Ehelapola Kumarihamy's drowning - fact or fiction?

It is fitting to begin this piece with the sweetly piquant legend that for seven days after the tragic episode no kitchen smoke rose to the Kandyan skies. To put it more prosaically, no food was cooked within the city limits of Senkadagala. Such was the compassion felt for the family of Ehelapola who paid with their lives for the adventures or misadventures of the family head.

The incident just electrified the Kandyan populace. Yet some years back at a certain seminar that discussed the last years of the Kandyan kingdom a very erudite woman whose forte is Lankan history said the drowning of Ehelapola Kumarihamy, spouse of the famous Maha Adikaram Ehelapola, was totally fabricated to vilify the last king of Kandy.

Surprisingly this comment almost went unnoticed for the main subject of discussion was king Sri Wickrema Rajasinghe.

A few months later I read a book or memoir written by Pohath Kehelpannala, a Kandyan historian who traced his ancestry on the mother’s line to a maid in the service of the Ehelapola family. She had witnessed the anguish of all what happened could have possibly been the writer’s great grandmother.

The writer himself was relating his family saga somewhere in the first half of the 20th century.

Doubts

This somewhat eradicated the doubts I had begun to entertain after the woman's statement. However, the odds are more for the veracity of this tale touched by many a writer. This historical character again finds mention in Henry Marshall's book on Ceylon. Marshall himself was Deputy Inspector General of Army Hospitals and made a name as the escort of the expelled king on his voyage to Vellore. In the crucial years connected to the capture of the Kandyan kingdom and in the sizzling drama that preceded this event, Marshall in his official capacity had been in Kandy and witnessed many a theatrical event, some very bizarre.

Among the bizarre events is the drowning of Ehelapola Kumarihamy.

Nowhere does he state that he was an eye witness to this event but he describes it as though he had been closely following it. A very modest narrator he describes himself as “the writer of this sketch” and leaves the reader in a quandary whether he actually saw the incident or based his narratives on hearsay. Here is how he puts it as he quotes many a source.

“The brother of Ehelapola, having been suspected of treason was executed as were also his wife and Ehelapola's wife and children, the latter were brought from prison and delivered to the executioners in front of the palace.”

Fortitude

He continues, “She displayed the most astonishing fortitude throughout the fearful trial”. This trial was against her husband.

“The wretched woman lifted the pestle and let it fall”. On what? On her infant?

No less a person than General Brownrigg who ruled the lowlands and was soon to become the Emperor’s deputy in the island of Ceylon gives more details, however, wrongly writing back home of the murder of “four infant children” on orders of the king. He had got the information from one Tolfrey then recording a narrative of events in Ceylon never questioning the miracle of a mother having four infants.

Anyway after the horrendous killing of the children, this is the way how Dr. Davy in his “An account of the Interior of Ceylon” puts it. “The mother and three other females were then led to the Bogambara tank in the neighbourhood of Kandy and then drowned”.

Marshall maintains that all that horror was a natural part of modes of Kandyan punishments where relations of the traitor are punished.

There is even an indication that the type of drowning that the Kumarihamy underwent was practised in some Western countries such as Scotland in the sphere of female punishments where a stone was tied to the body of the guilty, for it to sink in. Knox writing in the reign of an earlier Kandyan king, Rasingh Deiyo discloses that the king's wrath was not always appeased by the execution of the malefactor but that he punished the whole generation.

So an implication springs, that at least during the later years of the Kandyan regime this nasty and unfair practice of punishing the whole family of the wrong doer, especially if he is absconding as in the case of the Maha Adikaram had come to stay for the misfortune of many who are connected to the miscreant.

Cruelty

Marshall, however, finds excuses for the cruelty of the king. He states that horrible as the king’s punishments were, that they were much in the ordinary course of things under “Oriental despotism”. Subjects are beheaded, impaled or mutilated at their ruler's caprice. Here too he implies that the modes of punishment that members of the Ehelapola family were subject to, did really happen, including the drowning of the Kumarihamy.

On full moon nights the cries of Kumarihamy for her children are said to echo in the area where the waters of the Bogambara lake had once spangled.

Today the Bogambara prison house looms to the skies here. Is the Kumarihamy forgotten? No. She lives on in the minds of many who overlooking the long years eclipsed since the tragedy still are haunted by her memory.

In fact the writer of this sketch (imitating Marshall) was induced to do this piece by an acquaintance, TR, who says that Kumarihamy’s death anniversary falls on May 17, 1814.

The death itself signalled momentous tides of history, she says. Could be, for the flame for the hatred of the king was lit by this incident, a flame that led to his flight from the main city and the comeback of Ehelapola Maha Adikaram, not alone but with the Western power patronising him.

But soon he found himself a cat’s paw and was further banished to Mauritius by the very party he helped to gain power. More on TR. She is today undergoing a hallucination that she was once the much tortured Kumarihamy. Reborn and out of all places in a suburb of Colombo. Her likeness to the Kumarihamy, that she claims, has to be more disbelieved than believed for there is no extant painting or portrait of the tortured woman.

But she refers to a frequent illusion of hers. She is standing by a huge mass of water and then she is drowned.

This illusion has troubled her since childhood. Sometimes she sees herself bobbing up and down in that hydro mass. Calling for her murdered children? Cursing the king? No.

Those are embellishments occurring in my mind but the strange sad story dangles on our history never to depart.