The village of Kallur, in the Thrissur district of Kerala, is the kind of place that rarely appears in the biographies of celebrated Indian writers. Yet it is where Nalini Jameela was born on 18 August 1954, and where the outline of her later life was drawn: a childhood shortened by poverty, an education broken off almost before it began, and a stubborn intelligence that would eventually make her one of the most widely read Malayalam memoirists of her generation. Her writing carries the texture of that landscape, of small settlements and clay pits and the daily arithmetic of families who live very close to the edge.

A childhood in Kallur

Nalini Jameela's schooling ended in the third standard, when she was around seven years old. What followed was work rather than study. As a child she was put to labour in the clay mines that supplied the tile and brick trade of central Kerala, and later she worked in agricultural fields. This was ordinary for girls of her background in the Kerala of the late 1950s and 1960s, a state that was already building a reputation for literacy and social reform while large numbers of its poorest households remained outside the reach of both. The gap between Kerala's public self-image and the lived experience of women like her would become one of the underlying arguments of everything she later wrote.

Her name itself reflects the plural world she moved through. Nalini is a name from Hindu tradition; Jameela came from a later phase of her life among Muslim neighbours and companions. She has kept both, refusing the tidy single identity that Indian public life usually demands of a woman before it agrees to listen to her.

Widowhood and the turn her life took

She married young. When she was twenty-four her husband died of cancer, leaving her with two small children, no property and no reliable income. The options available to a barely literate widow in rural Kerala at that time were few and badly paid. It was in these circumstances that she entered sex work, introduced to it by another woman in the same situation. Her first years in that life brought her into repeated contact with the police, and the violence and humiliation she encountered were not incidental to the work but a direct consequence of the law and the social contempt around it. That distinction, between the work itself and the abuse that the law made possible, became the intellectual core of her later activism.

She has also spoken of the ordinary parts of her life that rarely fit the stereotype: raising children, running small businesses, holding a household together. In the 1990s she went back to school as an adult, studying at the government school in Kallur and continuing until the twelfth standard, decades after she had first been forced to leave.

Organising and the camera

Nalini Jameela's public work began through health outreach. In the 1990s, HIV prevention programmes across India began recruiting sex workers as peer educators, chiefly to distribute condoms and information. She and her colleagues in Kerala pushed those programmes far past their original brief, arguing that health could not be separated from legal protection, police accountability and the right to organise. From 2001 she served as coordinator of the Sex Workers Forum of Kerala, and she went on to be associated with several non-governmental organisations working on women's rights and public health.

She also picked up a camera. In 2000 she took part in a camera-training workshop for sex workers held in Thailand, and on returning she began documenting the lives of the women she worked alongside. Her first documentary, Jwalamukhikal, was completed in 2002, and a second film, A Peep Into The Silence, followed in 2004. These were not films made about a community by outsiders; they were made from inside it, by someone who did not need permission to enter the rooms she was filming.

The book

In 2005 she published her memoir in Malayalam, Oru Lymgikathozhilaliyude Atmakatha. Its reception was extraordinary and largely unexpected. Thirteen thousand copies were sold and six editions printed within a hundred days, and the Malayalam edition eventually passed forty thousand copies. The book was argued over in newspapers, on television panels and in living rooms, partly for what it said and partly because it refused the two roles Indian readers were prepared to grant such a narrator: the penitent and the victim. She wrote instead as a working woman describing an occupation, its economics, its dangers and its small dignities.

The English translation by the historian J. Devika appeared in 2007, and a French translation by Sophie Bastide-Foltz followed in 2008. The memoir was subsequently rendered into several Indian languages, among them Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi, carrying a specifically Kerala argument into a national conversation. In 2018 she published a second book, Romantic Encounters of a Sex Worker, which was likewise translated into English and other Indian languages.

Standing

Her work has been recognised beyond the world of activism. She received a Special Jury Award at the Kerala State Film Awards for her contribution to the film Bharatha Puzha, and her life and the reception of her memoir were the subject of the documentary Sex, Lies and a Book, made in 2013 as a co-production involving the Public Service Broadcasting Trust.

What makes Nalini Jameela significant is not sensation but authorship. She belongs to a small group of Indian writers who came to literature from outside every institution that usually produces it, and who insisted on describing their own lives rather than being described. From a clay pit in Kallur to a bookshelf in half a dozen languages is a long distance, and she covered it by writing plainly about things Indian publishing had preferred to leave unsaid.