In 1905, in Elaphi, in what was then the princely kingdom of Travancore in South India, a young girl was born. She was later raised in Trivandrum (now Thiruvanthapuram).1 She was named Anna Chandy. Although an Anglican Syrian Christian by birth, she took to Catholicism much later in her life. Anna saw hardship early on in her life. She lost her father when she was very young, and her mother provided for Anna and her sister by working at a local store. She saw her mother’s struggle to survive financially and to bring up her children in a world that was skewed towards men from an early age, even though Kerala was primarily a matrilineal society.
At home, she learnt how women could take on the mantle of household responsibilities and earn an income. But as she grew, she saw that society around her still considered a woman’s domain to be primarily the home. She saw that women were expected to be subservient to the men in their lives, and that they were not encouraged to be too educated. However, she grew up to defy the norm.
Her princely state was quite progressive for its time (compared to other states). The rulers set great store by women’s education. The queen of Travancore, Maharani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, a fierce advocate for women’s empowerment herself, opened admissions for women in the Government Law College in 1927. Eager to make a mark for herself, the young Anna signed up for a postgraduate degree in law. She was the first woman in her state to do so.
It wasn’t easy; she faced unforeseen hostility from the men in the classroom itself, but she stayed the course, undeterred. She got her postgraduate degree in law in 1929, with distinction, and passed the Bar exam the very same year.2 She immediately began practising as a barrister, with her focus on criminal law, getting much acclaim for the cases she fought.
She was also passionate about women’s rights. In 1930, she founded a magazine on women’s issues, Shreemati, that she also edited herself. It was the first women’s magazine in Malayalam. Through Shreemati, she created a platform to talk about the misogyny that affected women’s lives, and she espoused the causes of widow remarriage and gendered wage inequality, something we are still grappling with today. Back then, her area of concern was the wage inequality for farm workers.3 She was a fervent advocate of women’s right to work, and campaigned for support from other contemporary public figures and intellectuals like Sadasya Thilakan T.K. Velupillai, who authored Travancore Manual and was the first elected deputy speaker of Travancore, to put forth the demand for government offices to institute a quota for women.
To quote her from an argument she made when a fellow legislator opposed a quota for women in government jobs, ‘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.
Thanks to her relentless struggle, women could finally apply for government jobs, as the statute preventing women from working in government positions was abolished. She was one of the first women to fight for women’s right to be in the workforce in India, that too in pre-Independence India. Her strong feminism could also be a product of the matriarchal culture she came from in Kerala as well as the circumstances of her childhood, when she saw how her mother navigated society alone. Her fight for equality was fair to both men and women. In 1935, she took on the law that exempted women from being given the death penalty and questioned its rationale. If women should have equal rights as men, she felt, they should also have equal punishment.
At a time when the words ‘agency’ and ‘consent’ weren’t even considered in the lexicon of women’s rights, Anna Chandy was a fierce advocate of women’s consent. While we are still struggling to get a definitive law on marital rape in twenty-first century India, she took a stand against the law in Travancore which permitted men to force their conjugal rights on their wives, without consideration for the latter’s consent. She was always ahead of her time.
Her stand on bodily autonomy for women stands out for how relatable it is even in contemporary times. To quote her from one of her speeches, ‘Many of our sister-Malayalees have property rights, voting rights, employment and honours, financial independence. But how many have control over their own bodies? How many women have been condemned to depths of feelings of inferiority because of the foolish idea that women’s body is an instrument for the pleasure of men?
To read more, get your hands on Rising 2.0: 20 More Women Who Changed India by Kiran Manral.