- Lived:
- born 14 March 1958 in Puthupatti, a village in the deep south of Tamil Nadu (today's Virudhunagar district) — and Tamil Nadu is where the whole life has happened: village, convent, classroom, page (living, as of September 2026)
- Field:
- Tamil literature — the founding voice of Dalit women's writing in Tamil; autobiography, fiction, short stories
- The Big Idea:
- In 1992 a former nun wrote the first autobiography by a Dalit woman in Tamil — Karukku — in her own village's spoken Dalit Tamil, refusing literary Tamil entirely, and named a double exclusion no Indian institution had admitted: caste alive and well inside the Christian Church.
- In their words:
- events of her life, she writes in the book's preface, kept "cutting me like karukku, and making me bleed" — the serrated palmyra leaf of her title (tr. Lakshmi Holmström; as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- A woman who had lost her vocation, her home and her income sat down with a notebook and wrote her life in the dialect she had been taught to be ashamed of — and that act of testimony opened a literature, embarrassed a Church, and is now taught in universities around the world.