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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Focusing on places, objects, bodies, narratives and ritual spaces where religion may be found or inscribed, the authors reveal the role of religion in contesting rights to places, to knowledge and to property, as well as access to resources. Through analyses of specific historical processes in terms of responses to socio-economic and political change, the chapters consider implicitly or explicitly the problematic relation between science (including social sciences and anthropology in particular) and religion, and how this connects to the new religious globalisation of the twenty-first century. Their ethnographies highlight the embodiment of religion and its location in landscapes, built spaces and religious sites which may be contested, physically or ideologically, or encased in memory and often in silence. Taken together, they show the importance of religion as a resource to the believers: a source of solace, spiritual comfort and self-willed submission.

In this remarkable account of imperial citizenship, Sukanya Banerjee investigates the ways that Indians formulated notions of citizenship in the British Empire from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Tracing the affective, thematic, and imaginative tropes that underwrote Indian claims to formal equality prior to decolonization, she emphasizes the extralegal life of citizenship: the modes of self-representation it generates even before it is codified and the political claims it triggers because it is deferred. Banerjee theorizes modes of citizenship decoupled from the rights-conferring nation-state; in so doing, she provides a new frame for understanding the colonial subject, who is usually excluded from critical discussions of citizenship. Interpreting autobiography, fiction, election speeches, economic analyses, parliamentary documents, and government correspondence, Banerjee foregrounds the narrative logic sustaining the unprecedented claims to citizenship advanced by racialized colonial subjects. She focuses on the writings of figures such as Dadabhai Naoroji, known as the first Asian to be elected to the British Parliament; Surendranath Banerjea, among the earliest Indians admitted into the Indian Civil Service; Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman to study law in Oxford and the first woman lawyer in India; and Mohandas K. Gandhi, who lived in South Africa for nearly twenty-one years prior to his involvement in Indian nationalist politics. In her analysis of the unexpected registers through which they carved out a language of formal equality, Banerjee draws extensively from discussions in both late-colonial India and Victorian Britain on political economy, indentured labor, female professionalism, and bureaucratic modernity. Signaling the centrality of these discussions to the formulations of citizenship, Becoming Imperial Citizens discloses a vibrant transnational space of political action and subjecthood, and it sheds new light on the complex mutations of the category of citizenship.