C. S. Lakshmi

Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL) by persuading the University to acquire Roja Muthaiah Chettiar's collection of books and other published material.^[13][14][15] She has been a research Officer in the Indian Council of Historical Research and a college lecturer in New Delhi. In the 1990s, she worked in two research projects – Illustrated Social History of Women in Tamil Nadu sponsored by the Ford Foundation and An Idiom of Silence: An Oral History and Pictorial Study sponsored by the Homi J. Bhabha fellowship. The resulting research has been published as two volumes of the Seven seas & seven mountains series. The first volume, The Singer and the Song (2000), is a collection of interviews with women musicians and the second volume, Mirrors and Gestures (2003), is a collection of interviews with women dancers.^[16][17][18] In 1988, Lakshmi founded SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women) a non-governmental organisation (NGO) for documenting and archiving the work of female writers and artists. SPARROW has published a number of books on women artists and writers. As of 2009, she continues to be the organisation's Director and a member of its board of trustees. She is a current member of the University of Michigan's Global Feminisms Project.^[19] She considers herself as a "feminist who has lived without compromise".^{[1][20][21][22]}