The queen lies buried in Rockhill estate

Now that the city of Kegalle in Sathara Korale has come into the spotlight as the most recent venue of Lanka’s independence celebrations, it may be not irrelevant to write on one of its most famous citizens who lived some 500-600 years ago. Of course, she did not spend her whole life there. Perhaps it may be correct to say that she came there “to die”. In fact in her 33 or 35 years of Life, she, the famous Dona Catherina owned many addresses in the island.

First Kandy, then Mannar (some ascribe to her even a short stint in Jaffna Court) and again back to Kandy and then last, Kegalle. Converted and subject to a spell of westernisation under Portuguese tutelage, strangely she came to Kegalle to consult a Veda Mahaththaya who resided in Hettimulla,a village that still thrives under the same name. defying a time passage of 500-600 years.

Ill health plagued her often. Of course she withstood a sickness that killed most of the ship in crew. Her parents succumbed to it leaving her orphaned. They were fleeing the wrath of a rival in that maze of turbulent Kandyan politics, the Portuguese throwing in their share. It was the age of land grabbing by Western imperialists, pioneered at this time by an Iberian race entrusted by the Pope to catch as many into Christ’s fold. They had succeeded in the conversion of the heir to the kingdom of Kotte, now eyeing next the Kandyan kingdom and its ruler and family. The bait was the religion and many were in the fray. Tikiri Kumaru Rajasinghe, himself turned a Sailvite was all ready to grab the Kandyan kingdom whose ruler was planning and plotting to get Portuguese aid to ward him off. Plans miscarried and the reigning king fled with his family in a ship offered by the “Wild West” to take refuge in Mannar, already fallen to them. But only the little princess could land there for on the way an attack of small pox killed the rest of the family. That is how the tiny princess became a ward of the invader.

Convent

Earlier named Kusumasana Devi, she was baptised under a new name Dona Catherina and began to study in a convent in Mannar already dotted with churches and chapels. She was a priceless treasure to her guardians as the heiress to the Kandyan throne. Now she comes of age and her guardians carry her back to Kandy to be enthroned. But again things go awry and she is left in the hands of king Vimala Dharmasuriya who himself owns to a very colourful history. At the battle of Danthure, he kidnaps her.

She becomes his wife at the mere age of 11 or 12 and child bearing begins almost soon after making her a mother of many by her thirties. The constant child bearing plus the change of climate from that of Mannar to the cold climes of the highlands has a say on her health.

Climate

While on a royal trip she finds the climate of Kegalle drier than that of Kandy and also a discovery is made that her physician lives close by at Hettimulla. A whim obsesses her and her husband, Senerat (who marries her after the untimely death of king Vimala Dharma Surya) gives into this whim and she moves to the palace at Welimannathota built exclusively for her in the proximity of Kegalle. Years pass by.

Charmed by this tale of the princess, a group of us proceed years back, to Rockhill Estate where this place had been. But no palace is visible. Traffic rolls on the road below while a river too rumbles along.

A villager becomes talkative. “It is that river that gives the village its name. Sand is measured at the ferry. And hence Welimanna”.

“And the queen’s palace? What happens to it?”

“It lies buried there. Go up and see. A housing scheme has been built over it now. No trace of the royal family. Even the Bhikkhu in the Buddhist temple is barred from the place though the queen was non–Buddhist. In the hollow of a nearby tree a lamp was lit till recent times to honour her god. No one knows who lit it ”

We trek up, just masses of curiosity.

Silence

“Don’t take photos” A command breaks the silence of the afternoon. There was an unmistakable air of defiance, even aggression on the faces of those who had hastily come out of their houses. Then a bulky male almost bulldozed into our group.

Well. Who wants to be murdered on a desolate hill where has sprouted a housing scheme and may be, just for a lost or losing cause? We put the cameras discreetly into our handbags and withdraw.

Writers do have a tendency to exaggerate. But not in the case of this queen. In her short life of 33 or 35 years, her life owned all the components to qualify her for the title, Lanka’s queen of tragedy. Orphaned in early childhood by a political episode that rid her father of the throne of "Kandea", adopted by a race then in vicious grips with her race making her whole life a cultural and religious misadventure, led to head a campaign against the city of her birth, getting kidnapped by an adventurer who marries her at the young age of 12 or so, his sudden death leaving her a widow in her early 20s, getting forcibly wedded to an ex-Bhikkhu, her eldest son by the former king dying through his wiles to make the son by him heir to Kandy. That is the last straw to break the camel’s back. She turns hysterical, tears her hair, reverts to the language of her adopted race and curses in it her second husband as she dies. What more does any woman or any queen of any race in the world need for that undesirable title?

Threats

Back from the late 16th Century and early 17th C when all these events were orchestrated to our own times when we had timidly succumbed to the threats of those who were now living on top of the palace ruins. They were not new to them, their stares and threats seemed practised. Yes. They were probably used to it for the settlement has been made on land once about to be named crown land and as an archaeological preserve. But private interests had prevailed.

The palace built on it had been called the Welimannathota Palace. Welimannathota (name still in usage), where river sand was measured had beeen a popular place in the area 400-600 years back and forded a tributary of the Ma Oya that runs through Hatara Korale. Spilbergen’s Diary translated by Dr.K.D. Paranavithana gives an account of the life in the Kandy palace where the royal family is portrayed as very loving, the pair itself endearing despite the kidnapping. But this phase of the queen’s life is cut short by the king’s sudden death. The col d climes of the highlands had not been favourable to the queen brought up by the Portuguese in a mini palace in the hot climate of coastal Mannar making her fall ill often. Aware of her heirship to the Kandyan throne they bided their time. But things turned awry.

Sickness

And the loving king had built this palace at Welimannathota for her to retire in times of sickness especially as her physician lived close by at Hettimulla. So when her eldest son drowned or said to be drowned by king Senarat her second husband she developed temper tantrums and began to curse and swear at her husband in a strange language that nobody could understand it was nothing but natural that she retreat to this Welimannathota Palace, the additional motive to be aware from king Senarat egging her. The queen had died there in her early thirties after giving birth to seven children within 12 years (four by Vimaladharma and three by Senarat) and Baldeus observes Senerat had been genuine in his sorrow at her demise. This despite her curse on him before death, "You are the cause of my death."

Since after her death the Portuguese padres who had attended on her religious-wise as she had never changed her adopted religion (making a chapel a compulsory part of the palace) and a small contingent of their soldiers had remained there making the Palace known in the area as Parangi Maligawa.

That this was the only palace that Hatara Korale can boast of even the Bhikkhus in temples around as Asokaramaya had been keen to preserve it.

That is what the Bhikkhus there told us. Even the Bauddha Balamandalya had tried to help in. That the queen was Christian was no matter to them, it was the heritage they cared for.

But nobody else seemed to much care. Cash crop craze spread all over the island and this area of Kegalle too turned to an extensive rubber plantation. It was soon named Rockhill Estate while the jungle and the wild beasts took over the precincts of the Palace. Soon becoming private property it changed hands several times, the famous Ondatjee family too becoming owners before migrating to America.

One who bought it from them after coming to know that the palace lay embedded in the forest coverage had soon got rid of it to an innocent party for fear of it being confiscated. Now only a few tiles done in the style of Kandyan tiles lay strewn together with foundation walls of four feet thickness reminiscent of heyday times. The palace itself is no more, ramsacked and perhaps razed to the ground or succumbed to nature’s spread.

Curiosity

The new housing scheme spreads over it all. "Photographs, foul" bawls out the dwellers scared that somebody’s busy body curiosity might lead to their own eviction from a land of much historical watered not only by a tributary of the Ma Oya but by the tears of a woman who was not only entitled to a peculiar title by aesthetes but was politically powerful as the mother of one of Lanka’s greatest monarchs, Rajasinghe 11 who ruled for a good part of the 17th C and had his reign advertised globally via Robert Knox’s book. The queen had been having temper tantrums even when child with this prince and some attribute the king’s own eccentricities not withstanding his prowess in battle, to the mother’s mental state.

The book From flower to pawn by the writer is woven around this queen.