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Sri Lankan history:
King Rajasinghe II of Kandy
by Husna Inayathullah
Rajasinghe II was a Sinhalese king who ruled Sri Lanka from 1629 to
1687. He was the third king of the Kingdom of Kandy. He came to power
after King Senerath (1604 - 1635),his father, a brother of King
Wimaladharmassoriya. Rajasingha succeeded his father to the throne in
1634.
 Rajasinghe requested Dutch to help expel the Portuguese from the
island which they successfully did in 1656. By this time, however, it
had become clear to the Kandyans that the Dutch not only intended to
expel the Portuguese but also to replace them as the major colonial
power on the island and from 1645 onwards Rajasinghe was engaged in
sporadic warfare with his erstwhile allies.As a young man Rajasinghe
participated in the 1612 counter offensive that routed a Portuguese
invasion into the Kandyan territory.
Rajasinghe's father had long courted the Dutch as a potential ally
against the Portuguese. A treaty had been signed between Kandy and the
Dutch envoy Marcelis Boschouwer but had not amounted to much. Soon after
Rajasinghe's accession, however, the Dutch, now firmly established in
Batavia put Portuguese Goa under a blockade. On March 28, 1638,
Rajasinghe led his army to victory against the Portuguese forces at
Gannoruwa.
Soon after this, Rajasinghe sent a request for aid to Admiral Adam
Westerwolt and by May 23, 1638 had signed an extensive military and
trade treaty with them. The Dutch seized Batticaloa on May 18, 1639 and
a joint Kandyan-Dutch campaign began to make inroads into Portugal's
lowland territories. The alliance was, however, deeply unpopular with
the inhabitants of Kandy.
Tensions soon arose between the two parties. Batticaloa was the
traditional port of the Kandyan kingdom and Rajasinghe was eager to
acquire it as soon as possible. The Dutch, however, demurred, demanding
full payment for their assistance in displacing the Portuguese. Despite
a rising suspicion that the Dutch were not in Sri Lanka to expel the
Portuguese, so much as to replace them, the alliance was one that was
too valuable for Rajasinghe to simply cancel, and joint Dutch-Kandyan
efforts resulted in the seizure of Galle on March 13, 1640 and the
restriction of Portuguese power to the west coast of Sri Lanka by 1641.
The slow end of the eighty years' war, however, soon resulted in a
truce being called between Dutch and Portuguese forces in Sri Lanka (the
crowns of Spain and Portugal were united between 1580-1640) sometime
between 1641 and 1645. Rajasinghe, and many of his advisers,furiously
concluded that the Dutch intended to carve Sri Lanka up with the
Portuguese, to the detriment of native powers. The alliance of 1638 came
to an abrupt end and Kandy launched into what was to be a hundred years
of intermittent warfare with the Dutch.
The period between 1645 and 1649 saw the Kandyans adopting a scorched
earth policy in eastern Sri Lanka. Capturing and annexing Dutch held
territory was out of the question for the Kandyans who could muster
neither the firepower nor the manpower for an occupation. Nevertheless
Rajasinghe's policy of intentionally burning crops and depopulating
villages drove the Dutch to the negotiating table. The Kandyan-Dutch
alliance was resurrected although on slightly different terms in 1694.
To be continued |
