In ‘A Love Story with a Sad Ending’, the inaugural story of Ambai’s A Night with a Black Spider: Stories (2017), the demon Mahishan is smitten with Devi, who will kill him. He sends his ministers to her, with overtures of love, hoping to win her over, and she responds: “Since she was valorous, she said she was a man, and since Mahishan was speaking of love, he was feminine.” And then, the writer chimes in, with the precise sort of comment that faithful readers have come to expect of her: “In speaking thus, she spoke within the existing parameters of feminine and masculine. If she was a combination of feminine and masculine qualities, why could he too not be a combination of the masculine and feminine?”
C.S. Lakshmi, the pseudonymous Ambai, who has been writing since she was 16, and is 79 this year, has a body of feminist writing in Tamil that rivals no other. Last week, she was named the recipient of the Tata Literature Live! Lifetime Achievement Award that recognises and salutes sustained and outstanding contribution to writing and literature in India. On Saturday, she also was recognised with the Shakthi Bhatt Body of Work prize. The Sahitya Akademi award came in 2021.
The Tamil publishing world believes Ambai to be the language’s first (and abiding) feminist writer, constantly challenging social gender normatives and sometimes, rewriting them. Kannan Sundaram, publisher of Kalachuvadu Publications, recalls his decades-long association with Ambai, and her work over 63 years. “I’d consider Ambai (whom I have known since I was 7 or 8 years old) the first feminist writer of Tamil. There are other writers who had feminist elements in their writing, but I think Ambai was a feminist through and through — in her life and work and activism,” he says. As the writer herself puts it: “I lived as a feminist without compromise.”
