The dialogue on gender and modernity in Kerala has been delegated in the public and academic sphere since the last decades of the twentieth century vis-a-vis its engagements and responses to the social geopolitics. The iconography of the ‘Feminazis’, ‘Feminichis’ and related jargons has seeped through the collective unconscious of the people in the narrative of Kerala, has come to the fore from a deliberation or the lack thereof of navigating the politics and potentials of a movement as of the nature of Feminism. The state has been a sustained witness to a series of ecriture feminine, in the form of generic outlets as life writings in prose and poetry, novels, short stories and social commentary that modified and re-codified its narrative on women and the politics of their existence. From these, the paper would attempt to read and analyse social activist C.K. Janu’s seminal autobiography Mother Forest as a foray into the notion of indigenous feminist iconography and its complicated threads of negotiation with the ideas of modernity and gender roles in the public sphere. While doing so, it would also attempt to place the narrative and its writer in the larger discourse of feminism in the state across time.