The Rajpal Abeynayake column:

Post 'last-riot'

Ernest MacIntyre of Rasanayagam's 'last riot' fame is in town, and this has prompted some to ask tongue firmly in cheek, if this should also signify Rasanayagam's last election?

The stereotypical era of putting Tamils and Sinhalese in conscious ethnic compartments is gone, and Rasanayagam is done rioting. Well, he is the one who gets caught up in riots, but you get the point.

The middle class Tamil is a shrinking species. This is a result of the long years of war which led those who had the means out of the country to join the annals of the 'diaspora' - which is of course a misnomer if ever there was one.

So it's not as if 'Rasanayagam's last riot' is a relic, Rasanayagam himself seems to be a ghost from the past. Now these Rasanayagams come with Canadian accents which even the cosmopolitan but ageing MacIntyre himself is bound to find difficult to decipher.

They throw money all around the pubs in Colombo, and most don't visit Jaffna at all. If they do, there may have to be an accompanying guide to show them what a murunga looks like.

That's how much the middle class has shrunk in the north and the east of the country, and this is in the main due to Prabhakaran's fratricidal war which left mostly the impoverished Tamils to eke out an existence from the soil, as the more well to do brethren had all emplaned abroad.

There is of course a residual Tamil middle class which in the main finds its voice in Colombo, but these people are nothing like the Rasanayagams. They may be frugal to the extent that everybody has to be frugal in this economy, but in the main their politics being funded by the above mentioned moneyed diaspora, they are nothing like the Rasanayagams - because they take up positions that are, shall we say, a tad too loud considering their numbers.

So, there is hardly an organically active Tamil middle class in Sri Lanka, unless one can be created out of the war impoverished north and the east.

Though this is a distinct possibility, the Rasanayagam type of stereotypical Tamil middle class yokel is definitely something that is a relic from the past, and someone that should be confined to MacIntyre's memory, as tortured recollections of an old halycon are not necessarily chic.

In the post war era, Tamils though they may be frugal are not so in the exhibitionist sense that's portrayed in Mac's plays. Nowadays, the Tamil middle class or those that are aspiring, are connected more organically to the so called diaspora and this makes things different.

So there is more Toronto masala in their aspirations, than the Colombo based ambitions of Mac's Rasanayagam. MacIntyre's plays therefore are essentially a reminder of a historical era when the racial divide was defined in terms of crude and stereotypical jokes.

That there is no place for this in the collective psyche of the Sinhala and Tamil nation is a sign that there is progress in terms of ethnic relations, in spite of, and not because of Prabhakaran's fratricidal war.

In the main, ethnic relations between the Sinhala and Tamil middle classes are better than they have ever been before, as there is a common aspiration for contented sharing of whatever that's offered in a resurgent economy after years of impoverishing confrontation.

This is progress. That there is no room for a MacIntyre to make his rather dirty and sick jokes in the glare of the public spotlight anymore about the idiosyncrasies of the Tamil Sinhala racial divide is a sign that the nation has come of age ...

This is not to say that MacIntyre's museum piece plays should not be staged as historical pieces from a nastier era.

After all, there is theatre evocative of the Jim Crow era, and the dark days of the lynch mobs, that are essentially revelations of a historical Dark Age.

But it is also important to revisit the psyche that allowed skits of the sort of MacIntyre's in any era.

There was no racial sensitivity in this proclivity, as the lampooning was essentially of a one way street variety. The foibles of the Tamil government servant type were laughed at in these accounts, but there was no parallel lampooning of the majority Sinhala middle class.

In that way these plays were a blatant exploitation of self's own race by MacIntyre. That there was a great deal of raucous support for this kind of show of racial insensitivity at that time when the plays were staged is no excuse.

It is a strange and positive upshot of the war that this kind of stereotyping died with the fighting.

The two races were joined in one unstated cause which was to get rid of the iron manacle of Prabhakaran's fascism.

Now there is an understanding that the middle classes Tamil and Sinhala both have a fight on their hands which is to make it in a resurgent economy that is though still struggling, alive with myriad possibilities. In this type of milieu, there is less room for the crass race-based identifications that are a hallmark of the Mac era dramas.

Nobody is chided for buying a watch 'when there are so many clocktowers in Colombo'' because smart phones and not watches are now aspirational symbols of both Tamils and Sinhalese.

It is a brighter era therefore, and there is really a difficulty in finding delineating circumstances that would enable racist jokes purely Tamil on Tamil as in Macintyre's era, because those days are simply now gone.

There could be an entirely new set of jokes about how the scattered many in the so called diaspora come and throw money here, and how both the Tamil and Sinhala middle classes are sometimes amazed to the point of being offended by this tendency but then this is no laughing matter.

But it is glad tidings that times have changed. The races in fact have come together and not been drawn apart, and this is in spite of the MacIntyres of then and the Sumanthirans of now.