Deldeniya Sittara Naide

Among the masters whose names the Kandyan record keeps is Deldeniya Sittara Naide, one of the few Upcountry temple painters remembered as an individual in a craft that worked, for the most part, in anonymity. He carried the craft surname Naide, the title borne by every man of the Sittara caste, and appears, under a variant spelling of his name, Deldeniye Siththara Naide, in the small surviving body of writing about individual Kandyan-era painters. He belongs among the painters of the Upcountry rather than the southern coast, and the form of his name carries the mark: an ending in naide was characteristically an Upcountry usage, where a Lowcountry painter more often bore the honorific appu. Like other Sittara surnames, his is a village name; a Deldeniya lies in the Hataraliyadda country east of Kandy, among a cluster of the small pillared image-houses of the hills, and it is most likely the place his family came from. His hand has been linked by tradition to the murals of the Suriyagoda Raja Maha Vihara, a Central Kandyan temple near Kandy, though that association rests on a thinner thread of evidence than Silvattenne’s at Degaldoruwa and is best held as a strong tradition rather than a settled fact; no single source names both the temple and the painter independently of the others.

A name in an anonymous craft

The Upcountry Sittara were a hereditary caste of craftsmen, attached in the eighteenth century to the royal court and its temples, and their names have come down to us by two routes alone: the oral memory of the workshops, and the donor deeds, the sannas, sittu and tudapat, in which a grant of land or office was recorded to a painter who had finished a commission. The craft trained its members as children, apprenticed into a family workshop and taught first to copy a master’s set forms before they were trusted to work from memory, and it rewarded them in land and standing rather than in the modern sense of a wage. The manner they carried was the Central Kandyan idiom that Kirti Sri Rajasinha’s court painters, Devaragampola Silvattenne Unnanse chief among them, had brought to its height: the continuous narrative band, the firm outline drawn over colour, and the small palette of red, yellow, black and white.

What his name marks is real all the same. Secure dates for him do not survive, and no mural now standing can be shown with certainty to be his unaided work; what remains is the name itself, carried down through two centuries, thin but unbroken. In a craft where whole temple schemes went up without a single name attached to them, that a man is remembered at all, as a person and not a line in a guild list, is itself the record.

Sources

1. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Mediaeval Sinhalese Art. Broad Campden, 1908.
2. de Zoysa, Asoka, Vajira Nalinda Jayathilaka, and Ganga Rajinee Dissanayaka. Evolving Traditions of the Buddhist Image House, Part I. Samkathana Research Team, University of Kelaniya.
3. Bandaranayake, Senake. The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka. Colombo, 1986.
4. suriyakantha.org. ‘Contextualising Kandyan Period Temple Painting.’