The Forest's Daughter

C. K. Janu began her working life at seven, on someone else's land. She ended the twentieth century leading Kerala's largest Adivasi land-rights movement. The story between those two points is one of the most consequential — and least written — chapters in modern Indian political history.

Drawing on years of field reporting from Wayanad, oral histories from Muthanga, and previously unpublished government correspondence, The Forest's Daughter reconstructs Janu's life as both biography and testimony. It is a book about a forest, a woman, and the country that has still not fully heard either.