Born in Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, Rukma Anil grew up in various places, including the Maldives and the districts of Kanyakumari, Trichy, and Namakkal in Tamil Nadu. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli, and an M.A. in English from Christ University, Bangalore. She has worked with the Azim Premji Foundation and received training in Tamil literature and culture through the Contemporary Tamil Literature and Culture program at the Department of Social Sciences, French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP).
Her research experience includes serving as a research assistant on projects focused primarily on Dalit communities and minority religious institutions. She has translated articles by Palani Kumar on artist profiles and on the lives of the Boom Boom Maattukkaarar community in Tamil Nadu for the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). She participated in the 2024 Summer School for South Asian Literatures in Translation (SALT), where she worked on Kalakkal, a Tamil Dalit memoir by Vidivelli, and is currently translating a Malayalam biography of P. K. Rosy—the first Dalit actress in Malayalam cinema—written by Kunnukuzhi S. Mani.
Rukma’s research is a comparative study of Dalit literatures in Tamil and Malayalam, examining these works in the socio-political contexts of Dravidian and Left politics in the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, respectively. The research seeks to identify key texts, authors, and evolving Dalit identities, situating these literatures within both regional and global literary frameworks.