C S Lakshmi

Founder

Founder of SPARROW (Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women)

C S Lakshmi is the founding trustee of SPARROW (Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women) (1988)[1], an Indian non-profit working on women & children, arts & culture and education from Mumbai.

C. S. Lakshmi (born 1944) is an Indian feminist writer and independent researcher in women's studies. She has published Tamil fiction since 1962 under the pen name Ambai, reserving her own name for academic work. In 1988 she founded SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women) in Mumbai, an archive that documents the lives and work of Indian women writers, artists and activists and which has become the largest archive of women's history in India.

Early life and education

Lakshmi was born in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, in 1944, and grew up in Bangalore and Mumbai. She took a Bachelor of Arts at Bangalore University and a Master of Arts at Madras Christian College, and completed a PhD at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Career

Writing as Ambai, Lakshmi became a prominent voice in modern Tamil fiction; her short story 'Siragukal Muriyum' (1967) and the collection 'Veetin Mulaiyil Oru Samaiyalarai' (1988) established her reputation. Several of her collections have been translated into English by Lakshmi Holmstrom, including 'A Purple Sea' (1992) and 'In a Forest, a Deer' (2006).

As a researcher she held a Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1981 for a project on an illustrated social history of women in Tamil Nadu, and a Homi Bhabha Fellowship in 1992 for research on women musicians, dancers and painters. She was involved in establishing the Roja Muthiah Research Library. In 1988 she founded SPARROW, based in Mumbai, to collect and preserve oral histories, photographs, manuscripts and recordings relating to Indian women, and she has directed its work since.

Recognition

Lakshmi received the Iyal Virudhu lifetime achievement award from the Tamil Literary Garden in 2008, the Vodafone Crossword Book Award for the translation 'In a Forest, a Deer', the Sahitya Akademi Award in Tamil in 2021 for 'Sivappu Kazhuthudan Oru Pachai Paravai', and in 2023 both the Tata Literature Live! Lifetime Achievement Award and the Shakti Bhatt Award.[2][3][4]

SPARROW (Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women)

Set up in 1988 by scholars C. S. Lakshmi, Neera Desai and Maithreyi Krishnaraj, SPARROW is a Mumbai-based trust that builds a national archive of women's history through oral-history recordings, photographs, print visuals, books and films. It documents the lives of women writers, artists, freedom fighters and workers, runs workshops and school outreach, publishes booklets and translations, and gives the SPARROW Literary Awards to Indian-language women writers.

SPARROW (Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women) reports the following, on its own site: