ABSTRACT
The city generally known to foreigners today as Kandy and to many locals also as Maha Nuwara (literally ‘Great City’) was founded in the fourteenth century with the name Senkandesala Sirivaddhana according to the Mahavamsa, the ‘Great Chronicle’ of Sri Lanka which stretches back over a thousand years of her history (Nanayakkara 1977:1). The present name of Kandy derives in all probability from a Portuguese corruption of the Sinhala word ‘kanda’ in the expression ‘kanda uda rata’ meaning ‘hilly up country’. For three centuries after the Portuguese and subsequently the Dutch established control over the coastal regions of Sri Lanka, Kandy, flanked on three sides by the largest river in the island and nestling in a thickly wooded valley amidst the central hill ranges, proved impossible to capture, largely because of the difficulty of the terrain (Karunaratna 1984:3). Sri Lanka has had her capitals in numerous locales over the centuries, with shifts often being made for strategic considerations. At the end of the sixteenth century, Sri Lanka consisted of three semi-independent kingdoms centred on Kotte, Jaffna and Kandy, but when the European presence was secured along the littoral, and when the resistance of the Sitavaka Kingdom came to an end (K.M. de Silva 1979:130–1), Sinhala resistance decisively shifted inland to Kandy (Gunasinghe 1990:19; Roberts et al., 1989:5, 32). Burned and looted on several occasions by both the Portuguese and Dutch, Kandy was always able to repel the invader, but existed nonetheless for well over two hundred years in a more or less permanent state of readiness for war. Finally, in 1815, amidst a welter of intrigue by members of the Kandyan aristocracy against their ruler (Dharmadasa 1979:102–4, 118–21), Kandy, the royal heart of a kingdom which extended over much of the inland areas of the island, finally fell to the British, the first colonial power to secure control of the entire island.
