Manly kings, submissive queens

In this first section I document the hetero-patriarchal binary evident in the literary and didactic sources available to our historical actors. Such sources are not merely products of courtly culture; they were constitutive of it, in that they laid out ‘norms of behaviour [which] formed important “socialising” or “integrating” mechanisms for the ruling classes of medieval society’.Footnote ¹² Genres like courtly poetry and inscriptional eulogies alike reproduce ‘exemplary’ performances of specific social roles, which serve as models for re-enactment and reinstatement by living persons—who then, in turn, may create or inspire the production of future creative works. When we turn to the literary and didactic works available to Poḷonnaruva’s monarchs—the works which effectively demonstrate how to be an exemplary monarch—we see an explicit and overwhelming concern with the regulation of gender’s intersection with power: kings embody, and exercise their power through, explicitly ‘masculine’ (puruṣatva) traits, while women appear almost exclusively as objects of heterosexual desire.Footnote ¹³

Literary theory (sāhitya-śāstra, sometimes called alaṅkāra-śāstra) from early second millennium Sri Lanka, which enjoined radically different treatments of men (particularly royal men) and women, offers us a particularly vivid illustration of kingship’s assumed masculinity.Footnote ¹⁴ The Siyabaslakara, one of the earliest works of Sinhala literary theory, tells us that kings, even villainous kings, ought to be praised for their virility (vīrya) and bravery (śaurya).Footnote ¹⁵ The rasa (aesthetic mood) most suited for descriptions of these kings is, appropriately, the vīra-rasa, often translated as ‘the Heroic’ but more literally ‘the Virile’. This virility ought to be expressed through military conquests, the patronage of public rituals, and generous giving of alms—the first two of these activities were generally available only to normative men.Footnote ¹⁶ And descriptions of such virile, brave kings are rife in the literary works of early second millennium Lanka. This is particularly true of depictions of the Buddha as royalty, either in his youth in Suddhodhana’s court or in earlier lives as a king in his own right. The Dāṭhāvaṃsa, for example, calls the young prince Siddhartha both ‘greatly strong’ and ‘with a body pleasing in youth’.Footnote ¹⁷ Other kings are praised in the same work for their martial prowess:

And for their piety (śraddha):

The literary king, in other words, was a dynamic and heroic figure, ‘to be praised not just for the religious virtues he embodies—e.g. generosity, wisdom, loving-kindness, etc., but especially for the beauty of his physical appearance and of his female subjects, which in turn serve as indices to his own attractive form’.Footnote ²⁰

Literary queens, in contrast, are dutiful and submissive appendages, intended to further exemplify the glory of their respective kings—and, of course, to provide their husbands with male heirs.Footnote ²¹ In practice, of course, this was not necessarily reflective of reality, in which royal consorts were almost certainly engaged in degrees of co-rulership, ‘as part of a greater symbiosis of power and performance’.Footnote ²² But on the level of theory, our (primarily male monastic) literati understood, and therefore depicted, women as mere objects of manly actions and desires. The literary theorist Ratnaśrījñāna explains, for example, that we can distinguish the literary ornament preyas (platonic affection) from the Erotic (śṛṅgāra) rasa primarily by the gender of the object of affection:

In the world of high literature, men may be objects of admiration, but only women were to be depicted as objects of sensual desire.Footnote ²⁴ This advice seems to have been heeded well by Poḷonnaruva’s poets: compare, for example, the respective introductions of the Dāṭhāvaṃsa’s co-protagonists, Danta and Hemamālā, who together safely bring the titular tooth-relic to Lanka:

We might excuse the poet for dwelling on Hemamālā’s hair as foreshadowing the later plot, in which the titular tooth-relic would be hidden in her curls. But no other part of this description was necessitated by the plot, and the stock tropes—which, again, are explicitly theorized as heteronormatively erotic—stand in stark contrast to the pious depiction of her husband-to-be in the preceding paragraphs. Elsewhere royal women are literally reduced to the level of mere decorations: among the many pleasures of kingly life that the Buddha forsakes to become an ascetic, the Jinālaṅkara tells us that his body was ‘marked with excellent marks, ornamented with divine ornaments, and resplendent with similar[ly ranked] queens’.Footnote ²⁶ Early second millennium literary works, in other words, tended overwhelmingly to treat royal women as a means for glorifying the Great Men with whom they shared the page.

These literary works illuminate, particularly brightly, the hard distinctions between royal masculinity and royal femininity, and therefore between the social performances expected of royal men and royal women. These starkly differing expectations would have been sources of considerable tension for Poḷonnaruva’s two female monarchs, Līlāvatī and Kalyāṇavatī, who, like any monarch, must have been anxious to provide a satisfactory performance of kingship. This tension, I will suggest in the following section, was perhaps most evident in the problem of royal titles. When the masculinity of kingship was, as I have discussed in this section, so universally taken for granted, (how) could female regnancy be accommodated in the conceptual vocabulary?

Kings by any other name

In this section I turn to the wide variety of titles applied to Poḷonnaruva’s noblewomen. These titles, I argue, were deployed in consistent and meaningful ways, even if we cannot always reconstruct the patterns of use. Crucially, I argue that all of the grammatically feminine ‘equivalent’ titles that we typically translate as ‘queen’ were only ever used in practice to refer to royal consorts, not to women ruling in their own right. These titles were not interchangeable variants on a universal concept of queenship; they had very specific meanings, which denoted women’s places within a hetero-patriarchal hierarchy of femininities.

This concept draws on Connell’s arguments that genders are both plural and hierarchical.Footnote ²⁷ Writing in relation to masculinities, she argues that,

Similar gender politics, I suggest, was at work within the femininities of Poḷonnaruva’s nobility.Footnote ²⁹ To be clear, the women I discuss here are all very much ‘elite’ and racial or (writ-large) class hierarchies did not distinguish them.Footnote ³⁰ This does not mean, however, that there were no stakes in their own articulations and performances of difference. Such stakes are very apparent when we look to more global studies of queen-consorts. While some polygamous courts were singly ranked, those in South Asia typically contained strict internal hierarchies of consorts, and,

I suspect that within the walls of early second millennium Sri Lanka’s ‘inner cities’ (antaḥpura), a similar dynamic took place: a strict hierarchy of consorts was defined by specific titles.

The titles with the widest referent range, if with the fewest extant witnesses, appear to have been antaḥpura-strī (‘woman of the inner city’)Footnote ³² and kāminī (‘[woman] of pleasure’).Footnote ³³ These titles may have been interchangeable.Footnote ³⁴ We know very little about this group, and no named consorts (let alone female sovereigns) are ever associated with the title. There are two possible interpretations: (1) that one, or both, of these titles referred to all of the women of the royal household, some of whom were also distinguished by ‘higher’ titles; or (2) that one, or both, of these titles indicated only concubines below the status of formal consorts. The wider South Asian context, and the sexual connotations of ‘kāminī’, together suggest that antaḥpura-strī may have fallen into the former connotation and kāminī, the latter. However, without a wider range of witnesses it is impossible to judge.

Devī (or more frequently mahādevī) seems to have the widest range of reference throughout medieval South Asia, analogous perhaps to the generic ‘Lady’ in medieval Europe. It certainly could refer to royal consorts,Footnote ³⁵ but the title seems to have also applied more widely. King Sāhassa Malla, for example, granted the title mahādevī to the mother of a minister, Duttati Abonavan, in recognition of the latter’s assistance in his taking the throne.Footnote ³⁶ Devī is also attested in literary works of the period, particularly with reference to the Buddha’s mother Mahāmāyā, a queen consort,Footnote ³⁷ and wife Yaśodhara, a princess whose husband never ascended the throne.Footnote ³⁸ However, its usage in early second millennium Sri Lanka seems generally less frequent relative than in other courts on the subcontinent.

More frequent in both inscriptions and literature, but with what seems to be a more restricted sense, is the Sinhala title bisō.Footnote ³⁹ The most emphatic reference to bisōs comes from Niśśaṅka Malla’s inscriptions, particularly his Galpota inscription:

The wording here—‘living according to the order of the bisōs’—might indicate merely a support for regency. But a variant of this argument in Niśśaṅka Malla’s North Gate inscription (which seems to be an abridged version of his Galpota arguments) suggests that he may be advocating for full succession:

Here it is clear that the bisōs themselves are in Niśśaṅka Malla’s intended line of succession, even if as a last resort (although still above footwear!). We might therefore ask who exactly fell into the scope of this title. The Epigraphia Zeylanica’s editors translate the second reference as ‘princess’. I assume that they assumed that some form of male-preference primogeniture was at work—daughters of monarchs may inherit, if they have no living brothers—and that therefore bisōs, apparently eligible for succession, must therefore be ‘princesses’. I am not convinced that this is the case.Footnote ⁴²

The mother of the notorious Prince Ajātaśatru is repeatedly called bisō or even mavbisō (mother-bisō) in the Amāvatura’s discussion of his conception and birth, after which point she is never again mentioned in the narrative.Footnote ⁴³ And, of course, the only two women to succeed to the throne in this period, Līlāvatī and Niśśaṅka Malla’s own consort Kalyāṇavatī, were consorts of earlier kings, not daughters.Footnote ⁴⁴ Finally, we might note the many references to ‘procuring bisōs’ from other kingdoms in inscriptions.Footnote ⁴⁵ These women were all, to be sure, daughters or female relatives of other kings—in other words, ‘princesses’. But they were also, or at least also became, consorts, and it seems clear that the title bisō extended to all noble women, not only the ruling monarch’s daughter(s).

The most obvious contender for the translation ‘queen’ is rājñī, the grammatically feminine ‘equivalent’ to the masculine rājan. The Sinhala cognate räjana is most commonly used in modern Sinhala to refer to queens regnant, both modern and historical (for example, ‘Elizabeth II räjana’). But it appears relatively infrequently in either literary works or inscriptions, and is not associated with either Līlāvatī or Kalyāṇavatī. In fact, one of its very few attestations is by Candavatī, a woman who identifies herself—in the very same inscription—as the secondary consort of her regnant husband (discussed in detail below). So not only did this title not denote sovereignty, it was not even at the apex of the feminine hierarchy.

That apex position appears to belong to the title mahiṣī. Indeed, Dhammakitti’s autocommentary on the Dāṭhāvaṃsa glosses this title (as used by the Buddha’s biological mother Mahāmāyā) as the foremost (agra) bisōva.Footnote ⁴⁶ And even among the mahiṣī, there was yet another hierarchy: the primary consort of a given king was designated, in turn, as his agra-mahiṣī.Footnote ⁴⁷ Notably, even this apex-of-apices title was nearly ubiquitously accompanied by the name of the mahiṣī’s husband—the mahiṣī of such and such—even after that husband had long since passed away. This is true even of Līlāvatī, who used her dowager title in some of her inscriptions even after she was installed on the throne.Footnote ⁴⁸ This means that even the most exalted grammatically feminine title did not—perhaps could not—convey regnancy, but only a hetero-patriarchal relation to one’s husband. To put it another way: there were no words to describe a ‘queen regnant’, only a ‘queen consort’.

This should immediately suggest a historical problematic. If sovereignty was conceived by many (or, at least, by certain prominent monastic scholars and male monarchs) in early second millennium Lanka to be essentially ‘masculine’, we ought to wonder how a ‘female sovereign’ was described. The titles we typically translate as ‘queen’ referred in practice only to consorts of the male king and so could not express regnancy. Poḷonnaruva’s two female monarch—Līlāvatī and Kalyāṇavatī—therefore seemed to operate in a conceptual limbo: neither masculine enough, according to the near-ubiquitous discourse of kingship’s masculinity, to be called ‘king’ (rājan), nor adequately described by the many feminine consortial titles discussed above.Footnote ⁴⁹

In the following sections, I identify two broad strategies for dealing with the ‘problem’ of female regnancy and the absence of female regnal titles: one most evidenced in textual sources crafted by monks, both during Līlāvatī’s reign and in subsequent generations; and one, more subversive, evident primarily in the material culture of Līlāvatī’s own court. Modern scholarship, I will argue, has thus far accepted only the first of these strategies, effacing the more nuanced presentation of female regnancy evident in the second.

Līlāvatī as ‘queen’ in the monastic literature

Līlāvatī took the throne in a tumultuous period. The reign of her husband Parākramabāhu I (r. circa 1153–1186) is generally considered to be a ‘golden age’ of relative stability and kingly authority. After his death, however, a string of untimely deaths and contested successions destabilized, and perhaps decentralized, power, allowing more localized elites to assert their independence and support their own favoured successors to the throne. It is no coincidence that all three of Līlāvatī’s reigns began and ended in violent coups. These circumstances perhaps help to explain the rise to prominence of certain non-royal elites—ministers and generals—in our textual and epigraphic sources. They also help to explain how, in apparent contradiction with the norms of kingly masculinity described above, royal widows like Līlāvatī and Kalyāṇavatī (the widow of Niśśaṅka Malla, another former monarch) found themselves so repeatedly on the throne. Between Līlāvatī’s first accession in circa 1197 and her final deposition in 1210, there was only a single year—1201—in which neither of them was on the throne; this was clearly a period of particular openness to female succession and female rule.

Such openness did not seem to have extended to the period’s literary and intellectual elite. Monastic literature seems to have dealt with the problematic absence of female regnant titles, and of the conceptual possibility of female regnancy, by describing this regnancy only through the most oblique phrasing possible and by avoiding clear regnal titles altogether. In such works, Līlāvatī is never explicitly called anything we might accurately translate as ‘monarch’. Instead, she remains always in the consortial mode; a pious and devoted wife, who happened to be ‘established in the kingdom’ by other, more traditionally manly, men. This strategy attempts, in other words, to preserve the masculinity of kingship above all else.

The first strategy is particularly evident in the Mahāvaṃsa, upon which all histories of this period still lean heavily.Footnote ⁵⁰ The sections of the Mahāvaṃsa dealing with Līlāvatī’s reign were almost certainly composed retroactively,Footnote ⁵¹ and we should therefore treat its vision of the preceding century with some caution. Nonetheless, it provides a representative, and influential, example of how Līlāvatī’s three reigns were depicted:

In each of these descriptions, Līlāvatī is merely the grammatical object, to and through whom great things are done by great men. She is never named with any royal title, only obliquely ruled through or anointed in sovereignty. In her last reign—ironically the shortest—her ascension to sovereignty is described in more detail, with an anointing (abhiṣeka) and a description of ‘kingly splendour’ (rāja-tejas). This is certainly a more generous treatment than her earlier reigns are given, and we might wonder why the thirteenth-century chroniclers devoted more praise to this reign than to those that preceded it. However, even here we must note that Līlāvatī herself is given no appositional titles beyond being the mahiṣī of Parākramabāhu I.

This treatment of Līlāvatī is echoed in later monastic writings. In the Rājāvaliya, for example, while all of the period’s male monarchs are said to have themselves ‘performed sovereignty’ (Sinhala: rājyaya keḷēya), the reigns of Līlāvatī and Kalyāṇavatī are described with causal verbs: ‘sovereignty was made to be performed by’ them (lavā rājyaja karavīya). The notable exception to this is Līlāvatī’s third reign, in which she is finally described as having herself ‘performed sovereignty’ (rājyaya kaḷāya, with a distinctive feminine verb form).Footnote ⁵⁵ No explanation is given for this sudden attribution of grammatical agency, although we might note that this is the same reign in which the Mahāvaṃsa, which was certainly familiar to the Rājāvaliya’s authors, tells us that Līlāvatī received an abhiṣeka ceremony. Perhaps this, at last, qualified Līlāvatī for monarchy in the eyes of the Rājāvaliya’s composers. For the most part, however, the strategy established in texts like the Mahāvaṃsa remains dominant.

We should note that this strategy was not necessarily a critique of Līlāvatī’s unusual position. She patronized at least two high-literary works—the Sinhala-language Sasadāvata and the Pali Dāṭhāvaṃsa—and their authors include lavish praise of her munificence.Footnote ⁵⁶ This praise, however, emphasizes above all her consortial status, linking her to her then-deceased husband, Parākramabāhu, in order to maintain the conventions of idealized royal femininity we have seen evident in other literary works. It was to the powerful men in Līlāvatī’s three courts, meanwhile, that these works attributed the qualities that literary theory tells us to expect of ‘kings’.

The Sasadāvata, the earlier work composed in Līlāvatī’s first court, represented one of the first attempts to fulfil the Siyabaslakara’s literary vision. We should not be surprised, therefore, that its opening discussion on poetry’s reliance on good kingship so faithfully follows the latter text’s gendered dynamics:

Here it is Kit Senevit, Līlāvatī’s chief minister, who seems to embody the virile mood through his martial accomplishments and leonine imagery. Līlāvatī’s dynastic ties, virtues, and physical beauty, meanwhile, are hardly the work of kings; even the ‘royal splendour’ (rājaśrī) she nominally instated in Sri Lanka, which bookends these five verses, seems to have been largely the practical result of Kit Senevi’s military triumphs—triumphs characteristic, in the theory of high poetics, only of virile kings.

Above all, these verses say little about Līlāvatī’s status as a monarch. She is given the honorific title svāmin (Sinhala: himi), which is certainly noteworthy. In Sanskrit this is a grammatically masculine title, which can even have the sense of ‘husband’ in Dharmaśāstric literature.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Sinhala term is often used in adjectival clauses to mark ownership or possession, including possession of Sri Lanka itself. Neither implication is drawn out in the (almost certainly retrospective) Sasadāvata sannaya, however, which simply glosses Sinhala himi as Sanskrit svāmin and moves on (although see further discussion of this sannaya below).Footnote ⁶⁰ Overall, the image with which we are presented is consonant with that of the later Mahāvaṃsa: the elaborate praise we would expect for a king—the Heroic rasa—is directed towards Līlāvatī’s general, while she herself is described in femininized language we do not see elsewhere associated with sovereignty.

Similar dynamics are at play in Dhammakitti’s Dāṭhāvaṃsa, composed in Līlāvatī’s third and final court. Here agency is vested even more heavily in Līlāvatī’s then-chief minister, a military leader named Parākrama. Mirroring the Mahāvaṃsa structure, it is this general who is positioned as the grammatical agent of all actions, while Līlāvatī is only mentioned in an oblique case:

Līlāvatī is certainly generously eulogized, but in explicitly femininized terms: she is maternal, a beloved wife, of impeccable stock. She is praised as being particularly intelligent and well-versed in nīti—both indications, perhaps, that the real-life Līlāvatī was a far more skilful political operator than the passive version presented in these texts. But, once again, she is associated with no regnal epithet.Footnote ⁶² We do see mahiṣī, but this is again qualified by her husband’s name and (kingly) title in the possessive: she was still, above all, a consort. In his auto-commentary, Dhammakitti additionally calls her a rajaduva, a ‘royal daughter’ or princess.Footnote ⁶³ This is not inaccurate—her noble birth is emphasized both here and in Līlāvatī’s own inscriptions—but it is a strange gloss for a woman ‘appointed in the royal splendour’ and certainly not one we would associate with regnancy.

A further title does occur slightly further into the poem, one which complicates the stark gendered dichotomy that Dhammakitti otherwise appears to be setting up. Verse eight tells us that Parākrama, the general who placed her on the throne, ‘dispelled the ill repute which had for a long time befallen the trisiṃhala [due to] the absence of a Lord of Men’.Footnote ⁶⁴ ‘Lord of Men’, a common title for kings is, significantly, grammatically masculine.Footnote ⁶⁵ Who was it who claimed this title and so dispelled the unfortunate absence? It could not have Parākrama, for all that he is cast in the kingly mode throughout this section of the Dāṭhāvaṃsa. If Parākrama had taken on such an explicitly royal title as narinda himself, why would he have needed Līlāvatī as a nominal sovereign at all? I suspect instead that this verse refers to Līlāvatī herself, and it is her sovereignty that resolved the ‘absence of a lord of men’—even though Dhammakitti is unwilling to explicitly associate her with such a masculine title, either in the verses or his autocommentary. But this is not the only hint available to us that Līlāvatī may have taken more masculine titles than the literary tradition would have us believe.

Līlāvatī as ‘king’ beyond masculinity

The literary sources, in short, avoid explicitly naming Līlāvatī as a monarch in her own right. This is true even of those composed under her patronage and which seem intended to lavish her with (gendered, maternal) praise. This will not be particularly surprising to those familiar with more global patterns of female regnancy and with what Kathleen Nolan calls the difficulties of ‘…reading women’s lives, especially powerful women’s lives, through the words of suspicious male monastics’, which ‘requires careful sorting through the biases and motivations of the author’.Footnote ⁶⁶ She urges us instead to look to the ‘visual imagery of queenship’ evident in her subjects’ material products, which often reveal ‘…a dialogue between the calculated use of male emblems of authority and the assertive, even subversive employment of these emblems in a recognisably female sigillographic format’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Following Nolan’s lead, I argue that an alternative politics of gender is evident in Līlāvatī’s inscriptions and coins, media over which she perhaps had more direct control, than we can perceive by relying on our standard textual sources alone. Without explicitly transgressing her nominal femininity, she draws on tropes of kingly masculinity, including claims to the title rājan.

Few of Līlāvatī’s inscriptions have survived fully intact and legible. However, those to which we do have access provide us with several interesting pieces of information. One such inscription, for example, contains a complete stylized introductory section (often called a praśasti) for Līlāvatī:

Unlike in the courtly poems discussed above, Līlāvatī is praised in language usually reserved for great kings. Indeed, nothing in this inscription other than her (grammatically feminine) personal name would suggest that she was any different from her male peers. The ministers who take the focus in our literary sources above are still present, but they are no longer the focal point: instead, the inscription emphasizes Līlāvatī’s own agency in all acts through the reflexive taman, ‘by herself’. Notably absent in this inscription, however, is any direct claim to the title rājan, which we would expect to see (alongside more grandiose variants such as mahārājan, rājādhirājan…) in any inscriptions of male Poḷonnaruvan monarchs. Instead, we see again the use of more oblique language: she has ‘attained kingship’ and is ‘like one ruling’. Clearly, even in this inscriptional medium she was hesitant to claim outright the title rājan for herself.

We might also note that in the inscription above, as in one other,Footnote ⁶⁹ she is referred to by the regnal name (viruda) Abhā Salamevan alongside her natal name Līlāvatī. This is a grammatically masculine name, which had until then only been used by normatively male kings.Footnote ⁷⁰ We should provide a caveat on the significance of this name adoption: ‘Abhā Salamevan’ is never witnessed apart from the natal name ‘Līlāvatī’, while ‘Līlāvatī’ is witnessed, with great frequency, independently. This is not, therefore, an outright rejection of femininity in favour of exclusive masculinity.Footnote ⁷¹ It is, nonetheless, a clear indication of the deliberation with which Līlāvatī negotiated her identity as simultaneously feminine (‘Līlāvatī’) and kingly (‘Abhā Salamevan’).

And we have good reason to believe that this adoption of a masculine viruda was accepted even by Līlāvatī’s political rivals. Prior to the Poḷonnaruva period such virudas were adopted in strict rotation: kings and their successors tended to alternate between Abhā Salamēvan and Siri Saňghabo.Footnote ⁷² The Poḷonnaruva period’s frequent usurpations and short reigns disrupted this pattern considerably, leaving long gaps without a monarch in a position to claim the next viruda in sequence (see Table 1).Footnote ⁷³ But—if we assume that both Jayabāhu I and Vijayabāhu II continued the sequence by taking the regnal name Abhā SalamevanFootnote ⁷⁴—it is evident that no monarch broke the sequence by repeating the viruda name of their immediate predecessor out of turn.

Table 1:

Alternating viruda titles.

What does the continuation of this sequence indicate about Līlāvatī’s place in the lineage of kings? If Sāhasa Malla, who overthrew Līlāvatī’s first reign in 1200, had rejected her claim to such a name we might expect him to have taken the viruda Abhā Salamevan, identifying himself as the true and direct successor to his half-brother Niśśaṅka Malla. Instead, however, he took the alternate viruda Siri Saňghabo, effectively acknowledging that his predecessor—who he himself had deposed violently!—was, in a meaningful sense, an ‘Abhā Salamevan’. While the turbulent reigns of Kalyāṇavatī’s successors Dharmāśoka (r. 1208–1209) and Äniyaṅga (r. 1209) left behind no inscriptional evidence, it is telling that the first viruda of which we have evidence after her own was, again, the alternative. Both women, it seemed, had their otherwise masculine regnal names acknowledged and upheld, even by their political rivals.

We see evidence too of masculine titles in Līlāvatī’s massa coinage, all of which is minted with the phrase ‘śrī rāja līlā vatī’.Footnote ⁷⁵ We must place particular weight on the rhetorical significance of coins, perhaps the most common means by which both Lankans and those overseas would engage with the visual imagery of a given monarch’s sovereignty.Footnote ⁷⁶ Līlāvatī’s coins, as with all those of the Poḷonnaruva period, were written in Devanāgarī script, suggesting that they were intended to circulate widely,Footnote ⁷⁷ and perhaps to be read as Sanskrit. But rāja as a standalone noun makes little sense in Sanskrit: we would expect to see rājā in the nominative or rājan in the vocative. It could suggest an unusual adjective compound, rājalīlāvatī (‘royal Līlāvatī’). I suspect, however, that this inscription was meant to be read in Sinhala, in which rāja is a viable standalone noun: ‘the auspicious king Līlāvatī’.

Space on coins was, of course, limited, and we might interpret rāja here as merely a contraction of something ‘properly feminine’ like rājñī. However, it is worth noting that the title rāja appears in no other coinage of the period (see Table 2). The coins of Līlāvatī’s predecessor Coḍagaṅga, for example, read śrī coḍa ga[ṅ]ga deva; if syllable count were truly the deciding factor here, she could have followed suit and inscribed her own coins with the (grammatically feminine) śrī līlā vatī devī. Līlāvatī’s use of the title rāja is exceptional, and so must have been intentional; this was, I believe, an explicit claim to kingship, regardless of grammatical gender.

Table 2:

Regnal titles inscribed on extant coinage.

And we have at least one suggestion that this supposedly masculine title was used in Līlāvatī’s own court and possibly survived beyond her reign. There is at least one commentary extant for the Sasadāvata, the courtly poem composed in Līlāvatī’s first reign. Dating this commentary is difficult: the ephemeral nature of manuscripts in tropical climates means that our only copies are very late, and the text itself could have been composed at any point between the original poem’s composition and the surviving manuscripts’ nineteenth-century acquisition by British colonists. This commentary tells us that the original Sasadāvata was composed ‘in the time when, in accordance with the ten duties of kingship, the auspicious king Līlāvatī was ruling’ (emphasis mine).Footnote ⁷⁸ This is an explicit rejection of the claim that the title rājan, ‘king’, was only available (grammatically and conceptually) to those who were normatively masculine. For this commentator, at least, no ambiguity was necessary: Līlāvatī was not a ‘princess’, not a ‘consort of’, nor someone whose proximity to power was best described in multivalent adjectival clauses. Despite her femininity—described so explicitly in the Sasadāvata itself—Līlāvatī was a king.

These sources together indicate some details about kingship and gender in early second millennium Sri Lanka that have previously been obscured. None of the grammatically feminine terms we typically translate as ‘queen’ is used appositionally to refer to Līlāvatī, and each of them seems to have a more specific meaning within the hierarchy of royal wives. For Līlāvatī, a regnant sovereign in her own right, these terms therefore did not accurately describe her position. This necessitated a certain creativity in descriptions of her sovereignty. In those sources that were likely to have been most closely controlled by Līlāvatī herself—her inscriptions and coins—we see indications that she claimed for herself some of the trappings of royal masculinity: viruda names and kingly titles. However, literary sources—further from her direct control—seem less inclined to repeat this claim. Even in the poems she, or those of her court, patronized, she is not referred to as rājan. Retrospective works like the Mahāvaṃsa and Rājāvaliya find other ways to describe her sovereignty, which do not so clearly attribute otherwise exclusively male terms and titles to her.

To be clear, I am not making here a dichotomist argument for material over literary sources. In the few extant inscriptions of Kalyāṇavatī, Poḷonnaruva’s other female sovereign, regnal titles are again suspiciously absent. And autonomous local warlords like Bhāma, even while including both women in lists of those who ruled (raja kaḷa) and dating his own reign by that of Kalyāṇavatī,Footnote ⁷⁹ similarly use oblique descriptions such as ‘she who achieved the highest position within Sri Lanka’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Epigraphy was not, in other words, simply a more ‘feminist’ medium. Rather, Līlāvatī’s use of material culture was a specific and deliberate policy on her own behalf, one which merits careful attention. This policy doubtless played out across other, more ephemeral, media now lost to us: her speech, her dress, her court ceremonial. Nonetheless, what we have available still suggests a particular deliberation and nuance in how she negotiated gendered expectations of sovereignty, one primarily available to us through material evidence.

Taken together, this has several implications for modern scholarship. Most immediately, it necessitates a reconsideration of the language we use to describe and analyse the relationship(s) between gender and power in premodern Sri Lanka, and particularly of the language we use to designate Sri Lanka’s monarchs. It seems to me that the title ‘queen’ is a poor fit for Līlāvatī, as it designates (in both medieval South Asian languages and in modern English) a ‘feminine’ relationship to power distinct from masculine ‘kingship’. Both Līlāvatī and the monastic literati who wrote about her seem to have consistently avoided describing her with such a distinctly ‘feminine’ title, beyond the strictly limited context of her consortial relationship (as a mahiṣī) with her late husband. To continue to refer to Līlāvatī as a ‘queen’ in our scholarship does not just obscure that nuance, it is an inaccurate representation of the primary evidence we have available to us.

This raises, however, a broader conceptual issue: if Līlāvatī cannot be called a ‘queen’, how should we refer to her? The use of gender-neutral terms such as ‘monarch’ or ‘sovereign’, as in this article, can help to avoid this issue. But, unless we apply this practice broadly, we risk such terms becoming once again a mark of difference. Scholars have long criticized the assumption that ‘gender’ is ‘something which… only “happens” or needs to be taken into account when women are present’.Footnote ⁸¹ We cannot risk gender-neutral royal titles only being deployed in the ‘abnormal’ case of women or non-binary persons sitting on a throne, while normatively masculine ‘kingship’ remains the unmarked default. A third alternative would be to simply call Līlāvatī, and monarchs like her, by the masculine title ‘king’.Footnote ⁸² This would serve a heuristically useful purpose of calling attention to the inconsistent gender assumptions implicit in such language.Footnote ⁸³ But while some evidence—the Dāṭhāvaṃsa commentary, and her coinage—does refer to Līlāvatī by the title rājan, this term was clearly deployed only in selective contexts: it does not appear in her inscriptions, for example, let alone in the monastic narratives. To call her ‘king’ in all cases might therefore also be missing Līlāvatī’s point; her self-presentation as a ruler appears more nuanced, more ambiguous, than any single term seems capable of capturing.

The problem is not, in other words, merely a matter of identifying a more ‘accurate’ term or translation to be applied to a single medieval case study. Rather, the struggle we face in characterizing Līlāvatī’s identity as a woman in power is symptomatic of a far broader issue: the extent to which modern thought, and therefore modern languages, conflate masculinity, power, and kingship, and so mark out ‘queenship’ as something distinct.

Conclusions: The making of a modern queen

Our medieval sources present us with two conflicting accounts of Līlāvatī’s sovereignty. In one, preserved in literary sources, she was the consort of a powerful man and, through the agency of other powerful men, she came to occupy the throne—but never at the expense of her ‘femininity’ (expressed in normatively acceptable ways). In the second, more evident in the material products of her reign, she performed sovereignty in what appears to have been a more masculine-coded fashion, including (in certain circumstances) claims to the otherwise masculine title rājan.

This second account, and the more nuanced performance of gendered power expressed therein, appears to have been lost in the transition to modernity. When colonial powers set out to create authoritative narratives of their new possession—‘Ceylon’—it was the monastic vaṃśas to which they first turned. Prior to the ‘discovery’ of these texts by Europeans, colonial scholars had available to them only oral sources, ‘wild stories’, on which they placed little historical value.Footnote ⁸⁴ But once the vaṃśas were published in translation—first by Edward Upham in 1833 and then by George Turnour in 1837Footnote ⁸⁵—colonial scholars began to produce historical texts at pace. Turnour’s own Epitome was soon followed by Knighton’s History of Ceylon and then Tennant’s Ceylon,Footnote ⁸⁶ a trio of texts so influential that while ‘later Sri Lankan writers challenged particular assessments made by Knighton and Tennent, they did so within the ideological framework put forward by these authors’.Footnote ⁸⁷

This ideological framework was drawn from the vaṃśas, but read through a decidedly Victorian lens. In these texts Turnour, Knighton, and Tennent found a vision of the world well suited to their expectations: the easy equivalence of power and masculinity, the belief that ‘kingship’ was necessarily masculine, and the exceptionalization of female regnancy as a phenomenon necessitating explanation with reference to male agency. Turnour provides a useful illustration of the extent to which these men were concerned with ‘proper’ heteropatriarchal relations, particularly when mapped onto royal women. A verse in the Mahāvaṃsa refers to 500 ‘kaññā’ (‘maidens’) and 500 ‘antepurikaitthī’ (‘women of the inner city’),Footnote ⁸⁸ which Upham refers to collectively as ‘sacred virgins’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Turnour seizes on this as evidence of the inadequacy of Upham’s translation, on the grounds that these groups constituted ‘matron queens and pleasure women’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The proper delimination of queenly ranks, based on their sexual histories, was clearly a high priority to Turnour, as it was to the scholars who followed him.

Līlāvatī, and the other women who laid claim to power in Lanka’s long history, were no exception to this concern with proper gender roles. In the brief summaries of Līlāvatī’s reign provided by Turnour, Knighton, and Tennent, we can identify two shared interpretive moves.Footnote ⁹¹ First, all three scholars insist that Līlāvatī ruled in name only, and that the actual work of rulership was carried out by powerful men within her court. This is a plausible interpretation of the Mahāvaṃsa’s account, in which (as discussed above) each of her three reigns was initiated by the agency of a general (senapati), who then occupied central roles at court (attested in the introductions of the Dāṭhāvaṃsa and Sasadāvata). But the support of powerful military leaders and other non-royal elites was an increasingly common feature of Sri Lankan royal courts throughout the early second millennium;Footnote ⁹² we should wonder, therefore, that it is only the agency of Līlāvatī which is so effaced. The downplaying of women’s agency in premodern, or even early modern, South Asia is hardly a phenomenon of colonial-era scholarship only. As Kashi Gomez notes, scholars confronted with evidence of female agency often express ‘remarkable anxiety over its attribution’ and are quick to suggest the possibility of male intervention behind the scenes.Footnote ⁹³ The second interpretive move of our nineteenth-century scholars is less plausible. All three claim that the first of Līlāvatī’s general-cum-ministers not only ruled in her name, but that he was, apparently, her husband, whom she married after the death of Parākramabāhu I. No evidence is provided for Līlāvatī’s supposed remarriage, and it is certainly not attested in any of the primary sources I have examined (including the Mahāvaṃsa). It seems, in other words, that these scholars simply did not consider it possible that a woman would remain in power, in proximity to a powerful man they assumed to be ruling in her name and not be married.

The great irony was, of course, that Turnour, Knighton, and Tennent were themselves citizens and servants of their own female monarch, Victoria (r. 1837–1901). This was, to be fair, before the death of Victoria’s husband, and therefore they had yet to access the undeniable proof that a widow could remain in power, and in association with powerful men, without remarrying. But they could hardly plead ignorance to the politics of gendered titles. Less than a century earlier, the Habsburg monarch Marie-Thérèse (r. 1740–1780) refused to be crowned empress-consort of the Holy Roman empire explicitly because she considered the title to be lower than her kingship of Hungary and Bohemia.Footnote ⁹⁴ And yet earlier, Christina (r. 1632–1654) was crowned as king of Sweden, specifically to avoid the implication that she was a ‘mere’ consort.Footnote ⁹⁵ ‘Female kings’, in other words, were hardly unknown in Europe. In fact, it seems as though the female monarchs of the British empire—from Mary II (r. 1689–1694), who refused to rule independently from her male consort William III, to Victoria herself, who so publicly emphasized her matriarchal qualities and her devotion to her deceased husband—were relative outliers.Footnote ⁹⁶ Britain’s imperial rulers, in other words, were particularly engaged in the public performance of binarized gender roles, which reserved ‘power’ for masculine ‘kings’.

This was the context, of course, in which emerged Foucault’s great regulatory regime, and the ever-tightening manacles of dichotomous ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’.Footnote ⁹⁷ And this was the context in which our colonial scholars laboured to make sense of the history of Sri Lanka, and in which they first came across the literary and didactic texts described above. From that evidence our first modern histories of Sri Lanka were fashioned: histories which reflected back the British empire’s assumptions about kingship’s inherent masculinity and therefore cast Līlāvatī as a ‘queen’. They both misread her coinage and even claimed that she must have married her prime minister. I am not suggesting that such a vision of kingship’s masculinity was invented wholesale by colonial scholars: it (or, at least, a version of it) was, as I have argued above, certainly widespread in pre-colonial Sri Lanka. But, crucially, it was not held to be universally true, and should never have been taken as a neutral depiction of the natural state of affairs. Like all such social constructions, it could be and was challenged, negotiated, and subverted. The near-ubiquity of kingship’s masculinity may have necessitated such challenges by women who held power in their own right—but it did not dictate the nature of these challenges, nor how they were received.

It is easy to accept the strategies adopted in textual sources as adequate and comprehensive descriptions of the social world, as did Turnour, Knighton, and Tennent. Such strategies present themselves, after all, as timeless and ahistorical, and so paint their critics as dissidents or revisionists. But the dominance of masculinity is far from unassailable, both in history and in the present. As scholars of premodern South Asia, we must embrace such dissidence. The alternative is to simply repeat the colonial-era ideology that a more-or-less stable ‘masculinity’ has simply always been dominant and always been the default. But this ideology, like all essentialist logics, is ultimately incoherent. It constructs frail boundaries between ‘men’ and ‘not men’, between ‘those who hold power’ and ‘those upon whom power may act’, which are arbitrary and therefore surmountable. The case of Līlāvatī presents us with, instead, a more transcendent performance of kingship, which serves as a powerful reminder that the politics of gender need not be so binary.