She is best known for her studies of chattel enslavement of the lower castes in Kerala, which upended the conventional wisdom that there had been no historical slavery in south India.
[3] Her thesis, Changements économiques et sociaux au Kerala: la caste des Pulayas depuis 1800, appeared in 1971.
[3] In Matriliny Transformed: Family, Law and Ideology in Twentieth Century Travancore (1999), she investigated the effects of matrilineal inheritance on Kerala women, which offered some amount of security.
[6] While landholding women continued to be active in management or cultivation of their lands, in several cases they lost their possession post-reform either on widowhood or because of ceilings of ownership, and were able to maintain control only if they had male relatives to support them.
[3] Along the lines of her researches into the effects of agricultural reforms on women, referred to above, she showed (Divided Poor: Study of a Kerala Village, 1981) that the lower caste Pulayas had barely any uplift.
This was rebutted by critics because higher caste landholders had sufficient non-agricultural income, so there was no reason that the Pulayas, so dependent on agriculture, couldn't own more of the land that they cultivated.