Biography

Flavia Agnes is a women’s rights lawyer who has worked consistently on issues of gender and law reforms. As co-founder of MAJLIS, a legal and cultural resource centre, her primary engagement has been to provide quality legal services to women and children. She has played an important role in bringing women's rights to the forefront within the legal system and in contextualizing issues of gender and identity. 

Among Flavia’s many publications is her autobiographical book My Story Our Story ... Of Rebuilding Broken Lives (1988). Other publications include Law & Gender Inequality – The Politics of Personal Laws in India (2001) and the eco-edited Omnibus, Women and Law (2016). Flavia is a proponent of legal pluralism.  Within the premise of ‘reforms from within’  she has played an important role in reforming the Christian Personal Laws  as well as advancing the rights of Muslim women. Her more recent engagement has been with issues of democracy, secularism and  identity politics.  Her organisation,  Majlis has worked consistently  in countering the rising wave of  Hindu fundamentalism in the country.  After the communal carnage in Gujarat, India in 2002, she initiated a legal advocacy program for sexually violated women in relief camps and subsequently has brought out a publication titled Of Lofty Claims and Muffled Voices (2002).