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This chapter discusses that Cornelia Sorabji was at the center of debates about the role that the zenana, and by extension the precints of house and home, should play in shaping modern Indian culture. It adds that Sorabji, a Parsi Christian who was trained as a barrister at Oxford in 1889-1892, aimed to improve the conditions for purdahnashin and publicizing those conditions to reform-minded audiences in Britain and India. It narrates that she used her legal skills and her official connections to investigate the homes and detail the lives of hundreds of “secluded” women in the first three decades of the 20th century. It tells of Sorabji's biography as well as her family's history. It suggests that Sorabji's determination to preserve her Purdahnashin in the domain of memory signals the uneven and unlooked-for terrains of colonial modernity itself.

This chapter first addresses the entry of women into higher education and professions in England. It specifically deals with Cornelia Sorabji in Somerville Hall, Oxford. When she joined Somerville Hall, she was not sure what course she would pursue. Her Oxford experience proved to be crucial in making her what she was to become. She also did become the first woman to study for the BCL at Oxford, a major landmark in the history of women's entry into higher education. Oxford treated Cornelia as an ‘exception’. She had the privilege of being inducted into the Oxford elite circle from her initial days at the university, and she took pride in this fact. The patronage that Cornelia received at Oxford was largely because of its multiple involvements with the sustenance of the Empire. Moreover, her response to the male bias in Oxford is revealed. Additionally, it covers the new Toryism, authoritarian liberalism and faith in the Empire. Once Cornelia had completed her studies in Oxford, life appeared to be more difficult than she expected.

Cornelia Sorabji was born in a Parsee family at Nasik (Bombay Presidency) on 15 November 1866. The Parsees, a minority group in India, are followers of Zoroaster and worshippers of fire. Although the Parsees developed close associations with the British colonial administration and worked as commercial collaborators, they steadfastly struggled to maintain their own minority identity in temperament and their habits of life. The Sorabji family is described. The life experience of Cornelia's father, Sorabji Kharsedji, had a deep and long-lasting effect on her. Cornelia's writings show that her parents took particular care to encourage them to think independently, and inculcated in them a spirit of self-help. Cornelia's higher education in India is also discussed. In general, her family, social background, and faith in religion and the Empire set the parameters within which she made a bid to aspire for social recognition and economic self-sufficiency. Driven by a social evangelical urge to help disadvantaged social groups, she wanted to equip herself intellectually.

This chapter first provides a discussion on legal help to the purdahnashins and extensions of the authority of the Empire. Cornelia Sorabji's duties as the lady legal adviser to the court of wards comprised legal as well as non-legal functions. An important implication of her role as an intermediary between the government and her wards was the extension of imperial authority to the court of wards' estates. It also addresses Cornelia and the purdahnashins of Bengal. It then deals with Cornelia's imagined sisterhood of purdahnashins. Working with the purdahnashins, she developed a deep admiration for them. The English women and the purdahnashins of Bengal are reported. In general, Cornelia's work in colonial bureaucracy clearly reveals how, being a pioneer, she too had to convince the authorities of the value and worth of her work, and fight for its proper recognition, in vain.

Cornelia Sorabji's political thinking had an important bearing on her life and work. The most distinguishing aspect of her political self was her implicit faith in the British Empire. In defending the traditional order in India, Cornelia was influenced by another strand in the British political thinking of the mid-Victorian era, which came to represent the conservative face of liberalism. The critic of Indian nationalist politics is explored. In addition, it explains the propagandist of the Empire and Hindu orthodoxy. Generally speaking, she remained an isolated figure in India's contemporary political scenario.

This chapter begins by considering Cornelia Sorabji as she fights male bias in the legal profession. She became a victim of the reluctance of the Calcutta Bar to enlarge its membership, though in theory, it was a time when the Bar, hitherto based on the exclusive privileges of a few, was undergoing a crucial transformation. Her determination to undo the predominant gender discrimination in society and pave the way for the next generation of women, for a new professional life, encouraged her to keep her spirits high even in her most despondent moments. In the profession, Cornelia also had to fight the ‘old boys' network’ among British and Indian men, which largely determined success in the legal profession. Moreover, the issue of professional morality is explained. Furthermore, her sources of emotional sustenance in professional life are shown.

Cornelia Sorabji was aware of the difficulties that she would have to face in pursuing a career in the legal profession when she returned to India. She spent her time in trying to secure a foothold in India's legal world, first as a roving practitioner of law, and subsequently as a lawyer for zenana women in colonial bureaucracy. Her early experiences are described. It is stated that there was a need for legal protection for women in colonial India. Despite the objections to and criticisms of Cornelia's project, the Secretary of State intervened in the matter and consulted the Government of India. Ultimately, in 1904, the British government sanctioned Cornelia's project of providing legal assistance to the purdahnashins in Bengal, which, was partitioned in 1905 into two provinces — Bengal and Eastern Bengal and Assam.

While engaged in the struggle to establish herself in the legal profession at Calcutta High Court, Cornelia Sorabji did not forsake her connection and association with the purdahnashins. She helped with the drafting of the National Council of Women of India's (NCWI) constitution and rendered a significant service in implementing its programme. Cornelia's desire for social service remained unfulfilled in many ways. This was partly because of her association with the book Mother India by Katherine Mayo, which provoked deep nationalist resentment and was widely condemned as a ‘remarkably wicked book slandering the whole Indian people...’. Cornelia shared many of Mayo's perceptions on issues relating to women, children, and animals in India. Cornelia's Bengal League of Social Service for Women became a victim of the nationalist tirade against her. The tension between Cornelia's political vision and that of the nationalists in twentieth-century India, and the process of her political marginalization, ultimately deprived her of the space she had striven so hard to create by working amongst the purdahnashins.

Cornelia Sorabji was the first woman to study law in Oxford, the second Indian woman barrister, and among the first Indian women to practise at the Calcutta High Court, to be appointed to a senior bureaucratic office under the British government, and to protect the interests of the purdahnashins. To strike a balance between her pioneering role as a lawyer and her individualism, and political and social conservatism, a personality like Cornelia needed supportive emotional anchors in her life, with whom she could share her ‘unconventionality’ and consequent isolation. Her personal relationship with Harrison Falkner Blair and Elena Rathbone may make one ponder as to why she chose to remain single, although she had a romantic idea of marriage and thought it to be a source of strength and sustenance. The irony of Cornelia's life was that she failed to see any legitimacy in the democratic and nationalist aspirations of the Indian people.

This chapter explores the works of Cornelia Sorabji, Iqbalunnisia Hussain, G. Ishvani, and Krupabai Satthianadhan, Indian women writers who gained prominence during the late-colonial period. It argues that their works raised politics as a matter of communal responsibility and voice despite the seclusion of women. Their writings present an intersecting critique of gender and genre that realigns women's social and political identities while opening a space for an alternative narrative modernism. The narratives about servants, children, and women living under conditions of seclusion due to the practice of purdah not only trouble the distinction between autobiography and fiction but also employ that liminal zone as a place of ethical encounter across irremediable gaps of knowledge and experience. The chapter describes how they refused the absolute dichotomy of the home, world, individual, and community and how they resisted the reinscription of the traditional model of “Mother India”.

The trajectory of Cornelia Sorabji's life experience shows that she struggled to be India's pioneer woman lawyer at a time when British power had reached its zenith. The most enduring aspect of her life-experience and her public image, which led to an outright dismissal of her public role in the context of twentieth-century politics, was her opposition to all forms of popular politics. The pattern of Cornelia's negotiation with colonialism and patriarchy raises questions about the significance of her life from the perspective of emancipatory politics of gender. Till the end of her life, she was caught in the colonial ascription of race and gender and was at home neither in England nor in India.

Can a dialogic New Modernist paradigm be made to fulfill its intended potential as a literary and scholarly geomodernist geopolitical equalizer? With this question in the background, this chapter considers Woolf’s review of Cornelia Sorabji, whose Between the Twilights, an auto/biografictional 1908 account of upper-caste Hindu purdahnashin women, Woolf read and wrote on at the same time she was composing the auto/biographical, fragmentary account of her childhood published by Jeanne Schulkind in Moments of Being (1976) as “Reminiscences.” Sorabji’s equivocal, subversive, sliding strategies, chief among them a predilection to, as Woolf put it in A Room of One’s Own, “talk of something else.” are reminiscent of/evoke Woolf’s own.

By the final decades of the nineteenth century, the child-wife had come under the purview of reformist legislation in British India. Infant marriage was widely prevalent in most parts of the subcontinent and in imitation of the high dogmatic standards set by brahmanical castes, other lower castes and classes too adopted early marriage. Besides religious directives, believers in child marriage put forth many other ‘practical’ reasons for the continuance of this practice. They argued that such indissoluble marriage that practically lasted from birth to death signified a higher form of love and bonding that surpassed mere physical desires. Magniloquence about infant marriage, however, hid from immediate view its evil effects. More pernicious and direct effects of infant marriage were sexual abuse of child-wives, their premature motherhood, and widespread widowhood. Though largely overlooked, women writers did use their pens to raise awareness on this issue. This chapter concentrates on short stories by Cornelia Sorabji and M.P. Seelavathi Amma.

Sati in British India came to simultaneously refer to the widow-burning rite as well as to the self-immolating widow. With growing imperialist interests in the Empire in India, the British administration detected in the sati issue a powerful opportunity to promote the image of a progressive, reform-minded, benevolent Raj. An endeavour to know how Indian women themselves portray sati in their writings is of unfailing interest. Caught between the loud crossfire of the two warring camps of pro- and anti-Sati campaigns, the Indian woman—both the subject and the object of the entire sati discourse—hardly gets a chance to claim for herself the attention of a perceptive audience. The silence of the sati victim is, of course, nearly insurmountable and only a voice, seeped through another agency, reaches us. This chapter concentrates on three such mediated voices (Cornelia Sorabji, Snehalata Sen, and Sita Devi) as presented in their fiction.