Cornelia Sorabji

Cornelia Sorabji was the first Indian female lawyer. She was "original and often outspoken in her views - for example in her criticism of Gandhi and her surprising friendship with Katherine Mayo". Cornelia was "a passionate advocate of women's rights whose own career was nearly compromised through her relationsip with a married man". -- Book jacket.

Cornelia Sorabji (1866 1954) was a pioneer woman lawyer of India whose formative years coincided with the high noon of the British empire. Discussing Sorabji s life and times, this biography focuses on her decisive role in opening up the legal profession to women much before they were allowed to plead before the courts of law.

Parsee by background yet "brought up English," an imperial servant mistreated by the imperial bureaucracy, and a pro-woman nonfeminist, Cornelia Sorabji embodied some of the most powerful contradictions of empire of her time.

Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1952) was a pioneer in the tradition of Indian-Parsee women's literature in English. This collection of Sorabji's short stories reflects her fascination with orthodox Hindu women and her frustrated feminist ambitions to liberate them from their enforced or self-willeddomesticity.

Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1954) was the first woman lawyer of India whose formative years coincided with the high noon of the British Empire. She occupies a significant place in Indian history, as she played a pioneering role in trying to open up the legal profession to women much before they were formally allowed to plead before the courts of law. This detailed biography uses rich and hitherto unused data to illustrate a remarkable individual, who has remained neglected in the historiography of modern India. Sorabji's opposition to Indian nationalism in the Gandhian era led to a disapproval of her role and personality. Yet this Parsee and the daughter of a convert to Christianity was the first woman to study law at Oxford, the first Indian woman to be allowed to practise in the Calcutta High Court, became the first woman to be appointed to a senior bureaucratic office under the colonial government, and the first person to champion the cause of Indian women in purdah who owned property. Sorabji's life is has been shown as reflecting the dilemmas of a colonial subject who, in trying to negotiate her dual subjectivity to colonialism and patriarchy, was left with very little neutral space to operate upon. This book relates Sorabji's life to the complexities of gender issues in colonial India, and will be of equal interest to general and specialist readers.

Through an analysis of the writings of three 20th century Indian women, this book explores how the memoirs, fictions, and histories written by women can be read as counter-narratives of colonial modernity.

Lawyer-sleuth Perveen Mistry returns in another fascinating Bombay mystery. 'Vivid and clever...love her to bits.' Kerry Greenwood, bestselling author of the Miss Phryne Fisher series The delightfully clever Perveen Mistry, Bombay's first female lawyer, returns in an adventure of treacherous intrigues and suspicious deaths. India, 1922: It is rainy season in the lush, remote Sahyadri Mountains southeast of Bombay, where the kingdom of Satapur is tucked away. A curse has fallen upon Satapur's royal family, whose maharaja and his teenage son are both dead. The kingdom is now ruled by an agent of the British Raj on behalf of Satapur's two maharanis, the dowager queen and the maharaja's widow. The royal ladies are in dispute over the education of the young crown prince, and a lawyer's council is required - but the maharanis live in purdah and do not speak to men. Just one woman can help them: Perveen Mistry. Perveen is determined to bring peace to the royal house, but when she arrives she finds that the Satapur palace is full of cold-blooded power plays and ancient vendettas. Too late, she realises she has walked into a trap. But whose? And how can she protect the royal children from the deadly curse on the palace? '... even better than the series' impressive debut . . . The winning, self-sufficient Perveen should be able to sustain a long series.' - Publishers Weekly, Starred Review 'Simply put, The Satapur Moonstone is a flawless gem. Historical mysteries don't get any better than this.' - New York Journal of Books 'Once again Massey does a superb job of combining a fascinating snapshot into 1920s British-ruled India with a top-notch mystery. She has created a strong, appealing heroine who is forging her own path in a rapidly changing world.' - Library Journal, Starred Review

Antoinette Burton focuses on the experiences of three Victorian travelers in Britain to illustrate how "Englishness" was made and remade in relation to imperialism. The accounts left by these three sojourners—all prominent, educated Indians—represent complex, critical ethnographies of "native" metropolitan society and offer revealing glimpses of what it was like to be a colonial subject in fin-de-siècle Britain. Burton's innovative interpretation of the travelers' testimonies shatters the myth of Britain's insularity from its own construction of empire and shows that it was instead a terrain open to continual contest and refiguration. Burton's three subjects felt the influence of imperial power keenly during even the most everyday encounters in Britain. Pandita Ramabai arrived in London in 1883 seeking a medical education and left in 1886, having resisted the Anglican Church's attempts to make her an evangelical missionary. Cornelia Sorabji went to Oxford to study law and became the first Indian woman to be called to the Bar. Behramji Malabari sought help for his Indian reform projects in England, and subjected London to colonial scrutiny in the process. Their experiences form the basis of this wide-ranging, clearly written, and imaginative investigation of diasporic movement in the colonial metropolis.

This book critically examines the cultural desire for anglicisation of the Indian middle class in the context of postcolonial India. It looks at the history of anglicised self-fashioning as one of the major responses of the Indian middle class to British colonialism. The book explores the rich variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings that document the attempts by the Indian middle class to innovatively interpret their personal histories, their putative racial histories, and the history of India to appropriate the English language and lay claim to an “English” identity. It discusses this unique quest for “Englishness” by reading the works of authors like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Cornelia Sorabji, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Dom Moraes, and Salman Rushdie. An important intervention, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of postcolonial studies, Indian English literature, South Asian studies, cultural studies, and English literature in general.

Cornelia Sorabji was a social reformer, an author and the first woman to practise law in India and Britain. This text presents Cornelia's letters in chronological order from 1866 to 1954.