Cornelia Sorabji: India’s Pioneer Woman Lawyer. A Biography, by Suparna Gooptu

Abstract

Cornelia Sorabji, a Parsee Christian convert, was ‘a pioneer in more ways than one’ (p. 1). She achieved many firsts, or near firsts (she was not actually, as is commonly believed, the first Indian woman to be called to the bar, but the second), and so can be rightly regarded as a path-finder at a time when strong racial and gender biases shaped the colonial professional world. Her senior bureaucratic role, as a lawyer with responsibility for protecting the interests of Indian women who lived secluded lives (purdahnashin, confined to the female quarters, or zenana), underlined her capacity to work with the system and her readiness to challenge particular aspects of it. However, as this biography highlights from the outset, Sorabji moved at a tangent to her time. Rather than going with the flow of the rising tide of Indian nationalism, she was politically and socially conservative in outlook, which translated into ardent, if often unpopular, support for the British Raj in India. Indeed, her choice ‘not to question existing structures of authority, based on British racial superiority and patriarchal authority’ (p. 67) made her ‘a rarity among educated Indians of her time’ (p. 3) and helped to marginalise her in terms of mainstream historiography.