Geopolitics of Teeth

When Siddhartha Gautama was cremated in the sixth century BCE, his left canine tooth was plucked from the pyre by the disciple Khema Thera. It was a modest beginning for an object that would eventually dictate the fate of a sovereign state.

Nearly a millennium later, in the fourth century CE, the relic made a clandestine journey to Sri Lanka. Smuggled out of Kalinga by a princess who concealed it securely within her hair, the tooth found a new home where it would soon outgrow its purely religious significance. In medieval Sri Lankan political theory, holding the tooth became the absolute prerequisite for holding the crown. It functioned as the physical anchor of the monarchy, a sacred palladium without which a ruler had no legitimate right to govern.

This curious constitutional arrangement naturally drew the attention of outsiders. When the Portuguese arrived during the colonial era, they viewed the relic through the crude lens of European iconoclasm, attempting to seize and destroy what they condemned as a pagan idol in 1560. The act backfired spectacularly. Far from stamping out local traditions, the assault triggered massive civil unrest and cemented the relic as an enduring symbol of anti-colonial resistance.

Whether the tooth resting today in Kandy's Temple of the Tooth is the genuine article or the replica that local tradition claims was successfully hidden away during the sixteenth-century chaos matters remarkably little to its history. The enduring power of the relic never lay in its enamel, but in the peculiar human conviction that sovereignty can be held in the palm of a hand.