The risks of speaking out were underlined during that period. Shortly after a local girl was raped and murdered, Ms. Ammini said she and two other women marched into the office of a senior police official and called for the arrest of the men responsible for the crime.

“They were siding with the criminals,” she said.

Instead, a few days later, the police arrested Ms. Ammini, she said, accusing her of attacking a man and knocking out one of his teeth. After a night locked in the police station, she escaped by jumping from the building’s first floor.

(Ms. Ammini said she was not convicted in the “fake case.”)

The first in her family to attend college, Ms. Ammini gravitated to leftist circles at the University of Calicut and joined the Communist Party of India. She also met her future husband, K.V. Hariharan, a party member, bonding with him over books by Pablo Neruda and humanist writers.

“Even his love letters were serious,” Ms. Ammini said.

With little money, Ms. Ammini wore a $2 sari to her wedding in a building called “Freedom Fighters Hall.” A few years later, she gave birth to a daughter, B.H. Olga, naming her for Olga Benário Prestes, a German Communist who was killed in a Nazi gas chamber.