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Confronting Charlie Ponnadurai: Clarifying the Context of Disparaging Ethnic Epithets in Sri Lanka over the last 180 years – By Michael Roberts Charlie and I go back a long way – to Ramanathan Hall at Peradeniya University where we were freshers together in 1957 and thus were ragged together.[1] Charlie was known then as Charlies Ponnadurai, but he is now a “Sarvan” and resides in Germany with his German wife after years of work in Zambia and the Middle East. He has done me a singular honour in basing an essay on “Para Dhemalā” purely on my work. The reference is to “Pejorative Phases: the Anti-Colonial Response and Sinhala Perceptions of the Self through Images of the Burghers.” Readers may have been misled into thinking this was either a book or an independent article. Not so. The title is that of a chapter, “Pejorative Phrases….,” which is the first chapter ...