Anna Chandy pursued a law degree in the princely state of Travancore in the early 1920s, at a time when almost no women in the region practiced law, let alone appeared regularly in court, facing skepticism from male colleagues and litigants who were unaccustomed to a woman arguing cases before a judge.
She also worked as a journalist and public speaker, using both platforms to campaign directly for women's legal rights, including property rights and protections within marriage, publishing articles that argued forcefully against the legal disadvantages women faced under the personal and civil laws of the time.
In 1937, she was appointed a district munsiff, becoming the first woman in Travancore, and among the first in all of India, to hold a judicial position, a milestone that required her to establish, largely without precedent to draw on, how a woman in that role would be treated by the lawyers and litigants who appeared before her.
She continued rising through the judiciary over the following decades, eventually becoming a judge of the Kerala High Court in 1959, one of the first women in India to reach that level, having spent a career demonstrating through consistent, careful judicial work that gender was irrelevant to the quality of legal judgment.