Anna Chandy (1905–1996)

Kriti Omprakash

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Archiving Feminisms in South Asia

4 min readMay 23, 2019

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The first woman to become a High Court judge in India, and the British Commonwealth

The early decades of the 20th Century saw greater numbers of young men and women striving to obtain western education. However, access to education was firmly dependent on one’s social location — caste, class, gender, and even location, played a crucial role in determining this access.

The landscape of Kerala’s colleges, even though the state was home to several communities that were matrilineal in structure, continued to be dominated by men. This was particularly true with regards to the field of law. However, the Regent of Travancore, who was herself a woman –Maharani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi –, opened the door for women in the Government Law College, Trivandrum. This reform led to the admission of Anna Chandy, who would not only complete her post graduate degree with Distinction, she would also go on to become the first woman to become a High Court judge in India, and the British Commonwealth.

Anna Chandy belonged to a Syrian Christian family in Trivandrum, the capital of the Travancore state. Born in 1904, Anna’s father passed away when she was very young, leading to her mother seeking employment at a local school to support Anna and her sister.

Following the reform allowing admissions to women in the Government Law College, Anna faced stiff opposition from her family when she revealed her intent to pursue law. Undeterred she went on to enroll herself for a post graduate degree and, at the end of three years, graduated with Distinction. In 1929, she began practicing as a barrister and gained a formidable reputation for her handling of criminal cases.

In 1930, Anna attempted to enter politics by standing for the elected representative body of the Travancore State but lost, largely due to a sustained slander campaign linking her with the Dewan of the state. Refusing to admit defeat, she contested again in the following year and won the seat for tenure of two years from 1932–34.

Throughout this time, Anna continued to be vocal about the subject of women’s rights. Her debate with her fellow legislator, the intellectual and judge Sadasyatilakam T.K. Velu Pillai, on the subject of women’s employment has been well documented. Pillai opposed the entry of women into government jobs. To counter his argument, Anna remarked in the Assembly, “From the elaborate petition, it is clear that the plaintiff’s immediate demand is to ban all efforts by women to gain employment, on the grounds that they are a bunch of creatures created for the domestic pleasures of men, and that their lives outside the hallowed kitchen-temples will harm familial happiness.”

It was her determined campaigning that led to the removal of the barriers preventing women from being employed in government jobs. Besides this, Anna also started a journal, “Shrimati” which sought to document and further the cause of women’s rights.

In 1937, Sir C.P. Ramaswami Iyer, the Dewan of Travancore, appointed Anna the munsif of Travancore, making her the first female judge in India. She set another precedent in 1959, when she was appointed to the Kerala High Court, becoming the first female High Court judge in the British Commonwealth.

During her stint as a barrister, as well as during her time as a lawyer, Anna was a fierce proponent of equal rights for men and women, and spoke extensively on this subject. In 1935, she argued against the law, which exempted women from the death penalty. In the same year, she also made a speech in which she highlighted the peculiar situation of Malayalee women who were entitled to property rights, voting rights, and financial independence, but still lacked agency over their own bodies with regard to conjugal rights.

Anna retired from the High Court in 1967, going on to serve in the National Law Comission. As a member of the Law Commission, Anna had also argued against the provision on adultery in the Indian Penal Code, stating that the provision did not adequately represent the woman’s status within the marriage and discriminated on the basis of gender. She passed away in 1996, two decades before the Supreme Court of India finally struck down the provision.

References

Anna Chandy (1905–1996)

Written by Kriti Omprakash