C. Gaston Perera's account is a military history in the narrow sense: how the Kandyan kingdom fought the Portuguese, with what men, what weapons and what ground. It covers the decades in which Portuguese commanders repeatedly tried to bring the central highlands under their control and repeatedly failed to hold them.
The book falls into parts. The first sets out the conditions of the fighting — the terrain of the interior, the combatants on either side, and the weaponry each brought to the field — and makes the case that the broken, forested country of the highlands was itself a Kandyan asset. The second follows the campaigns: the advances into the hills, the retreats, and the pitched encounters that settled matters in the Kandyans' favour. The third turns to warfare in the lowlands, where the Kandyans fought away from the ground that suited them.
The period is one of the more studied stretches of the island's early modern history, and for good reason. From their footholds on the coast, the Portuguese faced a kingdom that would go on to outlast three European powers in succession. Kandyan armies were loosely organised, highly mobile and supplied on a thin logistical base, and against better-armed and better-drilled opponents they inflicted severe casualties. The Portuguese phase alone includes the defeats at Danture and Randeniwela and, at Gannoruwa, a disaster from which the Portuguese army in the interior did not recover.
Perera writes for readers who want the campaigns examined as campaigns — routes, supply, the shape of an engagement, the reasons an army broke — rather than as episodes in a national story. That makes it useful for anyone reading around the Kandyan kingdom and the European presence in Sri Lanka: students of the period, readers of military history looking at a case of sustained resistance to European expansion in Asia, and visitors who have walked the ground around Kandy and want to know what happened on it.
Written in English.
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