Totagamuwa Subhadraramaya

The Subhadraramaya at Totagamuwa, on the Galle coast, is one of the temples in which the southern painter’s dealings with the colonial world can be read most closely. Its walls carry the ordinary devotional programme of the maritime south, and worked into that programme, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, are the dress, the faces and the heraldry of British Ceylon, taken up with a freedom, and an irony, that the older Kandyan tradition never allowed itself.

The empress with two names

Over the left doorway into the inner shrine, on the tympanum, is set the temple’s most discussed image. A fair-skinned woman in Western dress and ornament sits framed within an oval, the lion and unicorn of the royal arms posted on either side of her as supporters and the imperial crown set above, every mark of a Victorian state portrait in place; a line beneath fixes the year as Buddhist 2431, that is 1888. She is, to all appearance, Queen Victoria. A second line, though, in Sinhala letters tucked almost out of sight below the foot of the banner, gives her name as ‘Queen Mahamaya’, she who bore Prince Siddhartha. The single image is thus made to carry two persons at once, the sovereign of a Christian empire and the mother of the Buddha-to-be, and which of the two a viewer meets turns on which script that viewer can read. Scholars of these temples take the doubleness to be deliberate, a way for a subject people to seize the sign of the ruler and turn it, in a whisper, to their own devotion. Whether or not one presses the reading that far, the fact on the wall is arresting: the queen of the empire, set above the shrine door and relabelled, in a hand kept low, as a queen of the Buddhists.

The placing sharpens it further. The space over a shrine entrance, where the empress here presides, is the position the tradition had kept for the Bodhisattva Maitreya, the Buddha who is to come; the copyist L.T.P. Manjusri observed that across these southern temples Victoria and the royal arms were set in exactly that place, so that the borrowed image does not only enter the shrine but takes the seat reserved for the future Buddha.

The colonial world, venerated and damned

The same absorption runs through the walls in two directions at once. Where a Kandyan painter had dressed the kings and nobles of the birth-stories in the costume of the Kandyan court, the southern hand at Totagamuwa clothes its royalty in the outfits of the colonial masters, ranks of princes and courtiers in European coats. In the register of the hells, in the story of Mahadhanasitu, the painters take the opposite turn: among the sinners shown suffering their punishments are figures with Caucasian features and Western dress. The coloniser’s world furnishes both the honoured and the condemned, the empress raised to the shrine door and the fair-faced sinner cast into the painted hell, and the temple holds those two judgements on the same walls without apparent strain.

A tradition in the open

Totagamuwa belongs, with Kataluwa, Dodanduwa, Kotte, Kelaniya and the other much-studied image houses of the coast, to the body of southern work in which the loosening of the Kandyan discipline became a licence to invent. The history of the temple reaches back before the Victorian age, and its murals as they stand are the work of repainting and over-painting in the century’s later decades, so that what the visitor sees is not the first scheme but a living tradition caught in the act of meeting a new world and answering it in its own terms.

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, essay V.
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.
4. Devapriya, Uditha. ‘Some Reflections on the Temples of the South’. Medium. https://udithadevapriya.medium.com/some-reflections-on-the-temples-of-the-south-5094e1ab17c5
5. Manjusri, L.T.P. Design Elements from Sri Lankan Temple Paintings. Archaeological Society of Sri Lanka, 1977.