Cornelia Sorabji was an Indian woman who achieved several notable firsts: the first female graduate from Bombay University, the first woman to study law at Oxford University(indeed, the first Indian national to study at any British university), the first female advocate in India, and the first woman to practise law in India and Britain.
Cornelia was born in Nashik in the erstwhile Bombay Presidency of colonial India on this day in 1866. Her parents Reverend Sorabji Karsedji and Francina Ford were advocates of women’s education and established several girls’ schools in Pune. They encouraged Cornelia to take higher studies, and she went on to become the first woman to be graduated from Bombay University.
Cornelia took up law at the famous Oxford University and it was no easy task. It was a time when universities were reluctant to accept female students. The National Indian Association came to Cornelia’s help. Her English friends petitioned on her behalf to allow her to sit for Civil Laws exam at Somerville College, Oxford. In 1894, she completed her course, but the University didn’t award her a degree. Oxford University started awarding degrees to women only since 1922.
Even after completion of her education, Cornelia was not allowed to plead in courts both in England as well as India. She returned to her homeland and became a legal advisor. She took the cause of purdahnashins, the veiled women who were forbidden to interact with men outside their families. She helped widowed purdahnashins get their rightful share of the property, helped them pursue education and secure employment. She succeeded in pursuing the government to appoint Lady Assistants to the courts to help women litigants.
Cornelia again appeared for LLB examination in Bombay University to obtain a law degree, becoming the first woman graduate from the institution. She cleared the pleader examination in Allahabad High Court in 1899 but she was not acknowledged as a barrister.
Only in 1923 colonial courts opened their doors to women advocates. The next year Cornelia began practicing in Kolkata. In addition to pleading for her clients, she had to fight bias and male domination in courts. Six years later she retired and moved to London. She died on July 6, 1954.
In 2012, her glory was unveiled at Lincoln’s Inn, London.
At the turn of the century, Sorabji was also actively involved in social reforms. She was associated with the Bengal branch of the National Council for Women in India, the Federation of University Women, and the Bengal League of Social Service for Women. For her services to the Indian nation, she was awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind Gold Medal in 1909. Although an Anglophile, Sorabji had no desire to see “the wholesale imposition of a British legal system on Indian society any more than she sought the transplantation of other Western values”. Early in her career, Sorabji had supported the campaign for Indian Independence, relating women’s rights to the capacity for self-government. Although she greatly supported traditional Indian life and culture, Sorabji did a great deal to promote the movement to reform Hindu laws regarding child marriage and the position of widows. She often worked alongside fellow reformer and friend Pandita Ramabai. Nevertheless, she believed that the true impetus behind social change was education and that, until the majority of illiterate women had access to it, the suffrage movement would be a failure.
By the late 1920s, however, Sorabji had adopted a staunch anti-nationalist attitude; believing that nationalism violated the beliefs, customs, and traditions of the country’s Hindu ‘orthodox’.By 1927, she was actively involved in promoting support for the Empire and preserving the rights of the Hindu Orthodox. She favourably viewed the polemical attack on Indian self-rule in Katherine Mayo’s book Mother India (1927), and condemned Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign of civil disobedience. She toured India and the United States to propagate her political views which would end up costing her the support needed to undertake later social reforms. One such failed project was the League for Infant Welfare, Maternity, and District Nursing.Sorabji also wrote two autobiographical works entitled India Calling: The Memories of Cornelia Sorabji and India Recalled.
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