After India, Sri Lanka's ancient capital, Kandy, disappoints at first glance: it is just too clean, too quiet, too unprepossessing. Yet this hill station where the British grew tea and built their colonial mansions, enjoying the cool, leafy surroundings, is saved from genteel tedium by its excellent old temples and natural beauty. The first of these that we visited, seen here in dusky September light (bottom pictures), was the 14th-century Embekka Devale, an isba-like wooden building which presented a strange mix of Hinduism and Buddhism in the form of intricately carved pillars adorned with supernatural creatures. The syncretism was rather disorienting to see after the rigid delineation of Indian temples. (Buddhism came to Sri Lanka in 200 BC from India but Hinduism still held sway among some royal dynasties and in some parts of the country).
Next on our itinerary was the Temple of the Tooth Relic, the most famous one in the city, which has existed in some form or another since the 4th century as a shrine to Buddha's left canine tooth. As with Embekka Devale, the outside building was less impressive than what was found inside it. We attended a prayer ceremony which involved some men with what looked like a serious wardrobe malfunction blowing trumpets in front of the closed shrine and devotees filling the insides of the temple temple with heaps of fragrant jasmine flowers. Wooden carvings--evidently a specialty of Sri Lankan artisans--abounded.
But seeing Kandy means not just looking at its temples--which objectively paled in comparison with India's--but taking in its world-class botanical park, walking in the midst of the local macaques with coquettish golden peaked hairstyles, and being deafened by the screeches of flying foxes--the species of bats that live here. That was enough to realize that Kandy possesses charm in spades.
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