Kuriachira, on the edge of Thrissur in central Kerala, was a village in the princely state of Cochin when Sarah Joseph was born there in 1946. She was married at fifteen, while she was still in the ninth standard, and by the ordinary arithmetic of that time and place her education should have ended there. Instead she completed her degrees as a private candidate, became a professor, founded a feminist organisation, and wrote some of the most formally daring fiction in modern Malayalam.

An Education Taken Back

Her early marriage did not end her schooling so much as interrupt it. She took a teacher's training course and began working as a school teacher, and then studied for her bachelor's and master's degrees in Malayalam as a private candidate, sitting the examinations while working and raising a family. She eventually joined the college system and rose to become Professor of Malayalam at the Sanskrit College in Pattambi, from which she later retired.

That trajectory explains a great deal about her writing. She came to literature from outside the ordinary academic pipeline, with a direct knowledge of the domestic labour, dependency and small humiliations that her fiction would later anatomise, and she never wrote about women's lives as an anthropologist would.

Manushi and Pennezhuthu

In the 1980s, based at Pattambi, she founded Manushi, a women's collective that brought together students, teachers and writers. It was not a literary club. Manushi organised against rape, dowry deaths, trafficking and sexual exploitation, and it did so in a Kerala that liked to think of itself as having solved the woman question through literacy statistics.

Out of that milieu came the idea of pennezhuthu, women's writing, which Sarah Joseph did more than anyone to establish as a category in Malayalam. The argument was that women's experience required forms of its own, and that the existing conventions of the Malayalam short story had a male shape built into them. It was contested at the time and remains so, but it changed the terms of literary debate in the language for a generation.

The Fiction

She built her early reputation on short stories, including the collection Papathara, written in a compressed, allusive style that owed something to myth and something to the surreal. Her later turn to the novel produced her best-known work.

Aalahayude Penmakkal, whose title means the daughters of God the Father, is set in a poor Christian settlement on the outskirts of Thrissur that is gradually erased by urban expansion. It is narrated largely through the consciousness of a child, and it is at once a novel about the theft of common land and a novel about faith. It won her the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award and the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award in 2003, and later the Vayalar Award.

The book's power comes from its refusal to choose between the sacred and the material. The settlement is being destroyed by a perfectly ordinary process of urban land acquisition, and the people losing it understand their loss in the language of scripture, because that is the only language available to them. Sarah Joseph writes that collision without condescension towards either side of it, which is why the novel is read as much by theologians as by literary critics.

Mattathi and Othappu completed a loose trilogy. Othappu, whose title means scandal, follows a nun who leaves her convent, and it examines institutional religion, celibacy and female desire with a directness that provoked considerable hostility. Aathi, published in English as Gift in Green, is an ecological novel about a wetland community and the developer who arrives to fill it in. Budhini takes up the true story of a young Santhal woman ostracised by her community after she garlanded Jawaharlal Nehru at a dam inauguration. Ramayana Kathakal retells episodes of the epic from the point of view of its women and its minor characters.

Politics and the Returned Award

She has never separated the writing from public action. In January 2014 she joined the Aam Aadmi Party and contested the Lok Sabha election from Thrissur that year, losing to C. N. Jayadevan. She has campaigned on land rights, on environmental questions in Kerala, and on violence against women.

On 10 October 2015 she returned her 2003 Sahitya Akademi Award, joining the large group of Indian writers who did so that autumn in protest at the killings of rationalist writers and at what she described as a growing climate of fear and diminishing freedom. It was among the more consequential returns, because she was one of the most senior Malayalam writers to act.

Her other honours include the Cherukad Award, the Muttathu Varkey Award in 2011, the O. V. Vijayan Sahitya Puraskaram in 2011 and the Padmaprabha Literary Award in 2012.

Sarah Joseph continues to write and to intervene in public argument from Thrissur, a short distance from Kuriachira. The distance between the fifteen-year-old married off before her school-leaving exams and the writer whose fiction is taught across Indian universities is the point of the story, and she has never allowed anyone to make it sound easier than it was.