<h1 class="centre">This collection of profiles covers four women in distinct fields, who have been the architects of women’s liberation. This could mean being firmly situated in collective action, political justice, and legal wins, or in the quieter spaces of self and sex. We talk loosely about ‘women’s movements’ and ‘the patriarchy’ as if they are as vast and unpinnable as air. But these women have found particularities from which they are fighting to breathe afresh. The work is vertiginous, and the path is fraught. Of course it is. This collection asks what it means to sustain a career fighting against gravity for freedom. It asks how cultural, political, economic, and sexual injustices can be met with somatic bravery, intellectual hard work, and joy as much as resilience. Looking to fight the good fight? This is what (some) resistance looks like.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">“If you ask me what is at the core of what I write, it isn’t about ‘rights’, it’s about justice. Justice is a grand, beautiful, revolutionary idea.” - Arundhati Roy</h1>
<h1 class="centre">I first encountered Flavia Agnes in my 11th-standard Sociology class. We passed around her short autobiography, written in 1984— My Story...Our Story of rebuilding broken lives—paging through her knife-like, unadorned account of surviving domestic violence. Forty years after its publication, when I meet Flavia, I see the same conscious public positioning of intimate stories and journeys; the ‘my’ of her life cannot be separated from the ‘our’ of the community. Eyes lighting up when I tell her we all studied her work, “good, good,” she says, “that makes me happy.” It is difficult to overstate the force one feels behind each of her words, welded by years of strength, service, and indelible power.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Lawyer, writer, activist, and everything in between, Flavia Agnes has spent decades turning her own experiences into a blueprint for legal and activist intervention. In 1990, she founded Majlis Legal Centre, a legal resource centre based in Mumbai. She understands that justice cannot exist in a vacuum—that the law, left to its own devices, is inert. “Once the law comes into place, unless you work on implementation, it doesn’t matter,” she says. “You have to work out a mechanism to reach the people who need it most.”</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Agnes was in a mentally and physically abusive marriage for over a decade before she could carve out her exit. At the time, Indian divorce laws under Christian personal law offered little recourse for women in violent marriages. “As a Christian, I was not entitled to divorce on the grounds of cruelty,” she says, with a palpable sense that the legal and emotional landscape she is describing is extremely far away from our conversation today, in large part because of her life’s work.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Majlis and Supporting Survivors</h1>
<h1 class="left">It took multiple attempts, but Agnes finally extricated herself from her marriage and then went to college to get a degree in Sociology in 1980, and then an LLB in 1988. Ground from her own experiences and participation in the women’s movement in Bombay in 1980, she saw that legal intervention required more than just courtroom advocacy. “Most of the time when they [resources to victims filing complaints] say they are giving help, it is only counselling outside the court, what a victim needs is legal support within.” Majlis was conceived as a space that could provide both — not just litigation, but comprehensive socio-legal support, including counselling, job training, and emotional care. Majlis has provided legal aid to over 50,000 women.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Victims of interpersonal (domestic) abuse approach Majlis, while the police refer those of sexual violence. Methodically, Agnes constructs the workings of the organisation and the profiles of women it serves. She notes that domestic violence victims tend to belong to middle-class or lower-middle-class, seeking help of their own volition. Contrarily, she characterises: “Sexual violence cases? Extremely low-income. The victim may not even know she’s been abused, she may be very young, she may not understand what an FIR is.” Since sexual violence cases are tried in a criminal court, her job is to prepare the girl or woman to answer questions without being intimated or slipping into contradictions. Agnes charts the tension of the courtroom and how much hand-holding is required to come out of it with a win.</h1>
<h1 class="left">When asked about the typology of cases requiring the gravest support, she comments on how disturbing child custody cases are. Agnes describes the manipulation, the child’s compromised state, and how important it is that women are physically with the children of whom they are fighting for custody. Then, she says minors are tricky in general: in cases of consent (in India, the age of consent is 18), she is left contemplating the ambiguous spaces of whether there was coercion of some kind, or whether the girls had entered into a relationship that their parents simply didn’t approve of. Most of these came out when the girls would go to the hospital for something casual, like a stomach ache, and the doctors would find out they were pregnant. These cases were particularly tricky, Agnes says, for the reasons you might expect - social biases against girls having sex outside marriage, difficulty in establishing that there was no indeterminacy in the power dynamic, and the fraught identity binds of Indian ‘dating.’</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Growing Into the Fight</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Hearing the unmediated awe in my voice, Agnes decides to volunteer an admission: “This work is taxing,” she says, sternly. “There are cases I have handled where, after everything, the woman goes back to her husband. It feels like a big letdown.” The reality of social and familial pressure means that the law can only do so much. “You can’t live her life; she has to live it herself.”</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Agnes’ relationship with the women she works with has not come with professional distance or detachment. Her choices have been made with a calculus that included the wider community of women and their political liberation. Agnes’ widely-read Femina column was the first of its kind, where she wrote in a simple question-and-answer format in an effort to reach as many women as possible. She viewed the writing as a necessary companion to start a conversation that could then be addressed through policy, legal support, and economic agency.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">“In our generation, we did everything—we litigated, we wrote, we counselled. There was no roadmap, and we were just trying to understand the system,” she says, with no nostalgia, only a persuasive, blatant outline of what change feels like. “This generation of lawyers and activists has it easier—the process is more streamlined. Now, people specialise in something. They don’t go for demonstrations, they do professional work.” There’s a clear-eyed recognition of how activism has transformed and professionalised, and, if along the way it has lost some of its emotional exigency, Agnes seems proud of that fact. The entrapment of sleepless nights over trials she had no control over, and the unyielding investment in getting justice for her clients has been more than a gift to the women of India; it has been real, all-consuming work.</h1>
<h1 class="left">To Write is to Hope for More Writing</h1>
<h1 class="left">Agnes has seen the law and public’s expanded view on domestic violence, and increased awareness and belief in women who come forward. But the newspapers still pile up violence in print and the films still turn girls into painted moving bodies. The fight has become more complex over the years—"Today, just resisting patriarchy is not enough,” she says, looking to the future, asking for resistance that can evolve to meet the cultural moment’s injustices. “We have to fight for secularism, minority rights, and environmental justice.”</h1>
<h1 class="left">The near-constant invasion of gruesome articles, incredulous word-of-mouth stories, and traumatic lived experiences as a woman make it difficult to imagine sustaining a life combatting the ubiquitous. Agnes agrees that this fight has been devastating, saying, “I feel very depressed.” But right from the My Story… Our Story autobiography, her unflappable duty and bravery won out against defeatism: “I had to succeed in this process. Because if I became a failure, all hope would be lost. I was so public. There was a great thing at stake for me. The price I’ve paid is worth it.” Indeed, the price has been steep. But the architecture she has built—of resistance, of reform, of a future where the law can serve the most vulnerable—remains standing.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Credits:</h1>
<h1 class="left">Editor-in-Chief: Kshitij Kankaria</h1>
<h1 class="left">Words by: Sanjana Sheth</h1>
<h1 class="left">Digital Editor: Shriya Zamindar</h1>
<h1 class="left">Managing Editor: Anurag Sharma</h1>
<h1 class="left">Art Director: Tia Chinai</h1>
<h1 class="left">Graphic Designer: Rishika Sikder</h1>
<h1 class="left">G Ode Team:</h1>
<h1 class="left">Creative Direction: Nimi Raja</h1>
<h1 class="full">This collection of profiles covers four women in distinct fields, who have been the architects of women’s liberation. This could mean being firmly situated in collective action, political justice, and legal wins, or in the quieter spaces of self and sex. We talk loosely about ‘women’s movements’ and ‘the patriarchy’ as if they are as vast and unpinnable as air. But these women have found particularities from which they are fighting to breathe afresh. The work is vertiginous, and the path is fraught. Of course it is. This collection asks what it means to sustain a career fighting against gravity for freedom. It asks how cultural, political, economic, and sexual injustices can be met with somatic bravery, intellectual hard work, and joy as much as resilience. Looking to fight the good fight? This is what (some) resistance looks like.</h1>
<h1 class="full">“If you ask me what is at the core of what I write, it isn’t about ‘rights’, it’s about justice. Justice is a grand, beautiful, revolutionary idea.” - Arundhati Roy</h1>
<h1 class="full">I first encountered Flavia Agnes in my 11th-standard Sociology class. We passed around her short autobiography, written in 1984 — My Story...Our Story of rebuilding broken lives — paging through her knife-like, unadorned account of surviving domestic violence. Forty years after its publication, when I meet Flavia, I see the same conscious public positioning of intimate stories and journeys; the ‘my’ of her life cannot be separated from the ‘our’ of the community. Eyes lighting up when I tell her we all studied her work, “good, good,” she says, “that makes me happy.” It is difficult to overstate the force one feels behind each of her words, welded by years of strength, service, and indelible power.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Lawyer, writer, activist, and everything in between, Flavia Agnes has spent decades turning her own experiences into a blueprint for legal and activist intervention. In 1990, she founded Majlis Legal Centre, a legal resource centre based in Mumbai. She understands that justice cannot exist in a vacuum — that the law, left to its own devices, is inert. “Once the law comes into place, unless you work on implementation, it doesn’t matter,” she says. “You have to work out a mechanism to reach the people who need it most.”</h1>
<h1 class="full">Agnes was in a mentally and physically abusive marriage for over a decade before she could carve out her exit. At the time, Indian divorce laws under Christian personal law offered little recourse for women in violent marriages. “As a Christian, I was not entitled to divorce on the grounds of cruelty,” she says, with a palpable sense that the legal and emotional landscape she is describing is extremely far away from our conversation today, in large part because of her life’s work.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Majlis and Supporting Survivors</h1>
<h1 class="full">It took multiple attempts, but Agnes finally extricated herself from her marriage and then went to college to get a degree in Sociology in 1980, and then an LLB in 1988. Ground from her own experiences and participation in the women’s movement in Bombay in 1980, she saw that legal intervention required more than just courtroom advocacy. “Most of the time when they [resources to victims filing complaints] say they are giving help, it is only counselling outside the court, what a victim needs is legal support within.” Majlis was conceived as a space that could provide both — not just litigation, but comprehensive socio-legal support, including counselling, job training, and emotional care. Majlis has provided legal aid to over 50,000 women.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Victims of interpersonal (domestic) abuse approach Majlis, while the police refer those of sexual violence. Methodically, Agnes constructs the workings of the organisation and the profiles of women it serves. She notes that domestic violence victims tend to belong to middle-class or lower-middle-class, seeking help of their own volition. Contrarily, she characterises: “Sexual violence cases? Extremely low-income. The victim may not even know she’s been abused, she may be very young, she may not understand what an FIR is.” Since sexual violence cases are tried in a criminal court, her job is to prepare the girl or woman to answer questions without being intimated or slipping into contradictions. Agnes charts the tension of the courtroom and how much hand-holding is required to come out of it with a win.</h1>
<h1 class="full">When asked about the typology of cases requiring the gravest support, she comments on how disturbing child custody cases are. Agnes describes the manipulation, the child’s compromised state, and how important it is that women are physically with the children of whom they are fighting for custody. Then, she says minors are tricky in general: in cases of consent (in India, the age of consent is 18), she is left contemplating the ambiguous spaces of whether there was coercion of some kind, or whether the girls had entered into a relationship that their parents simply didn’t approve of. Most of these came out when the girls would go to the hospital for something casual, like a stomach ache, and the doctors would find out they were pregnant. These cases were particularly tricky, Agnes says, for the reasons you might expect - social biases against girls having sex outside marriage, difficulty in establishing that there was no indeterminacy in the power dynamic, and the fraught identity binds of Indian ‘dating.’</h1>
<h1 class="full">Growing Into the Fight</h1>
<h1 class="full">Hearing the unmediated awe in my voice, Agnes decides to volunteer an admission: “This work is taxing,” she says, sternly. “There are cases I have handled where, after everything, the woman goes back to her husband. It feels like a big letdown.” The reality of social and familial pressure means that the law can only do so much. “You can’t live her life; she has to live it herself.”</h1>
<h1 class="full">Agnes’ relationship with the women she works with has not come with professional distance or detachment. Her choices have been made with a calculus that included the wider community of women and their political liberation. Agnes’ widely-read Femina column was the first of its kind, where she wrote in a simple question-and-answer format in an effort to reach as many women as possible. She viewed the writing as a necessary companion to start a conversation that could then be addressed through policy, legal support, and economic agency.</h1>
<h1 class="full">“In our generation, we did everything — we litigated, we wrote, we counselled. There was no roadmap, and we were just trying to understand the system,” she says, with no nostalgia, only a persuasive, blatant outline of what change feels like. “This generation of lawyers and activists has it easier — the process is more streamlined. Now, people specialise in something. They don’t go for demonstrations, they do professional work.” There’s a clear-eyed recognition of how activism has transformed and professionalised, and, if along the way it has lost some of its emotional exigency, Agnes seems proud of that fact. The entrapment of sleepless nights over trials she had no control over, and the unyielding investment in getting justice for her clients has been more than a gift to the women of India; it has been real, all-consuming work.</h1>
<h1 class="full">To Write is to Hope for More Writing</h1>
<h1 class="full">Agnes has seen the law and public’s expanded view on domestic violence, and increased awareness and belief in women who come forward. But the newspapers still pile up violence in print and the films still turn girls into painted moving bodies. The fight has become more complex over the years — "Today, just resisting patriarchy is not enough,” she says, looking to the future, asking for resistance that can evolve to meet the cultural moment’s injustices. “We have to fight for secularism, minority rights, and environmental justice.”</h1>
<h1 class="full">The near-constant invasion of gruesome articles, incredulous word-of-mouth stories, and traumatic lived experiences as a woman make it difficult to imagine sustaining a life combatting the ubiquitous. Agnes agrees that this fight has been devastating, saying, “I feel very depressed.” But right from the My Story… Our Story autobiography, her unflappable duty and bravery won out against defeatism: “I had to succeed in this process. Because if I became a failure, all hope would be lost. I was so public. There was a great thing at stake for me. The price I’ve paid is worth it.” Indeed, the price has been steep. But the architecture she has built — of resistance, of reform, of a future where the law can serve the most vulnerable—remains standing.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Credits:</h1>
<h1 class="full">Editor-in-Chief: Kshitij Kankaria</h1>
<h1 class="full">Words by: Sanjana Sheth</h1>
<h1 class="full">Digital Editor: Shriya Zamindar</h1>
<h1 class="full">Managing Editor: Anurag Sharma</h1>
<h1 class="full">Art Director: Tia Chinai</h1>
<h1 class="full">Graphic Designer: Rishika Sikder</h1>
<h1 class="full">G Ode Team:</h1>
<h1 class="full">Creative Direction: Nimi Raja</h1>