Gendered Pathways to Justice: Women and Customary Dispute Resolution in Coastal Tamil Nadu

Customary dispute resolution institutions hold significant authority across the coastal districts of Tamil Nadu, regulating livelihoods, marriages, welfare and disputes among fisher communities. While accessible and culturally legitimate, they remain patriarchal, excluding women from direct forms of membership and decision-making. Drawing on legal pluralism, Risman’s framework of gender as a social structure and Mahmood’s paradox of agency, this article examines women’s access to justice within customary bodies, based on fieldwork across six fishing villages in Ramanathapuram and Tuticorin districts, including focus group discussions, in-depth interviews and non-participant observation of customary council and women’s collective meetings. Adopting a legal pluralist framework, this article treats customary, religious and statutory norms as coexisting legal orders, while considering the institutions through which women access them ( oor panchayats, oor koottams, jamaats , the police and courts) as institutional sites rather than legal orders in themselves. The findings show that the normative order that an institution applies matters more than the institution a woman approaches. This is mediated by a shifting threshold of severity, bias and awareness. Customary authority also rests in part on institutionalised gender exclusion, producing a regulated presence: women bear the obligations of customary governance without its authority. This complicates Mahmood’s paradox of agency, suggesting that women’s negotiated engagement reflects dependency and risk calculation rather than internalised desire for patriarchal norms. Christian women, particularly in Tuticorin, show higher legal awareness, illustrating how religious context reshapes this threshold over time and how the hierarchy among customary, religious and statutory orders shifts rather than remains static.