Sundara-Mahadevi, an Odia queen in medieval Sri Lanka who was called its greatest politician, ended up in Lanka due to marriage.
Near the ruins of the royal palace at Polonnaruwa—Sri Lanka’s most important medieval city—is a rather unassuming open-aired hall. On one of its stone slabs is an inscription of a queen called Sundara-Mahadevi, or Sundari, from the distant land of Kalinga (present-day Odisha). Her unassuming stone inscription reveals a wild history of dynastic intermarriage and international political wrangles, behind which loomed the growing power of Sri Lanka’s Buddhist Sangha.
Marriage and the mainland
To understand how an Odia queen ended up in Lanka in the first place, we need to note that such exchanges are not exactly surprising. As seen in an earlier edition of Thinking Medieval, the island was deeply integrated into South Asian movements of goods, people, ideas, and capital. One of the most visible aspects of this was the sheer degree of inte...
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