Ambai, the Tamil feminist writer on how music, life and cinema weave their way into her writings.
Most of your writings deal with the politics of the family and the language of women. Could you elaborate on that?
Basically, my stories are about communication, relationships; about fleeting moments. These fleeting moments, which I live and observe, I weave into stories. Politics of the family is a despairing thought to deal with. I look at the family as an institution which has a discrimination against women. As an institution, it’s patriarchal. So it places women in certain ways within its construct. So I’m basically trying to look at women who are breaking those barriers or women who have stayed in it and how women function within this family institution.
Do these stories stem from personal experiences?
They don’t necessarily. I think that even if you internalise somebody else’s experience, it becomes personal. Everything I write is subjective; it’s from our experiential world. I don’t live it, but I make it my own.
Back when you started off, what kind of reception did your writings receive?
Popular magazines which, back then, would set limits to what women can write. My early writing was published in these magazines which dealt with slightly different themes but not entirely different in style. When I wrote a story which was a little offbeat, had a new tone, it would get sent back. I thought that probably something must have been wrong with my writing. That’s when I went to Delhi. I sent the rejected piece to a journal there. They agreed to publish it without changing the language and tone.
The research you did on women artistes in India, that’s also a really massive one. Can you just talk a little about it?
I got a Homi Bhabha Fellowship in 1992-1994, and I did a project called ‘The Idiom of Silence.’ It was on women musicians, dancers and painters. It was to understand how women perceive their lives, to understand their lives from what they’ve spoken and also from what they’ve not spoken. Because very often we’re not able to put into words everything that has happened in our lives. Very often, we have to couch it in silence. It was a way of understanding oral history, actually.
What were your findings from this research?
I have understood that oral history has to do with many different tellings of one life. If different people interview a person, you may get different perspectives, although the events may be the same. Every time it’s narrated, it may be narrated differently. There is no question of thinking of authenticity or veracity because oral history has to do with memory and recall. And very often, you recall a memory differently at different stages of life. Like a woman who has delivered a child will talk about the child. If you interview her after fifty years, she may mention it only as an incident. So memory and recall depends on at what stage you intervene in a person’s life. Also, how history has changed during that time. For example, there’s an old musician called Gangubai Hangal. I asked her, when a particular musician sang very well in a concert, did she write and tell her that she enjoyed her music? She was confused. She said, “But why should I write?” She understood communication very differently. She’d probably tell that musician if she met her, ‘I heard your concert and it was great’. But my generation believed in writing and appreciating. So we were at different stages of life and a totally different generation. If I ask the same question to a very young artiste now, she would probably say, ‘Yeah, I just tweeted her’. Oral history is not static; it is changing all the time. The contents don’t change, but the perspectives are changing all the time. If a person reads the same interview after twenty years, they would look at a person’s life very differently from the way I saw. This project was basically to understand oral history and how women talk about their lives and what happens in women’s lives that don’t come out in the open. Things that have remained hidden in the crevices of their lives…
Speaking of how people find your story beautiful, you use a lot of colours in your writing. For example, a deer is yellow and black; so is that symbolic of something?
You know, even if you see ancient Sangam poetry, there are very beautiful descriptions of animals and birds and colours…
Most of your stories don’t seem to have an ending to them too. Is that for a particular reason?
My stories are not linear stories. They have no beginning or ending because I think that there are no endings to some things. Ending is a perception too. I think of stories as alap in music, which is the rendition of a raga. First you elaborate the raga, then the song happens. I think of stories like that, where you can expand the notes and take the notes to many places. Music can keep resonating. Stories are also like that. And somehow music is the background of my stories. I feel that there is nothing like a beginning or an ending even in everyday life, that’s why I’m not able to write linear stories that end in a particular way, either happily or sadly, it ends in a particular moment in life but that is not the real ending.
Could you talk a little more about the music in your writing? How does it all come together?
My mother was a musician. And I started learning it very early in life. My mother also played the veena. Well, I live near the sea, and the sea and mountains fascinate me. I’m also fascinated by cinema. My work is so visual also because I learned dance. In dance you have to express yourself and make sure that people understand what you show on your face. And the fact that when we listen to certain elaboration of raga in music, that music creates images in you. It takes you to places, like certain kinds of music make you feel you’re in the mountains, and some as if you’re floating on water, that kind of a thing. That and this love for cinema – I feel they’re all combined in somehow becoming part of my writing.
Amongst the upcoming Tamil writers, whose works do you respect?
There are so many women writers and poets like Kutti Revathy, Malathi Maithry; then there is a writer called Thamizselvi who writes novels. There are also many writers like Bama, Hari Krishnan, Thenmozhi, Vaasanthi, a whole lot of them. There are so many good writers.
So what are you working on now?
I’m working on another collection of short stories.
