Kamala Vasuki

Kamala Vasuki (Vasuki Jeyasankar) is a feminist activist and artist from the North and East of Sri Lanka. She has been part of women’s organizations and networks on the island since the late 1980s. She is a researcher, teacher and organizer on a range of issues of marginalised communities in the society where she lives. She organises on these issues at the local, national and international levels.

As a visual artist her work has archived the history of her times and places. She brings her passion and commitment to her art practice to create spaces for collective art-making in communities. This practice of collective art has become common place, especially in women’s spaces because of Vasuki‘s work over the past three decades. She has written and sings songs which live in the soul of feminists movements and spaces in Sri Lanka today. In Batticaloa, she founded a female troupe of drummers who play the Parai drum, traditionally only played by oppressed caste men. She began and works with the ‘Artists for Non-Violent Living’.

Most recently she has begun working in the area of reviving traditional crops and growing practices as well as environmental justice more broadly. She is working in communities with concerns related to food sustainability and sovereignty with the intention of reviving traditional ways of being which enable a balance between human society and nature.