Ambiguities and Certainties: Ernest MacIntyre’s Rasanayagam’s Last Riot and He STILL Comes from Jaffna

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.