The raw sexual imagery that she portrays in her writing is not an effort to be bold or to titillate. Rather, it is a means to give voice to women's emotions as realistically as possible.
But the moral police aren't too happy about it.
So how did the moral police deal with her? C S Lakshmi explains with an incident...
"Once a male Tamil writer wrote to another senior writer that my stories gave him the feeling that I was not physically satisfied and if need be he was willing to do the needful. And generous as that senior writer was, he forwarded the mail to me without absolutely any comments," she recalls.
"The letter angered me just as much as it amused me. The person who wrote the mail was an ordinary writer. So I replied, if a completely satisfied person could write so plain and bad then I better remain unsatisfied," says Lakshmi.
"A woman is taught to believe that her body doesn't exist. Her sexuality is defined in terms of how a man wants it visualised.
And when she starts writing about her body, that's flouting the rules of decency and it's a sign of her shameless desire," she avers."
That's writer Ambai for you. No mincing of words here... what you see is what you get. She gives us a unique perspective into her life and her work.
Why and how did you choose the pen name Ambai?
I started writing at the age of 16 and at that time using a pen name was fashionable. Plus, Lakshmi is a very common name.
I took up the name Ambai, which means goddess in Tamil, after reading a book by well known regional writer Devan. The female character in the book comes to terms with her hidden strength when she starts writing and she uses the pseudo name Ambai. I liked that character very much!
At around the same time I started reading the Mahabharata and the character of Ambai who transforms herself into Shikhandi and kills Bhishma appealed to me. The androgynous quality of that character interested me.
Give us a glimpse into your life and how it helped shape your writing?
I spent the first eight years of my life in Bombay. After which I grew up in Bangalore. So you could say that I had a cosmopolitan upbringing.
Nevertheless, I used to visit Tamil Nadu every couple of years. So I was equally aware of the traditional culture that existed down south and the restrictions it placed on its female populace.
As a child I got to learn more about my cultural background through the Tamil magazines, journals and newspapers that we used to get at home.
Since I had done my schooling up to the sixth standard in a Tamil medium school and spoke the same at home, the affinity to the language was greater than English or Kannada. So when I started writing fiction, it was in Tamil.
My writing was further influenced by my stay in Tamil Nadu while completing an MA. After which I worked as a school teacher in a small village, following a short stay in Chennai before heading to Delhi for my PhD.
Over the course of my doctorate program, I started working as an independent researcher on women's issues and I continue doing it in the position of the director of Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW).
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