In the dense green forests of Kallar near Vithura in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, a girl named Lakshmikutty was born in 1943 into the Kani tribe. She was the only tribal girl from her settlement to attend school in the 1950s, studying up to the third standard. Her real classroom, however, was the forest itself, and her first teacher was her mother, a traditional midwife who knew the healing secrets of leaves, roots and bark.

From her mother Lakshmikutty inherited the knowledge of more than five hundred medicinal plants. She memorised every remedy. When a venomous snake bit someone deep in the jungle, or when modern hospitals were hours away, people came to her. She prepared pastes and decoctions from memory, treating snakebites, insect stings and countless other ailments. Over the decades she saved hundreds of lives—many of them from poisonous snakebites—and earned the loving name “Vanamuthassi,” the Grandmother of the Jungle.

She lived simply in a palm-leaf hut, growing medicinal plants around her home. She also wrote poems and plays, taught at the Kerala Folklore Academy, and spoke Sanskrit. Nature, she always said, was her true guru.

One day a young man whose leg had swollen after a snakebite arrived breathless at her door. “Amma, will I live?” he asked, fear in his eyes.

Lakshmikutty looked at him calmly, already crushing the right leaves in her hands. “If you reached me in time,” she answered gently, “the forest will not let you go. Nature has already prepared the medicine. I only give it to you.”

In 1995 the Kerala government honoured her with the Naattu Vaidya Ratna award. In 2018 the President of India conferred upon her the Padma Shri for her lifelong service through traditional medicine. Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of her in his Mann Ki Baat radio address, calling her an inspiration.

From a tribal girl who learned the language of plants at her mother’s side to the quiet forest grandmother who became a national treasure, Lakshmikutty’s life remains a living reminder that the deepest healing often grows wild, free, and full of compassion.