt the city’s tiny, crowded streets, betraying, with hints of bashful sorrow, the remaining traces of striking 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century vernacular architecture.

Walauwas – or mansions are they are called in the West – abound in the city, as Kandyan nobles set up their family residences as close to the royal palace as possible. Proximity is power - but after the king was deposed, this particular force lost its draw, and their city address became of diminishing importance.

The city’s greatest walauwe is now The Queen’s Hotel. It was first turned into a mansion for the British Governors, before becoming the hotel equivalent of an ageing maiden aunt, chasing an elusive restoration as an improvised Jane Austen bride might a suitor. It’s an unequalled site, on a corner overlooking both the temple, the lake, and the palace, that makes you want to go round and round the block to take it all in properly.

Many other such buildings hide down other city streets, with balconies and verandas, screened windows, and opaque courtyards, squirrelled away behind shop hoardings that have yet to be bettered anywhere on the island for their chronic ugliness. Kandy is nothing if not the most secretive of cities. Its wonders reveal themselves best to those who look most.

“Secrets,” noted James Joyce, “silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.” But Kandy’s many secrets, held by old families in lofty mansions high above the city, in the unspoken concerns of the people who walk its streets, may be weary now, but they are most unwilling ever to be dethroned. Like threads you pick at, they unwind from way, way back - to explain almost everything. Here, history is not dead; not even sleeping or dazed. It is instead ever on the lookout.

Before you even get to the city’s colonial tribulations, still less its modern-day ones, its deeper history is a still more byzantine tale of competing plot lines in which kings, caste, money, and religion, complete with such complexity as to make the Human Genome Project look like a walk in the park.

Its first line of kings from the Siri Sanga Bo family wrested the kingdom’s independence from an older Sri Lankan kingdom. But beset by forcible catholic conversions, fever, and internal strife, they petered out, exhausted and baffled, in 1609, barely a hundred years later.

Its subsequent kings, the Dinajara, descended from an aristocratic hill-country family. During this dynasty’s 150-year rule, the kingdom entered into what doctors sometimes refer to as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), the kings having to look defensively outwards against the encroaching colonists as well as inwards as a never-ending line of rebel princes, nobles, dissatisfied monks, put-upon peasants and angry matriarchs forced a spaghetti of shifting alliances that are all but impossible to track clearly. That it has survived this long was a remarkable achievement in itself.

Its last kings, the Nayakars, reigned for only 76 years. In a sense, they never really stood much of a chance. Coming from India, their rule was forever undermined by the unceasing power struggle they faced against the older established interests of the monks and nobles they inherited with their new kingdom.

And yet, despite all this, the kingdom survived for 300 years, building out as an elegant capital in a web of tight streets around a vast new lake, surrounded by hills. It is said that nearly 500 historical buildings hide in plain sight along city streets that still follow the old medieval grid that first encompassed the capital.

To have progressed from jungle to a city with quite so many significant buildings in barely 300 years was remarkable. For most of Sri Lanka’s recorded history, progress itself, and all that came with it – writing, religion, architecture, war, kingdoms, trade - happened on its coastline and across the dry northern plains of the island.  The centre – the highlands, with Kandy at its belly - was merely part of an impenetrable and economically irrelevant mass of mountains and moors. It was a proper place from which to capture elephants, for hunting, and for a few aspects of horticulture. But that was about it.

It took Sri Lanka’s rulers 19 centuries before they bothered to seriously tame and colonise the interior, the moment occurring around 1357, when one of the descendants of the refugee kings of the Polonnaruwa kingdom established a new, smaller kingdom in Dambadeniya, headquartered for a while in Kurunegala. This brought Kandy to within reach. Within about a hundred years, the city gained its first king, when Vikramabahu declared UDI, transforming his governorship of the region and breaking from the control of his liege cousin, the Kotte king, around 1469.

Picture it, from that period to the kingdom’s fall in 1815, the city locked purposefully in a tight valley surrounded by hills, and those themselves surrounded by taller mountains. It was a political and geographical arrangement that certainly kept the kingdom safe. But in another sense, it was also like sending itself to jail, the city taking on some of those aspects that gated communities have today: insular, argumentative, with everyone knowing everything about one another.

As the aristocratic classes blossomed, building their walauwe houses cheek by jowl close to the royal place, it became a petri dish for secrets and political rivalries, magnified many times over by the absence of any greater context than what was going on in the temple and palace. Hardly surprising, then, that secrets remain so profoundly embedded in the city’s DNA.

“Democratic socialist republic”, as Sri Lanka states in its current documentation, it is also an oligarchy. Of the 100 or so families that dominate politics, administration, and business, almost half either come from Kandy or are related to such prominent Kandyan families as the Molligodas, Madugalles, Ehelepolas, Ratwattes, Weerasekeras, Pieris, and include ministers, MNPs, judges, generals, and such presidents as Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Many of those who can’t claim such links still own homes in these areas.

Nearly all of the city’s stunning and historic buildings hide down scruffy streets as enigmatic as the families who built them. Waluwa-spotting is a rewarding game to play in the town, though it is easier to detect public buildings  - the wonderful, tormented art deco railway station, for example, Ehelepola Walauwa, now a wreck; the 1920 Post Office; the  Dunuwille Walawwa, now the headquarters of the Kandy Municipal Council; or Giragama Walauwa, now given over to shops.

A notable public building is the Kataragama Devalaya, a Hindu shrine built by an 18th-century Buddhist king. It is a perfect example of a rare surviving treasure – its architecture enlivened by the most intricate carvings, and colours chosen to banish grey forever. Still more dazzling is the nearby Pillaiyar Kovil, a Hindu temple dedicated to Ganesh, the elephant-headed son of Siva, and built by a Buddhist king for his Tamil Dobhi. Its Muslim equivalent is the arresting Red Mosque, built around 100 years ago with a candy-striped façade in reds and whites.

Spotting hidden wonders like these is like playing hide-and-seek with a particularly naughty child. You eventually get the hang of it. It is like coming out of a major cataract operation and seeing the world as it once was. Kandy has plenty of beauty to reveal to the patient's eye.

Up and alongside the Royal Palace is an antique road of street lawyers and notaries, their signs embossed with their professional achievements, and the chunky-as-chutney neo-classical mansion, now called the President's Pavilion, which waits, Miss Haversham-like, for the elusive head of state to drop by. Built in the late eighteenth century and embellished with a trowel in the nineteenth, it is a two-storey edifice with nine bays, sporting balustraded parapets and looking out over lawns and gardens forbidden to the public and rarely seen by anyone else.

More accessible by far and just down from this ghostly palace is Kandy’s central Anglican Church, the Church of St Paul. The church’s terracotta bricks - now weathered to a red-ochre hue – have withstood more than the most expected tests of time. Just two years after its completion, it weathered the shattering 1848 Matale Rebellion – and then all the succeeding wars and insurrections that beset the island, protected by vast gates of wrought iron fabricated far away in Edwardian England. Inside the dimly lit church is a majestic pipe organ donated by Muslim businessmen from Bradford, a silver-gilt communion set gifted by the King of England, and a blazing 1874 stained glass window of the Crucifixion, the Ascension, the Angel in the Tomb, and the Nativity, the gift of a planter’s widow.

The church itself was built in 1846. This, it turned out, was just two years before one of the most popular hymns in the Anglian songbook, Hymns Ancient & Modern, was first published. “All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all,” was one of the Anglican faith’s catchiest songs, written by Mrs Cecil Alexander for “Hymns for Little Children,” and published in that most revolutionary of years – 1848. Its accompanying music – the sort that, once in your head, never leaves it- propelled this modest number to worldwide fame, the score written by William Monk, better remembered for “Abide with Me.”  So it is perhaps of little real surprise to come across Monk’s own grandson laid out in enteral rest in the graveyard adjacent to St Paul’s.

The British Garrison Cemetery, created in 1817 - two years after the formal annexation of Kandy – is typical of many crumbling imperial graveyards found across Asia, their stones spelling out, in the most personal of ways, the story and behaviours of the British occupiers. This one is a home to almost two hundred souls, laid out like crazy paving, including John Robertson, the last European to be killed by a wild elephant in Ceylon, and the colonial ruler, Sir John D’Oyly, whose penchant for sarongs and beards made him the country’s first foreign hippie. A visiting Englishman wrote that “a stranger visiting this spot would be charmed at the magnificent scenery which surrounds it. In this lonely spot lie many hundreds of kindly Scots, who cut off in the very prime and vigour of their manhood, sleep the sleep which knows no waking, under the rank weeds and wiry grasses which cover their neglected graves. Many a sad tale of hardship, agony, and pain, could the tenants of these nameless graves tell, were they permitted to speak.”

In equal sorrow - if not the same disorder - lie two hundred of the eighty-five million victims of World War Two, interred in perfect order at the flawlessly maintained Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery. Ceylon escaped much of the horrors of that conflict, but rather eccentrically found itself the location of Southeast Asia Command, set up in Kandy under Lord Mountbatten to be in overall charge of Allied operations.

That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbirck at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.