Sri Lankan Muslims
Genesis of Kollupitiya
by PADMA EDIRISINGHE
|
|
On a day subsequent to a Friday in January this year when I got
enmeshed in the maddening traffic of Kollupitiya thanks to the dark tarred
ribbon unfurled way back in the dawn of the 19th century by Major Skinner (a
feat commemorated by the Dawson Tower at Kadugannawa) I was up on the green
hills of Nillambe in the salubrious highlands. Nostalgia for my carefree
youthful days in the Peradeniya University sprang in me as I viewed the Campus
halls along the Hindagala-Galaha road.
A few days later in an attempt to put some order to my small
library. I came across the book, 'Madyama Lanka Puravrththaya ' (Anecdotes of
medieval Lanka) by Ven. Naulle Dhammananda Thera.
Turning its pages I came across a tale that revealed the intriguing
story of the genesis of Kollupitiya. Actually this terrain that has become one
of the craziest and busiest parts of modern Colombo has been spawned out of an
episode connected to Nillambe.
|
|
One piece of news on Nillambe was already known to me, which was
that Rajasinghe II (1635-1687) one of our most valiant kings had a palace at
Nillambe. This fact is mentioned in several places in Historical Relations of
Ceylon by Robert Knox whose imprisonment in our island owed itself to this
capricious monarch. Actually I had not visited Nillambe to locate this palace
though on inquiry after the remembrance of this fact, I was told that remnants
of some stone columns still stand in a thick bamboo grove flourishing in a
plummeted valley where British tea planters had later grown tea, a site that
cannot be reached by vehicle now. I was also told by a person in the Meditation
Centre of Nillambe that Nillambe is sited at the other end of Hantane mountain
range that overlooks the city of Mahanuwara or Kandy and the king would have
fled to Nillambe along the mountain pass. Nillambe is said to derive its name
from Nil Ambe, the Blue Waters of the Mul Haluwa Oya river flowing through this
terrain. (This is the name of the river given in the prelate's work).
Why did the king flee to Nillambe? According to other historical
sources as well as according to Madyama Lanka Puravrththa' it was to flee the
wrath of some rebel leaders. The king had not been a popular one. Very despotic
and capricious he ruled according to his own whims and fancies and his decision
to suspend a long standing procession in Kandy had been the last spark to
ignite the inflammable situation. By this time the king had already fled to
Nillambe. The ringleaders of the 1664 rebellion against the king had been
Udunuwara Ambanwela Appuhamy, Satkorale Manna Appuhamy and Ataklankorale
Sundara Appuhamy who very successfully broke into the Nillambe Palace,
threatened the king to resign and requested that he give over the throne to the
king's son who however declined to accept it either through filial loyalty or
through fear. That proved the undoing of the rebels. Rajasinghe II came back to
power and had some of the rebel leaders beheaded and due to a sudden whim of
his (a characteristic of him) banished Ambanwela Rala to Dutch territory in the
lowlands.
Ambanwela Rala was a man of many sides. He belonged to one of the
most powerful Kandyan families at the time. Yet he was a crafty and scheming
opportunist and also a poet. It did not take him long to establish very
pleasant relations with the Dutch who instead of punishing him gave him a piece
of land by the sea where he began an extensive coconut cultivation. This land
eventually came to be known as Polwatte. Still a part of Kollupitiya where the
famous church and aligned school of Kollupitiya stand is known by the name
Polwatte. The wider land in this area came to be known as Kollan Pitiya or the
Robbed Land, robbed by the machinations of an upcountry fugitive chief.
But the machinations seem to have been more of an aesthetic nature
as the composition of panegyrics to big wigs in the Dutch administration. In
the above book are quoted a set of ode like verses dedicated to one Surya Muttiah,
an officer in the Dutch bureaucracy perhaps to facilitate the land transactions
by the sea.
The Polwatte begun by Ambanwela Rala became so prosperous later,
that according to the late Mr. Gamini Samarasinghe, the prolific banker -
writer, either in the late Dutch period or the early British period a brewery
commenced here turning coconut treacle to liquor. The beer turned out had been
of such high quality that it had been very much in demand and had at one time
was exported even to towns in South India.
The house in which lived the head of this brewery business,
according to this writer, is the nucleus of the present Temple Trees!
However, Ambanwela Rala's progeny, perhaps who did not flee with
him to Kollupitiya to escape the king's wrath had got domiciled later at
Ratnapura. So Ambanwela Rala, the temporary bachelor, hailing from the Kandyan
backwoods was very adventurous and reckless as to plan the overthrow of a
powerful king, and then by a stroke of luck has his neck saved from the
scaffold and comes down to the lowlands and signs his way to become the
proprietor of an extensive coconut estate is really the author of present
Kollupitiya with its soaring skyscrapers, maddening traffic and thronging
crowds.