[4] Sivaraman played a major role in publicizing the atrocities of the Keezhvenmani massacre of 1968 and bringing the incident to international attention through her articles and essays.
[7] Sivaraman was amongst the first to visit the site of death of forty-four dalit women agricultural laborers and children who were killed when they were leading a strike demanding higher wages.
[5] Sivaraman also played a crucial role in Vachathi mass rape case of 1992, where officials from the forest and revenue departments as well as the police departments raped and assaulted tribal women and young girls in the village of Vachathi in Dharmapuri district of Tamil Nadu.
[11][12] Her social justice themed works were published in the Economic and Political Weekly, and other publications including the Mainstream, and the Radical Review.
[8] She co-founded the socialist periodical Radical Review in 1969 along with lawyer turned politician P. Chidambaram and journalist N. Ram.
[8] Some of the other topics that Sivaraman wrote on included the agrarian crisis, the Dravidian movement, and workers unions and labour issues.
[8] A film based on Sivaraman's life and activism, Fragments of the Past, was made by film-maker and historian Uma Chakravarti in 2013.