A Childhood at Kattoor

Kattoor lies in the low, water-laced country of Thrissur district, a landscape of paddy, backwater channels and small market roads where the seasons are measured by the monsoon and the harvest. Khadija Mumtaz was born there in 1955, into a Kerala that had recently become a state and was already famous for sending its daughters to school in numbers unusual elsewhere in India. That local advantage mattered enormously in her case, because the two things she would eventually be known for, medicine and fiction, both grew out of an education that a village girl of her generation in most other parts of the country could not have expected.

Her early schooling was followed by study at St. Joseph's College in Irinjalakuda, a well regarded women's college a short distance from her home. Reading in Malayalam came alongside the science subjects that pointed towards a professional career, and the habit of reading never loosened its hold. Long before she published anything, she was absorbing the Malayalam novel and short story at a time when both forms were being pushed in new directions, and she was also reading in the religious and historical traditions that would later supply the material for her most ambitious book.

Medicine as a Working Life

Mumtaz went on to the medical college at Kozhikode, where she completed her medical degree and then took a postgraduate qualification in obstetrics and gynaecology. She spent the greater part of her career in government service, eventually holding a professorship in obstetrics and gynaecology at the same Calicut Medical College where she had trained. It was not a sideline to her writing but the centre of her adult life, and it shaped the writing decisively.

A gynaecologist in a busy government hospital sees a cross section of society that few novelists ever encounter: women arriving alone and women arriving surrounded by relatives who speak for them, marriages under strain, poverty, silence, courage and the ordinary daily negotiation between what a woman wants and what she is permitted. That accumulated clinical experience gives Mumtaz's fiction its particular texture. Her women are not symbols in an argument; they are recognisable patients and colleagues, and their dilemmas are described with the unsentimental attention of someone who has sat across a consulting table for decades.

Her professional life ended on a note of principle. In June 2013 she applied for voluntary retirement from government service in protest against her transfer out of Calicut Medical College, choosing to leave rather than accept a posting she regarded as unjust. The episode was widely reported in Kerala and was consistent with the willingness to take a public position that runs through her writing.

The Novelist

Mumtaz came to fiction relatively late and with unusual confidence. Her first novel, Athmatheerthangalil Munginivarnnu, appeared as a serial in the weekly Chandrika before being issued as a book in 2004. The serial form suited her: it placed her work directly in front of a large ordinary readership rather than a literary coterie, and it established from the outset that she intended to write about faith, family and the interior lives of Muslim women in Kerala for that same readership.

Her second novel, Barsa, published in 2007, made her reputation. Set largely among expatriate Indian medical professionals working in Saudi Arabia, it follows a woman who goes to the Arabian peninsula partly in search of the sources of her own faith and finds a far more complicated inheritance than she expected. The novel moves between the immigrant present and the early history of Islam, and it examines with considerable nerve how women's place within a religious tradition has been narrated, remembered and constrained. It was praised for combining a sharp critical intelligence with warmth and humour rather than polemic, and it won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 2010.

Her later books extended the range. Among her published works are:

Athmatheerthangalil Munginivarnnu, her first novel, published as a book in 2004
Barsa, 2007, her best known work
Athuram, 2010
Mathrukam, 2012
Neettiyezhuthukal, 2017

Alongside the novels she has written essays and columns, and her work has been translated for readers outside Malayalam. Other honours include the K. V. Surendranath Literary Award in 2008, the Cherukad Award in 2010 and the Thrissur Sahithya Vedi Award in 2018.

Faith, Argument and a Public Voice

What sets Mumtaz apart in contemporary Malayalam writing is the position she occupies. She writes from inside the Muslim community of Kerala rather than as an outside observer, and she writes as a believer who nevertheless insists on the right to question. Her fiction asks how much of what is presented to women as religion is in fact custom, and it does so by returning to sources rather than by rejecting them. That approach has earned her both admiration and disagreement, and she has engaged with the resulting debate directly, in interviews, essays and public forums.

She has also been a persistent voice on questions of women's health and dignity, subjects on which her medical career gives her unusual standing. When she writes about childbirth, about the pressures placed on young women, or about the everyday indignities of a crowded public hospital, she is describing things she has handled personally, and readers respond to that authority.

From Kattoor Outward

The trajectory from a village in Thrissur district to a professorship at a major medical college and a place among Kerala's significant novelists is not a common one, and Mumtaz has never treated it as a private accomplishment. Her career stands as an argument for the value of accessible education, particularly for girls from communities where higher study was once discouraged, and her fiction returns again and again to the difference that a woman's own knowledge makes to her freedom.

For Kattoor she is a source of quiet local pride, and for Malayalam literature she filled a real gap. Before her, the inner world of Kerala's Muslim women had rarely been rendered with such specificity and such refusal of stereotype, neither romanticised nor reduced to a problem. She wrote it from the inside, in a plain and readable prose, and she did so while working full days in a hospital. That combination of ordinary professional discipline and literary ambition is a large part of why her books continue to be read and argued about.