A chronicle whose title means "line of kings", the Rajavaliya was written in Sinhala by an author who left no name. It runs from Vijaya, the legendary first king of the island, down to Vimaladharmasuriya II, carrying the narrative through the arrival and eventual expulsion of the Portuguese. It is described as the only chronicle that gives a continuous history of Sri Lanka in the Sinhala language, and it stands apart from the Pali chronicle tradition that most readers meet first through the Mahavamsa. That independence is the reason historians keep returning to it: the same reigns, seen from a different vantage and in a different language.
This is Prof. A. V. Suraweera's English translation. Suraweera established the Sinhala text from several manuscripts and then translated his own edition himself, so the English here rests on a critical edition rather than on a single copy of uncertain descent. He prefaces the translation with a long introduction setting out the chronicle's historical value and the questions it raises as a source. An earlier English version of the Rajavaliya, by B. Gunasekara, has long circulated among scholars; Suraweera's work returns to the manuscripts afresh.
The chronicle's interest is not confined to its facts. It records how an anonymous Sinhala writer understood the royal past — which kings mattered, how dynastic legitimacy was argued, how the coming of the Portuguese and the wars that followed were made sense of from within. For the later sections in particular, it offers a Sinhala account of events otherwise known largely through European sources.
It will suit anyone reading seriously in Sri Lankan history: students working on the Kotte and Kandyan periods, readers who have gone through the Pali chronicles and want to see what a Sinhala chronicler made of the same material, and those interested in how the Portuguese century was remembered on the island. It is a primary source in translation rather than a narrative history, so it rewards a reader willing to work with it, with the editor's introduction as a guide.
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