Seated in a rocking chair on the veranda, with an oil lantern on the table beside her, is Sarah Joseph. Behind her, the house is almost entirely books: glass-fronted shelves packed two rows deep, more stacked on the floor and across the table where she works. She has often said that writing is her life, that she cannot imagine a day without reading a few pages or writing a few lines. The house looks like the inside of that sentence.
But what she wants to talk about is love. The married kind and the other kind. She speaks of both without lowering her voice, saying things that many women in Kerala, whether her age or much younger, would still hesitate to say aloud.
“Love was a crime,” she says. “Before marriage a crime. Outside marriage a crime. Always a crime.”
Sarah lived a quieter version of the same punishment.
In 1961, when she was in Class IX, she was pulled out of school and married to a man much older than her. She knew nothing of marriage, love or desire. She had been a town girl who could identify every blade of grass in her yard, every flower that grew there. She climbed between two jackfruit trees and lay looking up at clouds drifting overhead.
Marriage took her to eight acres of paddy on a hill — a farming household with no neighbours nearby, no electricity, no bus service, and a house with a cow-dung floor. At first, the view held her. Soon it no longer did. What remained, she says, was a sadness she now recognises as depression, though she had no language for it then.
One afternoon, her daughter Geetha, then two years old, sat in the cow dung and began sliding across the floor. Watching her, Sarah, who was 19, made a decision. Her children had a right to something else, and that she would be the one to go and get it.
It took a decade.
She walked 3.5 kilometres to school each day, managed a household built on relentless labour, cared for her children, and studied whenever she could find the time. She became a teacher, later cleared the Public Service Commission examination, and eventually joined a college as a lecturer. Somewhere along the way, her father died.
She looks back at that decade now and cannot account for it. “It was I who did all this,” she says, almost as though she is describing a stranger.
The public story is well known: the girl who escaped an isolated marriage to become one of Malayalam’s most celebrated writers, winning nearly every major literary honour in the language. But she would rather talk about the private story — the marriage she was handed at 15, and the writing that everyone praises came straight out of it.
The institution runs on its own rules, she says. “There is no democracy in it. No love. If love happens, that is luck.”
She wrote a story called Scooter: a husband, a wife, a child, riding together, the two adults tied like bullocks pulling opposite ways, moving forward only because there is one scooter and no choice.
Women of her age, she says, searched for love the way people search for a gap in a wall. She admits she did the same – in secret, in fear, believing all the while that she was a thettukaari, a woman in the wrong.
Many women lived similar lives, she says. Even she hesitated until the Gen Z gave her the courage to say these things loud.
“Madhavikutty could write love the way she did because of the Calcutta house she grew up in and the air in it. A girl raised under mothers who taught her to take the dust off her husband’s feet and put it on her own head does not get to write it,” she says. “We got to hide a hint in a story and hope one reader finds it.”
What saved her was what she calls “don’t care”. She refused to perform shame for the people standing around waiting to name the crime.
On being asked what that love felt like, her voice softens.
“It was a mad thing,” she says. “It was madness, not fullness.”
She reaches for Dostoevsky, recalling the writer who refused to wish away his epilepsy. “It gripped like an octopus. It went deep, it did harm, and it never once let poverty or illness reach me.”
She wrote a story called Pranayam (Love). Read it, she says, and you will understand. In it, a lover walks up to you with a knife to kill you, for no reason at all. That, she says, is what love is like.
In an interview with malayalam.indianexpress.com, Sarah speaks with ease about extramarital desire, tradwives and premarital sex, in a vocabulary that often sounded closer to that of a 20-year-old.
On being told about a tradwife reel, she says knew about it already. She knows about OnlyFans too, about women who have decided their body is their only wealth and sell the sight of it online.
They are our children, she says. She watches them. Her granddaughter studied at VIT, worked in Bangalore, and now lives in the US. The first time Sarah saw her wearing short clothes, she says, she felt the old discomfort, the idea of clothing that has to break in you before it lets you breathe. Then she watched her granddaughter move through the world, unconcerned about her clothes.
It reminded her of her own small rebellion.
She never liked wearing a saree, a garment she describes as the “six yards that cover you and expose you at once”. After retirement, she stopped wearing it altogether. Women of her generation, she says, had their thighs pinched blue for letting their knees drift apart, and sat with their legs pressed together for life. These children, she says, took the armour off and do not feel it there.
She came to see her own body with similar acceptance. Vitiligo first appeared on her face in her forties and then spread to her whole body. She says she got over that too, and saw it as a shortfall of melanin and nothing more, and the only trouble it ever gave her was the thought that it might unsettle a stranger seated next to her on a bus.
Marriage, she says, was the least democratic institution she knew, where the women would find herself seeking permission for the smallest decisions. And when she sees today’s young adults, who are unmarried and do not see the problem, she admires them. “Her body is hers.
She talks about the Gen Z protesters on the streets, reading the Constitution, turning the police barricades into a train of wheels to play with, singing Jana Gana Mana.
When the feminist activist organisation Manushi organised marches in the 1980s, she had wished for girls on bicycles to lead. Out of fear, they held back. When girls gave speeches, they were mocked for their feminine voice. Now the girls have the road, she says.
She says today’s youth will come and they will practise what the Constitution preached. “We the people. Not we the Hindu, not we the Christian. No one above them.”
That conviction, that the books belong to everyone, is something she has based her writing on.
She spent decades taking the country’s myths back for the people they were used against.
She has rewritten the Ramayana from the perspective of Shurpanakha, imagining her not as a demoness but as an independent woman whose mutilation sets the epic’s violence in motion.
“Now, who is the demon?,” she asks. In another reading of the epic she argues that the vanaras (monekys) of Kishkindha were not monkeys but a tribe, and vanara was only their emblem.
Sarah Joseph has rewritten the Ramayana from the perspective of Shurpanakha. (Photos by Sumiesh S and Sajith OK/The Indian Express)
This is why critics had to coin a new word in Malayalam to mark her writing: pennezhuthu, women’s writing. But the label, she says, soon hardened into a way of confining women writers.
It has nothing to do with gender, she says. “It is politics. A woman telling her own experience in her own language, quarrelling with the order that shut her out, gathering in everyone that order threw away,” she says.
To write Budini, one of her recent novels, she went to Jharkhand, researching the story of the Santhal girl who garlanded Jawaharlal Nehru at a dam and was cast out by her own people, who read the garland as a marriage outside the community.
To write Cara, set at the Dead Sea, she went to Jordan. She went off the highway and through the wilderness, down to the lowest point on the surface of the earth, no person, no animal, no grass, only black and red hills and a desert lying in waves.
Looking back, she thinks their generation set out to change how women lived, and what changed instead was the men. Feminism made the man who was raised never to touch a broom ask who he was to make anyone obey. He came down a step. She will not say he climbed. He came down to where the wife was standing.
On being asked if she has any regrets, anything she would correct, she says “none”. “We could not say no. What is done is done.”
Sarah Joseph returned the Sahitya Akademi Award she received for Aalahayude Penmakkal. (Photos by Sumiesh S and Sajith OK/The Indian Express) 
Sarah Joseph has rewritten the Ramayana from the perspective of Shurpanakha. (Photos by Sumiesh S and Sajith OK/The Indian Express)
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