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 ...

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Why Thuppahi-by Michael Roberts Source:Thuppahis Because I am quintessentially thuppahi, that is, of mixed ethnic-stock, thus low, inferior, mongrel, pariah in the Asian scheme of things. Moreover, by stressing this dimension of my bloodlines as well as my socio-political background I can confront, challenge and undermine the thinking of those who are attached to notions of caste distinction and/or “racial” superiority. As I have shown in People Inbetween (1989, Sarvodaya), in British Ceylon imported racial theories of a supposedly scientific kind fused with locally prevalent caste theories against admixture to set up exclusivist lines of differentiation. In adopting this label here I am inspired by American example: remember that Black Americans started undermining the disparaging vocabulary of the Whites when they began to refer to themselves as “Niggers” [while yet confronting those Others who directed the term pejoratively at them]. ...

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