Ambai The 79- time-old pen, who won the Tata Literature Live! Continuance Achievement Award, is seen as the first feminist pen of Tamil, who constantly challenged the gender order In ‘ A Love Story with a Sad Ending ’, the initial story of Ambai’s A Night with a Black Spider Stories( 2017), the demon Mahishan is smitten with Devi, who’ll kill him.
He sends his ministers to her, with preludes of love, hoping to win her over, and she responds “ Since she was manful, she said she was a man, and since Mahishan was speaking of love, he was womanlike. ” And also, the pen chimes in, with the precise kind of comment that faithful compendiums have come to anticipate of her “ In speaking therefore, she spoke within the being parameters of womanlike andmasculine.
However, why could he too not be a combination of the mannish and womanlike? ” If she was a combination of womanlike and mannish rates. Lakshmi, the pseudonymous Ambai, who has been writing since she was 16, and is 79 this time, has a body of feminist jotting in Tamil that rivals no other. Last week, she was named the philanthropist of the Tata Literature Live!
Continuance Achievement Award that recognises and salutes sustained and outstanding donation to jotting 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 pen, constantly grueling social gender normatives and occasionally, rewriting them. Kannan Sundaram, publisher of Kalachuvadu Publications, recalls his decades-long association with Ambai, and her work over 63 times. “ I ’d consider Ambai( whom I’ve known since I was 7 or 8 times old) the first feminist pen of Tamil. There are other pens who had feminist rudiments in their jotting, but I suppose Ambai was a positivist through and through — in her life and work and activism, ” he says. As the pen herself puts it “ I lived as a positivist without concession. ”
Ambai was born in Tamil Nadu in 1944, and secured a Ph D from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She started writing in the 1960s and through the 1970s and the 1980s as the only feminist pen in Tamil. She had to face the flak from the erudite world, also generally upper class and joker.
“ She bore the heat over two long decades, there was so important trash talk and belittling, commentary. nonetheless, she carried on, steadfastly, until the 90s perhaps, when she had some company among feminist pens, ”Mr. Sundaram explains.
Wider followership The incomparable Lakshmi Holmstrom restated her workshop for the world outside the Tamil lingo. In fact,Mr. Sundaram points out, other than Perumal Murugan, Ambai is maybe the only other Tamil pen to have their entire corpus restated into English. Thanks to the restatements, a larger world came to be introduced to her jottings, the world of her characters, the spaces they inhabit, their lingo, their peculiar situations in life, the quotidian, always enlightened with perspective, and occasionally, an always sharp lingo.
Source: www.indianexpress.com
She had a range of characters, well dilate out within the short confines of the format she loved, knew well, and cherished — the short story. Be it the love- lorn demon Mahishan or Thangam Athai who noway ‘ bloomed ’ as a woman, the son- in- law Minakshi who seeks an extension of the kitchen, indeed the fearless investigator Sudha Gupta, her characters are meat and blood; the women may have agency or not, but there’s an underpinning of quiet rebellion, understanding of social structure, a wordless agreement with feminist study, and constantly, they question the gender order.
Ambai’s SPARROW is another achievement. In 1988, she innovated the Sound and Picture Libraries for exploration on Women, to document and library the workshop of women pens and artists, a rare and niche collection that has several calligraphies. As for her jotting, one can only hope she’ll keep the pledge she made in the prolusion to A Night with a Black Spider “ my stories aren’t done. There will be another collection that comes out soon holding onto the tail of this bone . also another bone holding to the tail of that bone.
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