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A.V. Kuttimalu Amma

Jail rules said no infants. She quoted the law back at the officers, and kept her two-month-old daughter with her in prison.

A.V. Kuttimalu Amma. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

📑 Contents

A.V. Kuttimalu Amma was born on 23 April 1905, into the Anakkara Vadakkathu family, in Palakkad district, South Malabar.
She began public life in 1931, as a Khadi and Swadeshi worker. In April that year, she organised a picketing of foreign cloth shops, alongside fellow activist Margaret Pavamani.
In 1932, during the Civil Disobedience Movement, she led a procession of women through Calicut. She carried her own 2-month-old daughter, breaking a British ban order on public assembly.
She was arrested and sentenced to two years of rigorous imprisonment. Prison staff tried to separate her from her infant, but she cited the relevant rules and kept her daughter with her.
In 1936, she was nominated to the Madras Legislative Assembly. She later won the seat by actual election, a decade on, in 1946.

During the Individual Satyagraha movement in 1940, she was arrested again and imprisoned for a year.
During the 1942 Quit India Movement, she was detained for two years, at the Presidency Jail for women. She was finally released in 1944.
She was married to Kozhipurath Madhava Menon, who served as a minister representing Malabar in the Madras government, and was himself a former KPCC President.
After her release in 1944, she took up the task of organising Congress across Malabar. She later served a term as Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president.
She was also a member of the Calicut Municipal Council and of the All India Congress Committee (AICC). She served as president of the Poor Home Society, Calicut.

Kuttimalu Amma’s insistence on keeping her infant with her in jail is a specific, documented act. It shows how women freedom fighters navigated activism and motherhood together, not as separate, sequential phases.
Her three arrests span a full decade, from 1932 to 1942, across three separate campaigns: Civil Disobedience, Individual Satyagraha, and Quit India. This shows sustained, repeated commitment, not one continuous stretch behind bars; between arrests, she was free enough to be nominated to the Assembly in 1936.
In her later years, she served as president of the Hindi Prachar Sabha, and established orphanage homes in Malabar.
Her post-independence roles show a common pattern among freedom fighters. Many moved into long institutional-building careers after 1947, rather than simply retiring from public life.
Kuttimalu Amma and Accamma Cherian were near-contemporary Kerala women leaders. Both led banned marches against colonial-era authority within a few years of each other, in neighbouring Malabar and Travancore.
She died on 14 April 1985, at age 79.