Devendra Mulachari

Devendra Mulachari is traditionally linked to the Nilagama line, the most celebrated of the Kandyan craftsman lineages, and he carried the title Mulachari, given only to a master judged expert in at least five arts and crafts and set at the head of a royal workshop. Devendra was his own name; Mulachari was earned, not inherited, the rank rather than a family surname, and it placed him among a small handful of men trusted to design and build for the crown itself. He served three kings across the closing decades of the kingdom: Kirti Sri Rajasinha, whose reign from 1747 revived the temple arts of the hill country; his successor Rajadhi Rajasinha; and finally Sri Wickrama Rajasinha, the last king of Kandy, whose reign ran from 1798 until the British annexation of 1815.

It was for Sri Wickrama Rajasinha that his best-remembered work was raised. He designed the Paththirippuwa, the octagonal pavilion added to the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, said to have first modelled the design in a plantain stem so the king could approve its form before a single stone was cut, and he built the great artificial lake below it, damming the paddy fields around an older pond to make the sheet of water that still shapes the city’s centre, its wall crowned by the Walakulu Bamma, the cloud-shaped parapet that remains one of Kandy’s most recognisable ornaments. He is also credited with the Magul Maduwa, the royal audience hall, built in the same king’s reign.

His craft ran wider than the brush, into building and stone as much as pigment, in the manner of the old master craftsmen who worked as architects and painters at once. He was not among the four Sittara who painted the walls of Degaldoruwa in the previous reign; that temple’s own foundation grant names Nilagama Patabenda as foreman of the painting team, with Devaragampola Silvattenne Unnanse as its most celebrated hand, and the popular pairing of Devendra Mulachari with that mural scheme appears to be a later conflation of two great names from the same generation rather than a documented fact. His own line, the Nilagama tradition, is credited too, by a persistent thread of tradition, with work at the rock temple of Dambulla, though that claim rests on thinner evidence than his architectural works at Kandy.

His death is remembered as tragedy rather than plain record. During the building of the Magul Maduwa he is said to have been falsely accused, by jealous court rivals, of rejecting sound timber they had supplied; the king, believing the accusation, is said to have threatened him with the loss of a finger, and Devendra Mulachari, unable to bear the dishonour, drowned himself in the lake he had built. When the truth came out, the king is said to have granted him a funeral with full royal honours in remorse. The story is widely repeated and carries the shape of a court tale rather than a contemporary document, and it should be read as a strongly held tradition about a man whose real works still stand, not as settled history. A dedicated modern study of his life, D. D. M. Waidyasekera’s Great Royal Artificer of the Kandyan Kingdom, Devendra Mulachari, was published in 2017. His is one of the last great names of the court tradition, set down almost at the moment the kingdom itself came to an end.

Sources

1. Waidyasekera, D.D.M. Great Royal Artificer of the Kandyan Kingdom, Devendra Mulachari. 2017.
2. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Mediaeval Sinhalese Art. 1908. https://archive.org/details/mediaevalsinhale0000coom
3. Sri Dalada Maligawa (Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic). ‘The Octagon’. https://sridaladamaligawa.lk/the-octagon/