Anveshi’s work in law and critical legal theory could be traced to the interventions of the founding members into the debate on rape law reform and the dowry death investigation committee in the mid-1980s. In the latter part of the 1990s, a dedicated group studied the various personal law reform proposals that were being made by different women’s groups for a uniform civil code. Some of the team members intervened in the debate to argue that neither the time was right nor the proposals took cognizance of the complexity of the religious personal laws on the ground (Anveshi Law Committee, EPW, 1997). The gap and the evolving relation between the everyday lives/battles of women and the protocols/framework of Law have been investigated in our studies on multiple institutional sites.
Drawing from her experiences in the Ibrahimpatnam land rights struggle, Gita Ramaswamy documented the experiences of poor people engaging with the revenue courts for claiming land rights. The two interviews with Satyamma and Yacharam Buddajangaiah reveal the map of scarce resources of legal expertise, finances or contacts with which claimants have accessed the legal system.
In this study on Contextualizing Criminality: Convicted Women’s Narratives and Procedures of the Criminal Trial (2002) Vasudha Nagaraj juxtaposed the experiences of convicted women and the codes in which the criminal justice system selectively sets up evidence to judge criminality. Women’s narratives made evident the various processes that constitute the legal discourse where the ‘histories’ that mark these women remain outside the courtrooms even as they inflect notions of legality and justice. The criminal trial seems to be a terrain of contested notions of identity with stated and unstated charges coming up for adjudication.
This three-year study on Institutional Responses to Domestic Violence (2000-03) by A.Suneetha, Vasudha Nagaraj and R.Bhagya Lakshmi investigated the responses of women police stations, family counselling centres, public hospitals and family court to the women facing domestic violence. The project team studied 3 women police stations, a dozen counselling centres/groups, one public hospital in Hyderabad and three family courts. Personnel of these institutions (policemen, counsellors/activists, judges and lawyers, doctors) and women accessing these institutions were interviewed as part of this ethnographic study. Important findings of the project are: a) public institutions, especially law, figure only in a minor way in the lives of women dealing with issues of violence; b) women found it useful to access a range of informal institutional setups ranging from family, kinship, local community networks, caste or women’s groups along with public institutions; c) the problems of access are much more for women without endowments such as caste, class, education, ‘connections’ etc.; and d) apart from the biases of the institutional personnel, women find it most difficult to keep up with the schedules, mandates and requirements of various institutions. Women found it difficult to negotiate the formal and legal institutions but sought repair of the family and correction of the husband that could only be achieved in the shadow of the criminal law (EPW, 2005 Commentary and A Difficult Match, EPW, 2006).
The research team participated and intervened in the debate on the then-proposed law on domestic violence which was promulgated in 2005. Anveshi also supported an interventionist initiative that emerged out of this project called Hyderabad Women’s Collective that supported women facing domestic violence for a year during 2003-2004.
Taking up a few questions that came up in this research, in a subsequent study (2007-2010) on Feminist Politics, Rights Discourse, the Family and Sexuality: Rethinking Women’s Suffering and Agency, A.Suneetha and Vasudha Nagaraj focused on the working of a ‘community adjudication mechanisms’ among Muslims and Dalit-Bahujan communities in Hyderabad around family and violence.
Vasudha Nagaraj studied ‘caste panchayat’ in one of the largest Dalit bastis of Hyderabad. While analyzing how such panchayats had become ‘integrated’ with formal institutions such as police stations and courts, she noted that the norm of conjugality that operated in the panchayat that solved a dispute was based on equal share of responsibility, rather than equal rights, which was also responsive to the discourse of women’s rights (Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 2010).
A. Suneetha studied the Muslim reformist initiatives in the city of Hyderabad to resolve domestic disputes by as shariah panchayats and Darul Ifta as well as Muslim women’s groups. She traced and documented the trajectory of these religious reformist initiatives to the churning among the Muslim communities after Shah Bano. In her writings, she places them alongside the Nikhanama initiative that All India Muslim Personal Law Board and many other religious bodies had taken up to address women’s distress and repair the Muslim family in crisis (EPW, 2012). Their location in the women’s madrassas, tells us that they were seen as supplementing the project of shaping new Islamic womanhood through the revival of Islamic education for women in these institutions. Muslim women’s groups drew on community understandings of nikah, huquq to mediate disputes but also saw schooling and education as ways to ‘empower’ Muslim women to solve their own problems (EPW, 2012).
The study on Dalit women and domestic violence (2012 -2013) by Gogu Shyamala, D. Sujatha and B. Sattemma sought to understand and evolve a Dalit women’s perspective on domestic violence by looking at their interface with police stations and counselling centres (EPW, 2014). Focusing on the issues emerging in the contemporary Dalit family, poised at the cusp of economic, social and political changes, it sought to evolve a perspective that focuses on Dalit women’s predicament on how to deal with the pressure and violence that such changes bring vis-à-vis their need for a family.
During 2018-2019, several members of the Anveshi actively petitioned the government along with many other women’s groups to address the issue of sexual exploitation in the Telugu film industry. Two members of Anveshi general body, Vasudha Nagaraj and A. Suneetha were invited to join the Working Group of the High Level Committee set up by the Telangana Government in April 2019. The Working Group is in the process of finalizing its report after having met several members of the 24 crafts unions.
Anveshi collaborated with NALSAR University of Law’s Prof. Vasanthi in Law Clinic on Labour in the Film Industry during 2019-2020 in which around 15 students were guided in understanding the specific nature of labour in the film industry and the ways in which existing laws could be made to work for the film industry workers.