MATCHBOX

Beyond Erasure: Celebrating Malayalam Cinema’s First Dalit Heroine, P.K. Rosy

By Athmaja Biju

History remembers P.K. Rosy poorly — and only because it failed to erase her completely. As the first Dalit woman in Malayalam cinema, she faced brutal rejection for daring to step outside caste lines. Who was P.K. Rosy? There are many narratives regarding her life; each version a fragile reconstruction from fragments left behind by those who took an interest in her far too late, while her own voice and truth remain entirely absent. Her life story reveals the multilayered erasure of self and identity faced by Dalit women who face the triple burden of class, caste and gender. Denied the basic dignity of living by her own name or following her artistic ambitions, Rosy was stripped of everything– her caste, artistic dreams, cultural roots, family bonds, community ties and ultimately, the self.

P.K. Rosy appears in history books as the first heroine of Malayalam cinema, starring in “Vigathakumaran” (The Lost Child), a 1930 silent film written, produced, and directed by J.C. Daniel who played the lead opposite to Rosy. On the day of the first screening of the film, Rosy was uninvited but still waited outside the theater with a friend, only to face immediate rejection when the upper-caste man designated to inaugurate the film refused to proceed until she was removed from the premises. The film was met with severe backlash and violence as it showed Rosy, a Dalit woman portraying a Nair (one of the upper castes in Kerala) woman on screen. What truly ignited the fury of upper caste men was a scene showing Daniel kissing a flower which fell from Rosy’s hair. In blind rage, the audience tore down the screen, their violence soon evolving into a manhunt. “She was chased away,” her cousin Madhu recounts, as Rosy fled to Thycaud, seeking sanctuary in the drama company building where she once worked. But even there, safety eluded her: “The mob came to Thycaud to set fire to the building,” forcing her to flee once more. On the third night after the film’s opening, the mob set her house ablaze. That night, Rosy escaped to Nagercoil with the help of a Nair lorry driver whom she later married, spending the remainder of her days until her death in 1987 living as the very Nair woman she had been persecuted for portraying.

The Lost Artiste

P.K. Rosy’s artistic spirit burned fiercely despite the oppressive social constraints of her era. According to her family, Rosy was irrepressibly drawn to acting, studying Kakkarashi folk dance drama when she was young and used to perform in plays. Her determination was extraordinary considering the period’s harsh realities: acting was deemed a profession only for “licentious women,” and men typically played female roles on stage. Yet Rosy defied both family pressure and societal moral judgment, secretly developing her craft, impressing Daniel. So deep was her pain and subsequent trauma, that she never shared her artistic past with her own children, burying that part of herself as though it had never existed. She couldn’t bear to revisit the place that had wounded her so deeply. Like Hattie McDaniel, barred from attending the premiere of ‘Gone with the Wind’ and Babasaheb Ambedkar, forced to sit outside his classroom on a lonely bench, Rosy suffered the cruel indignity of being forbidden from watching her own film—a film where she shone as the heroine.

Politics of a Name of One’s Own

Born into a Pulaya family of agricultural labourers in Peyad, Southern Kerala, she was named Rajamma by her parents before J.C. Daniel renamed her P.K. Rosy, an anglicized, glamorous name suitable for the world of Cinema. When she married Kesava Pillai, the lorry driver belonging to the nair caste, she took on yet another name, Rajammal. She lived out her days within an upper-caste family, ties to her old life and community, severed forever. The bitter irony of her life’s second act cannot be overlooked: to escape persecution, she became a Nair woman through marriage, embodying the very identity that had triggered her persecution. Rosy’s transformation from aspiring artist to a woman who concealed her former self exemplifies how caste violence operates beyond physical brutality—it severs connections to one’s origins, community, and dreams. In her enforced reinvention as Rajammal, we witness the crushing price extracted from those who dare to cross boundaries, the silent violence of erasure that continues long after the mobs disperse.

The Parallel Lives Of P.K. Rosy And Gladys Bentley

One cannot ignore the glaring similarities between Rosy’s life and that of Gladys Bentley. Bentley was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance who performed and lived as a masculine-presenting lesbian, wore men’s clothing, and was open about her sexuality in the 1920s-30s. Later, during the McCarthy era, she was pressured to conform, eventually claiming she had been “cured” and marrying a man.

Their lives show how marginalized are forced to mutilate their identities and self itself when faced with violent social rejection and violence. Though separated by geography and circumstance, both women endured the profound trauma of having to deny essential parts of themselves to survive.

Bentley, who was known for her improvised risqué lyrics and signature white tuxedo, carved space for herself as a Black, queer artist who daringly transgressed boundaries of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Yet as McCarthy-era persecution intensified, she publicly renounced her authentic self. Her 1952 Ebony magazine piece ‘I am a Woman Again’ painfully recast her gender expression and sexuality as a “hormone deficiency” and “social maladjustment” that had caused her to “violate the accepted code of morals.”

Similarly, Rosy, who had defied caste restrictions to pursue her passion for performance through Kakkarissi folk drama was forced to abandon her Dalit identity and artistic ambitions after violent backlash to her film role. The cruel irony of becoming a Nair woman through marriage adopting the very identity that had triggered her persecution mirrors Bentley’s retreat into heterosexual presentation.

Both women’s stories expose the violence of erasure: Bentley had at least spoken her own words (however coerced), while Rosy’s voice vanished entirely from historical record. Their transformations weren’t choices but survival strategies in societies that demanded conformity at the cost of authenticity. In their parallel silencings, we witness how oppressive structures force the marginalized to participate in their own erasure, leaving behind fragmented legacies that future generations must painstakingly reconstruct.

Dalit History Month offers us a vital opportunity to look beyond the dominant narrative’s obsession with Rosy as a tragic figure and to capture the extent of violence she and her community was subjected to. What Rosy suffered was the deliberate violence of a society terrified by the sight of a Dalit woman claiming space in art and modernity. In the scattered fragments of Rosy’s life, we find not a tragic heroine, but a resilient woman who survived the collective violence of a caste-crazed society. They ultimately failed to erase her completely. Despite every effort to excise her from cultural memory, her name endures as a question, a challenge, and a reminder. Rosy’s resilience demands more than remembrance; it demands reckoning. In every retelling, every refusal to forget, Rosy reclaims her space and reminds us that survival itself is a form of rebellion.