Abstract:
… soon after the riots, Colombo ’s mixed society of westernised
Tamils and Sinhalese tacitly settled on an arrangement that would
enable it to continue functioning. Whatever was locked in their
heads or embedded in their hearts, about which organisations and
people were to be held responsible, they would not utter in public
(MacIntyre, 1993: XI).
This statement by Ernest MacIntyre, in the preface to his play Rasanayagam’s
Last Riot, encapsulates a central thematic preoccupation in MacIntyre’s Rasanayagam’s
Last Riot and his most recent work He STILL Comes from Jaffna: the reaction of the
Westernised middle class Sri Lankan to the contemporary ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.
This position is elucidated by theorists like Ernest Gellner (1983) and Partha Chatterjee
(1986) who argue that while the elite and the intelligentsia played a crucial role in
initiating the pre-Independence nationalist and political struggles, their role after
Independence is one of self-seeking indifference.
This essay interrogates the politics of class by focussing on MacIntyre’s two most
recent plays. For instance, Philip Fernando in Rasanayagam’s Last Riot and Chandran
Rajasingham in He STILL Comes from Jaffna are indifferent to the nuances of political
conflict and the concerns of the masses. This is illustrated in the ‘curfew parties’ during
national curfews, their glib ability at clothing/masking feelings in bombastic terms (as
Philip frequently exemplifies), and evading reality. On the surface, MacIntyre attacks this
mindset. However, underlying the overt criticism of this class is an ambivalence which, at
the culmination of the plays, exonerates the characters from culpability. I will
demonstrate that this ambivalence is symptomatic of the writer who deals with his own
milieu. Efforts to unveil the hegemonies of this class are undercut by the writer’s own
biases and anxiety to make excuses for evading responsibility.
