Abstract
ABSTRACT Cornelia Sorabji, born into a Parsee Christian family in Pune, was the first woman to write the BCL examinations at Oxford University in 1892. She had some initial success as a woman lawyer after she returned to India in 1893, including becoming the first woman lawyer in the British Empire to defend an accused charged with murder in 1896. In 1904, she was appointed Lady Assistant to the Court of Wards and provided advice to women Purdahnashin in northern India for nearly two decades. Yet, her ardent support for ‘British India’ eventually resulted in her opposition to Gandhi’s independence movement and, as Vera Brittain concluded, she chose ‘a wrong direction’ at a critical moment in history. Her story reveals both opportunities and constraints for women in India in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, as well as the shifting colonial relationships in British India in the context of the Independence movement of the 1930s and 40s.
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