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The Sri Lanka Podcast

The Quest for Sri Lanka’s Demon Queen

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

So wrote Lewis Carroll in 1871 – wise words for anyone coming to terms with the very earliest stories and places associated with Sri Lanka’s very first steps as a nation.

Kuveni and Vijaya.

They were the pin-up lovers of their generation, the Bonnie and Clyde, Tristan and Isolde, Tarzan, and Jane of 543 BCE. Only with an unorthodox passion - more akin to Dido and Aneas, with the queen immolating herself.

Or Medea plunged into full scale murder after a disastrous encounter with Jason and the Golden Fleece. Vijaya and Kuveni, the hallucinogenic David and Victoria Beckham, are the Sri Lankan lovers who dare not speak their name.

Public roads, management consultants, radio celebrities, hospitals; even bags of branded cement: it is hard to find a corner of Sri Lanka that is not branded “Vijaya,” in besotted memory of the country’s founding king and paterfamilias, Prince Vijaya. Much harder, indeed impossible, is to find similarly smitten organisations or people who bear the name “Kuveni,” Prince Vijaya’s first wife.

Coming from a nation fond of boasting the modern world’s first female head of state, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, in 1960, this seems an inexplicable and monumental omission. But delve a little further and it becomes exactingly clear why Kuveni, the lost queen of the isle of rubies, is the queen the country is too frightened to properly acknowledge.

For Kuveni was not simply a wife and weaver of cloth, a mother, lover, and queen - but also a demon, a metamorphoser, an outcast, an avenging fury, suicide, traitor, murderess, ghost, and mistress of deception. A descendant of gods, she is also a goddess to the country’s still living aboriginal peoples. For anyone, still less a queen, that’s more than enough baggage to weigh down one’s reputation.

But the baggage need not weigh down your journey for the locations on the island were you are likely to draw close to her are few and scattered. If taking in important sites, monuments, and attractions at a rate of (say) half a dozen a day; or perhaps just one and half a day, is an important measure of tolerable success, then it would be best to abandon the search for Kuvani immediately. She is not, thankfully, made to measure for orthodox sightseeing, still less “Oh Ah!” tours. She is more like a Slender Loris or Serendib Scops Owl, rare, almost nocturnal, secretive, whose sightings are best made for the journey, not the destination. Yet, in following her wreathlike footsteps, which are still, from time to time, just about discernible in certain parts of the island, one puts together not just a travel schedule like no other; but one that takes you into the secret heart of the country itself, past, present, future.

Much of what we know about Kuveni and her husband, Vijaya, comes from two of three incomparable ancient chronicles (Dipavaṃsa Mahavamsa, and Culavamsa) written from the third century CE onwards.

Laying a shadowy trail of events and people through what would otherwise be a historical vacuum, they riotously mix up man, god and magic with morality, history, and myth.

Historians naturally debate their factual accuracy, in which the doings of men and kings take a poor second place to that of monks and Lord Buddha, but this is to miss the point.

No country, after all, is simply the sum total of its facts. It is also – and much more importantly - fattened up, like old style Fois gras, on all that its people believe too. And that is why the sorrowful and violent tale of Prince Vijaya, and his demon queen, so shockingly illuminates an island that, as Romesh Gunesekera put it, “everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.”

“In Sri Lanka,” notes Michael Ondaatje, “a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts;” and, in the tale of Vijaya and Kuveni, the polar opposite of what is believed, is the more likely truth. Viyaja, whose alter ego may well have most recently emerged on The Dick Van Dyke Show, was ever one to say “That ain't no lady. That's my wife.” For monster though Kuveni seems to be, one hardly needs the helpful filter of modern feminism to realise that she was in fact an iconic victim of men; and most heartening of all, a victim who bit back with unrestrained fury.

Had a man behaved like her, it would have generated awe-stuck changing room chatter, eager to understand, sympathise with, even emulate. But not a woman. Kuveni was to confound and challenge all ancient ideas of womanhood; and go on challenging them to this day.

Keep this in mind as you set out to first encounter Viyaja, recreating a moment that happened well over two thousands five hundred years ago. The path, though gossamer thin, still sustains a few sites, frail as spider’s web.

The first of these is some 180 kilometres from Colombo. A gentle curving cape juts out from a mountain range in the Wilpattu National Park and into the northern entrance to the Puttalam Lagoon. If you were a ship approaching it from the Laccadive Sea you would slide towards it as if it were a lighthouse pointing your tiny, tired vessel into the vast, safe, shallow waters of the lagoon. This is Kudiramalai, said to have been the original site of Tambapanni, the ancient kingdom and port founded by Prince Vijaya.

Given all that was to come, this unremarkable shore enjoys a myth of mocking irony. A warrior queen, Alli Rani, and her Amazonian army, lived here exploiting and exporting its pearls until a great flood buried her place under the waves and turned the enclosed lake into a lagoon.

And this is what Prince Vijaya found, pulling his boats onto a beach of reddish-brown sand – “Tamba” meaning Copper; or as it was soon and later known: Tambapanni. It was the perfect spot for a settlement, commanding the access to a great natural harbour opening into the Gulf of Mannar and an almost inexhaustible supply of pearl oysters.

For centuries it was a key strategic port for island arrivals, even later welcoming Annius Placamus, one of the Roman Emperor Claudius’ tax collectors. Pliny refers to the place, naming it as the “Hipporus” harbour with a related town on a nearby hill - presumably Kudiramalai Mountain, patrolled, and still patrolled by white-bellied sea eagles.

“Horse Mountain,” is another alternative name for Kudiramalai and for centuries, amidst the ruins of an ancient temple, the ruins of a massive horse and man statue stood on the cliffs. Made of brick, stone, and coral, it is estimated to have been at least 35 feet high, its front legs raised, its rider clinging to reins, bearing a lantern to guide ships into the port. Locals still point to some modest ruins, all that remains, they say of the horse and rider. And continually, raked by high waves and surf, broken bricks, pottery, and building materials, wash up on the shore.

This, then, is all that remains of Sri Lanka’s first kingdom, the modest, hard-fought-for settlement that became the nucleus of the Singhala nation, but was to remain the kingdom forever denied to Kuveni. And along the coast, encouraged by their leader, Vijiya’s lieutenants set up allied settlements - although all that remains are their names in the Chronicles: Upatissagama, Ujjeni, Uruvela, Vijita, towns or cities that once floated erratically on maps of the north...

The Quest for Sri Lanka’s Demon Queen

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