Anula (Anulā) was the Queen of Anuradhapura in ancient Sri Lanka — reigned 47-42 BCE, the first female head of state in South Asian recorded history. *The Sinhalese Mahavamsa chronicle records that she successively poisoned four husbands to maintain power. Eventually overthrown and killed by King Kutakanna Tissa. Despite the chronicle's hostile portrayal, she remains historically significant as the first reigning queen in South Asia*.
Featured in the Mahavamsa (5th c.).
Anula does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Anula reduce to 4, The Builder. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.