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Literature of Colonial South Asia: A Digital Archive Main Menu Author Profiles Profiles of authors whose works are featured on this site Chronological List Of All Texts On This Site South Asian Women Writers Profiles of South Asian Women Writers, such as Sarojini Naidu, Cornelia Sorabji, Pandita Ramabai Indian Travel Writers in the West: the Colonial Period (1794-1947) Texts by Indian or South Asian Writers Who Visited England, Ireland, Canada, and the United States during the Colonial Period Fiction by Western Women in Colonial India Overview and links to Fiction by Western Women in British India Literature of the 1857 Mutiny / 1857 Rebellion Literature relating to the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny Writers of the Bengal Renaissance: an Overview Interracial Romance and Multi-racial Anglo-Indian Community Writings that feature cross-racial romance or mixed race people Detailed Summaries of Works of Fiction (and some selected nonfiction)

Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1954): Author Profile

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Cornelia Sorabji achieved considerable success and was highly visible in her time, as the first Indian woman to be granted a law degree, and because of her extensive social and reform oriented work on behalf of Indian women. (Among other things, she frequently represented Purdahnashins -- women who were 'behind Purdah' [women living in segregation, who did not generally appear in public] -- in questions of property and civil law.) I would recommend taking a look at Sorabji's Wikipedia page for a detailed account of her long and impressive career.

While Sorabji's accomplishments are many, it is probably important to note that she is a somewhat controversial figure because she remained supportive of British colonial authority in India when many of her peers supported home rule or outright independence. (See our description of her memoir, India Calling, below)

Sorabji wrote many books; many of them were nonfiction.

Her first book, a collection of short stories called Love and Life Behind the Purdah (1901) is in our collection, as are detailed summaries of the stories.
In 1908, Sorabji published a book called Between the Twilights. This is essentially an ethnographic account of women in Hinduism. It features profiles of some important Hindu deities (Saraswati, Durga, Kali) with an emphasis on rituals and practices associated with them. Many of the anecdotes have a personal touch: Sorabji describes her own visit to a Kali temple, a conversation with a grandmother, etc. Sorabji also addresses topics like the plight of Hindu widows, the confusion and sense of displacement felt by "western returned" women, and the deep and powerful role played by caste in Indian life. In the final chapter, she gives some examples of difficult cases she had encountered representing "secluded" women in property and inheritance cases in rural India. A detailed summary of the book can be found here.
We also have a version of her 1918 book Sun Babies: Studies in Colour here (first published as Sun-Babies: Studies in the Child-Life of India in 1904). There is also a detailed summary of the book here.
We also have an edition of her 1934 memoir, India Calling, where she describes her hybrid upbringing -- with her family's Parsi heritage but Christian identity and her legal career, with many colorful accounts of representing poor women in legal cases in Princely states. She also expresses her ambivalence about the Indian nationalist movement; in contrast to Sarojini Naidu (described below), Sorabji never joined the Indian National Congress. While she was initially supportive of the nationalist movement, by the late 1920s, she had rejected the movement and instead embraced the continuation of British rule in India. The full text of the memoir is here, and a detailed summary of it is here.

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Cornelia Sorabji Photograph