Anna Chandy
Indian judge (1905-1996)
Justice Anna Chandy (1905–1996), also known as Anna Chandi, was the first female judge (1937) and then High Court judge (1959) in India. She was one of the first female judges in the British Empire.
Life
Anna Chandy was born in 1905, in the erstwhile kingdom of Travancore and raised in Trivandrum. She was an Anglican Syrian Christian who embraced Catholicism, in later life.
After obtaining a post-graduate degree from Government Law College, Thiruvananthapuram in 1926, she became the first woman in her state to get a law degree. She was called to the bar and practiced as a barrister from 1929 onwards. In 1931–32, she contested elections to the legislative assembly of Travancore princely state and was elected; she served as a legislator during the period 1932–34. Anna Chandy was the first woman to be a High Court judge in India and one of the first in the whole British Empire to attain this position. Her appointment in 1959 made news in legal circles in the UK, Canada, and other Commonwealth countries, drawing interest from around the world. Legal historians often compare her to Emily Murphy of Canada, who was one of the first female magistrates in the globe.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anna Chandy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.