Justice In Translation: Intersectionality, Law, And The Lives Of South Indian Women
- IJLLR Journal
- Jun 12
- 2 min read
Devika Lal, B.A., LL.B. (Hons.), Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai Campus
ABSTRACT
The persistent gap between what the law promises and what women live— in that yawning space, often, lies silence. This essay steps into that silence, not to fill it with more doctrine, but to listen to the echoes already there. It asks a question both old and unresolved: What happens to universal rights when they meet the uneven ground of caste, gender, language, and geography?
For decades, global charters like CEDAW and the UDHR have declared women’s rights to be indivisible and absolute, meant to transcend culture, creed, and country. Yet in practice, these declarations often glide past the women who need them most—those whose lives are folded into layers of exclusion: the Dalit woman who speaks a dialect no judge understands; the fisherwoman displaced by a coastline reimagined as capital; the tribal mother caught between the land her ancestors walked and the state’s indifference; the trans woman who not only navigates gender, but caste and economic precarity; and the Tamil-speaking litigant who loses her case long before it begins, simply because no one speaks her truth in her tongue. This article walks with them—not as subjects of study, but as producers of knowledge. It is through the lens of intersectionality, the framework shaped by Kimberlé Crenshaw but carried forward in the everyday resistance of these women, that this essay re-examines the stale binary between universalism and cultural relativism. Where one flattens complexity, the other often hides behind tradition, excusing violence in the name of heritage. Both, ultimately, fail to listen.
But South India, with its centuries-old rebellions and restless cultural churn, offers a different grammar of resistance. It is in the clenched fists of Vanitha Mathil, the songs of Kudumbashree meetings, and the courtroom testimonies of Dalit women who refuse to be erased, that we see the emergence of a third path. These movements remind us that rights are not abstractions parachuted from Geneva or Delhi; they are formed in kitchens and fields, in the margins where language, labour, and land intersect. This essay proposes what it calls a culturally sensitive universalism: a framework that refuses the neatness of binaries. It insists that while some rights must be non-negotiable, their expression must be rooted in regional textures, linguistic nuance, caste consciousness, and ecological humility. It is not a compromise. It is a confrontation—with simplicity, with hierarchy, with the dangerous comfort of categories. In the end, it argues that any human rights project that claims to be just must begin not with theory, but with the lives that theory so often overlooks. These lives—full of contradiction, beauty, sorrow, and strength— do not merely demand justice. They redefine it.
