Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam is a Sri Lankan journalist and author from Jaffna, known for incisive reporting on conflict, culture, and geopolitics across South and Southeast Asia.

Sri Lanka
The Language Beneath the Language

The Language Beneath the Language

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam In one of Alagu Subramaniam’s stories, a woman named Mrs. Ramasamy is riding home to Atchuvely in a bullock cart. She has just left her daughter, Parvathy, at a girls’ school in Jaffna town, and she will not see her for three months. She is crying. The carter, Subbu, asks her to stop, because anyone who sees her in tears will think he has wronged her. Subramaniam gave her reply in English: “Don’t talk nonsense. You are like a father to me. You are an old man, you woul
November 2026
Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam
Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflict Was Not an Elite Invention, and It Will Not Wait for Trust
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake addresses the National Intellectuals’ Organisation’s 10th anniversary convention at P.D. Sirisena Grounds in Maligawatte, Colombo, on October 31, 2026.

Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflict Was Not an Elite Invention, and It Will Not Wait for Trust

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam In the second week of July 1983, about thirty members of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna's Central Committee met at a house in Vitharandeniya, outside Tangalle. The agenda had one item. For a decade the party had accepted the Tamil people's right to decide their own political future. The party had written the position into its policy declaration in a prison cell, and its leader, Rohana Wijeweera, had defended it on public platforms, including in Jaffna. Then came the pre
JM Exclusive November 2026
Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam
One Thousand Years of Belonging – One Mad Command of Exile

One Thousand Years of Belonging – One Mad Command of Exile

I was only a few years old when the LTTE committed one of its most heinous crimes — the mass expulsion of Jaffna’s Muslims. Three decades later, I found myself sitting in Sonagar Theru (Moor Street), Jaffna, with a group of Muslim women who still carry the scars of that history. Their bodies and souls bear the weight of one of the greatest tragedies and injustices ever committed in the name of the Sri Lankan Tamil struggle. Among them was 68-year-old Mahroopa — fragile, elderly, yet radiant wit
Cover Story
Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam
Chemmani’s Critics Got Much of the Science Wrong. The Archaeologists Have Questions to Answer, Too

Chemmani’s Critics Got Much of the Science Wrong. The Archaeologists Have Questions to Answer, Too

By: Aruliniyan Mahalingam JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Makkal Seyal, a civil society group in Jaffna, told reporters at the Jaffna Press Club on Sunday that it rejected “completely” the archaeologists’ latest report on the human remains found at Chemmani. In a Tamil statement, the group called the report one-sided and based on guesswork. It accused the authors of serving a state that has long suppressed minorities. Two days earlier, at the same place, groups representing families of the disappeared rej
JM Exclusive October 2026
Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam
The Chemmani Blunder

The Chemmani Blunder

Tamil Nationalists Turned a Cemetery Into a Genocide Story. The Families of the Disappeared May Pay for It. The archaeologists’ interim report on the Chemmani excavation reached the Jaffna Magistrate’s Court this week. It counts the remains of at least 574 people taken from the Sinthupathi Hindu cemetery, and nearly two-thirds of them were infants and children. Its authors, Professor Raj Somadeva and Anusha Wanninayake, say the site looks more like a place of formal burial than the clandestine
JM Exclusive Editorial
Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam
What Jaffna’s Deadly Epidemics Can — and Cannot — Tell Us About Chemmani

What Jaffna’s Deadly Epidemics Can — and Cannot — Tell Us About Chemmani

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — On 27 November 1825, cholera killed two small girls at the American mission at Uduvil, north of Jaffna town. Harriet Maria Winslow was three years and nine months old. Sarah Jane Spaulding was five. They died on the same day, in the same place, and a tablet at the mission church commemorates the Winslow child and her two siblings. Cholera returned to the peninsula in 1838. The Rev. John M. S. Perry, a missionary of the American Board, died of it on 1
JM Exclusive October 2026
Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam
Chemmani Report Finds Nearly Two-Thirds of the Dead Were Children

Chemmani Report Finds Nearly Two-Thirds of the Dead Were Children

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka, Oct. 21, 2026 — Nearly two-thirds of the 574 people exhumed from the Sittupatti Hindu cemetery at Chemmani, on the outskirts of Jaffna, were infants or children, according to the third interim report of the archaeologists directing the excavation. The report concludes that the site bears greater similarity to formal burial practices than to clandestine burial sites documented elsewhere in the world. Its authors also say their evidence cannot establish how the dead came to be t
JM Exclusive October 2026
Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam
Saudi Arabia Credited God. Bangladesh Read the News.

Saudi Arabia Credited God. Bangladesh Read the News.

In early October, Sweety Akter called her parents in Tangail from a prison in Saudi Arabia. It was one of her monthly calls. She said nothing about a sentence. In one of those last calls, her father later told The Daily Star, she had said she might be released within two months. On Sunday, 11 October, Nazrul Islam made his weekly call to his parents in Brahmanbaria. It lasted two to two and a half minutes. His father says Nazrul told him he was in some trouble. His mother says he gave no sign o
JM Exclusive October 2026
Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam