Who reads Ambai?

I read in the news that "Tamil feminist writer Ambai, whose writings challenge the stereotyping of women, has won this year’s Sahitya Akademi award."

Ambai?

I have been away from the old country for 35 years.  Did I miss reading her when I was in India and reading Tamil magazines?  Or, have I read her stories but forgotten them?  But then did she write in the mainstream magazines that almost always published traditional stories?  Or, was she an an exception like Jayakanthan whose stories were published in those conservative outfits too despite his work and politics being too radical?

It was time to dig deep.

Ambai is only her pen name, adopted at 16 when C.S. Lakshmi began writing Tamil fiction. "In those days it was fashionable to write under a pen name. Besides, I was not fond of my name because down south every child born on Friday is called Lakshmi."

I remember back then many writers used pseudonyms.  A male wrote under the female name of Sujatha.  For that matter, even in serious poetry, unlike Sujatha's potboiler prose, Kanagasabai Subburathnam wrote as Bharathidasan.  Pseudonyms were very popular in Tamil.  For the longest time, I thought that the writer Indira Parthasarathy was a woman!

But, the name Ambai?  A relatively important town near grandmother's village was Ambai, which is short for Ambasamudram.  Is she also from that part of the Tamil world?

Turned out that she is not from that part of my old country.  C.S. Lakshmi adopted as her pseudonym the name of a character in a short story that made a deep impression when she was a young girl.

Maybe Ambai is an author who is not unknown among people.  But, over the years I have observed only a dramatic diminishing of reading.  It seemed like Indians had become obsessed with material economic growth, cricket, and masala movies, and all the tamasha that never ends.  Book-reading has become an endangered human habit in the old country.  Even the news about the Sahitya Akademi Award would not have been read.

When I read that Ambai prefers writing short stories to novels, well, that sealed the deal for me who is a sucker for the short form of storytelling.  I decided to get two books: A collection in Tamil, and another collection of short stories that have been translated to English.

I am all set.

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