Ashik Kahina

Ashik Kahina is a writer and translator based in Chennai.

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Competitors take part in jallikattu in Tamil Nadu. Compared to the heights of C S Chellappa’s literary style and inventiveness in ‘Vaadivaasal’, Perumal Murugan and Appupen’s graphic novel in translation has lost some of the original text’s stylistic depth and inventiveness.

Jallikattu, caste, and the pitfalls of adapting the Tamil classic ‘Vaadivaasal’

27 Mar 2025

Civilians walk past a burnt-out bus in southern Sri Lanka in 1989, during the second JVP insurrection. The shock of the first, in 1971, turned the world of Sri Lankan letters towards the political, and invited the country’s anglophone elite to an unsparing interrogation of themselves as the insurrection’s target. Photo: Robert Nickelsberg

“A glass of blood to drink”: The insurgent poetry of Sri Lanka's Lakdhas Wikkramasinha

05 Jan 2024

Pandiyakannan insisted that one can only write as he does from actual experience with manual scavenging. “When I write,” he said, “I use the same hands that have carried shit.” Illustration by Akila Weerasinghe

“I write with the same hands that carried shit”: Reading Pandiyakannan’s ‘Salavaan’

25 May 2023

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