Hanguranketa Potgul Vihara

Hanguranketa, in the hills south-east of Kandy, was a royal town of the Kandyan kingdom, a retreat and second seat of the kings, and one of the few places outside the capital to keep the ruins of a palace. Its Potgul Vihara is a temple built around a library: the upper floor is a repository of palm-leaf manuscripts, and the building declares that purpose in its very front, marking the upper storey with an architecture openly borrowed from the coloniser.

The book-house and its front

The temple takes its name from the potgula, the store of books, and the manuscript repository on its upper floor is the reason for its shape. The façade is a piece of the hybrid British-Kandyan architecture that spread through the temples of the nineteenth century, the upper floor set visually apart and worked in a manner drawn from Western building. The same idea was carried, a little later, to the Potgul Vihara at Gallengolla, whose front was raised in deliberate resemblance to Hanguranketa’s, its own upper floor another store of manuscripts. A temple ordered around the written word, holding the palm-leaf book above the painted wall and dressing the whole in a colonial front, is itself a mark of the age.

An abundance of styles

The murals are the temple’s chief interest, and their interest is that they hold to no single manner. At Hanguranketa Potgul Vihara, an abundance of styles can be read on the walls at once: an imitation of the older Upcountry manner in some passages, and the later Lowcountry style in others, the one giving way to the other on the same surfaces. A great blue guardian-demon, a tusked raksasa drawn in the plain hill-country line, is one such survival of the older hand among the newer work. Where a temple is usually read for a single school, Hanguranketa is a place where the tradition can be watched in the act of changing, the hill-country idiom the painters had inherited loosening towards the freer, colour-hungry manner of the coast. Murals are added to and painted over, older work failing and newer laid across it, and Hanguranketa keeps that layered history on open view.

The royal hinterland

The setting is part of the meaning. Hanguranketa was a centre of regional power in the eighteenth century, one of the seats from which the Disaves, the provincial governors, held the country for the king, and local memory keeps it as a place where the plots to unseat a king, or to hold him against the Dutch and the British, were laid. The provincial Rajamaha Viharas of such places were more than shrines; they were fixed points of the kingdom’s authority in the hinterland. The Potgul Vihara at Hanguranketa, royal in its origins and colonial in its later dress, carries that double history in its fabric.

Sources

1. 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.
2. de Zoysa, Asoka, and Vajira Nalinda Jayathilaka. Buddhist Image Houses. Colombo.
3. Bandaranayake, Senake. The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka. Colombo, 1986.