Centre for Advanced Studies in India

Happy Diwali to all ✨🙏✨

Difficult man but a great writer!

VS Naipaul, British author, dies aged 85 Nobel and Booker prize-winning writer died surrounded by loved ones in his London home, family confirms

Why liberal arts and the humanities are as important as engineering An engineering degree is very valuable, but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology provides a big advantage in design.

[Tips for Writing Your Research Proposal]

1. Know yourself: Know your area of expertise, what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses. Play to your strengths, not to your weaknesses. If you want to get into a new area of research, learn something about the area before you write a proposal. Research previous work. Be a scholar.

2. Know the program from which you seek support: You are responsible for finding the appropriate program for support of your research.

3. Read the program announcement: Programs and special activities have specific goals and specific requirements. If you don’t meet those goals and requirements, you have thrown out your chance of success. Read the announcement for what it says, not for what you want it to say. If your research does not fit easily within the scope of the topic areas outlined, your chance of success is nil.

4. Formulate an appropriate research objective: A research proposal is a proposal to conduct research, not to conduct development or design or some other activity. Research is a methodical process of building upon previous knowledge to derive or discover new knowledge, that is, something that isn’t known before the research is conducted.

5. Develop a viable research plan: A viable research plan is a plan to accomplish your research objective that has a non-zero probability of success. The focus of the plan must be to accomplish the research objective.

6. State your research objective clearly in your proposal: A good research proposal includes a clear statement of the research objective. Early in the proposal is better than later in the proposal. The first sentence of the proposal is a good place. A good first sentence might be, “The research objective of this proposal is...” Do not use the word “develop” in the statement of your research objective.

7. Frame your project around the work of others: Remember that research builds on the extant knowledge base, that is, upon the work of others. Be sure to frame your project appropriately, acknowledging the current limits of knowledge and making clear your contribution to the extension of these limits. Be sure that you include references to the extant work of others.

8. Grammar and spelling count: Proposals are not graded on grammar. But if the grammar is not perfect, the result is ambiguities left to the reviewer to resolve. Ambiguities make the proposal difficult to read and often impossible to understand, and often result in low ratings. Be sure your grammar is perfect.

9. Format and brevity are important: Do not feel that your proposal is rated based on its weight. Use 12-point fonts, use easily legible fonts, and use generous margins. Take pity on the reviewers. Make your proposal a pleasant reading experience that puts important concepts up front and makes them clear. Use figures appropriately to make and clarify points, but not as filler.

10. Know the review process: Know how your proposal will be reviewed before you write it. Proposals that are reviewed by panels must be written to a broader audience than proposals that will be reviewed by mail. Mail review can seek out reviewers with very specific expertise in very narrow disciplines.

11. Proof read your proposal before it is sent: Many proposals are sent out with idiotic mistakes, omissions, and errors of all sorts. Proposals have been submitted with the list of references omitted and with the references not referred to. Proposals have been submitted to the wrong program. Proposals have been submitted with misspellings in the title. These proposals were not successful. Stupid things like this kill a proposal. It is easy to catch them with a simple, but careful, proof reading. Don’t spend six or eight weeks writing a proposal just to kill it with stupid mistakes that are easily prevented.

12. Submit your proposal on time: Duh? Why work for two months on a proposal just to have it disqualified for being late? Remember, fairness dictates that proposal submission rules must apply to everyone. It is not up to the discretion of the program officer to grant you dispensation on deadlines. Get your proposal in two or three days before the deadline.

Stephen Hawking's Final Theory About Our Universe Has Just Been Published, And It Will Melt Your Brain Groundbreaking physicist Stephen Hawking left us one last shimmering piece of brilliance before he died: his final paper, detailing his last theory on the origin of the Universe, co-authored with Thomas Hertog from KU Leuven.

The Commonwealth as imagined by Britain does not correspond with the harsh reality of colonialism. It is a sanitised self-congratulatory construct which needs to be vigourously challenged.

Embroidered into Meghan Markle’s veil was Britain’s bid to celebrate its bloody colonial history The bride’s dress is being praised for its floral motifs of the 53 Commonwealth countries. But colonialism destroyed the lives of India’s weavers.

The death of universities | Terry Eagleton Terry Eagleton: Academia has become a servant of the status quo. Its malaise runs so much deeper than tuition fees

RECALLING CORNELIA SORABJI: PLURAL IDENTITIES IN
COLONIAL SPACES AND NATIONALIST TIMES

- Dr. Nilufer E. Bharucha, Adjunct Professor of English,
University of Mumbai

[First published in Discourses of Resistance in the Colonial Period, ed. Avadhesh Kumar Singh, Creative Books, New Delhi, 2005. Reprinted in Indian Diasporic Literature and Cinema, Nilufer E.Bharucha, CASII, 2014.]

In his British Academy lecture of 2001, entitled ‘Other People’, Amartya Sen had spoken of an ‘identity base line’ which differentiates one individual from another. This basic identity also encompasses not just how an individual looks at herself but how she is looked at by others. So identity is never merely a singular construct but one that is multivalent. The construct of identity is also concerned with the social, the cultural, the racial, the sexual and the geopolitical. Individuals often choose their identities and add or subtract to the ones they found themselves with when they are born. Such choices often result in plural identities. Sen has therefore argued that identity choice is a matter of reasoning and responsibility – that of social ethics and not just self-realisation. In multicultural, postmodern societies such multiple identities do not cause surprise. However, such identities have their antecedents in modern colonisation, when cultures and civilisations had clashed with one another and created new ways of looking at the world, oneself and the other.

Cornelia Sorabji was the product of such an intervention in time and space. She was a woman, a Parsi by race, Christian by religion, Indian in geographical space and an Imperial subject in colonial time. Cornelia was the daughter of Sorabji Kharsedji Langrana, a Parsi who had embraced Christianity. Langrana in the 1840s had fallen under the spell of Christianity, much like many other young Parsi Zorastrians. The Parsi community was not unaware of this danger to their English educated young men and it was to counter this lure of Christianity that Dadabhai Naoroji had established the journal Rast Goftar (Herald of Truth) in 1851 and initiated reforms in the community such as female education, abolition of child marriages, widow re-marriages and stressed on the monotheistic nature of the Zoroastrian religion.
Langrana’s conversion to Christianity was opposed by his family and the entire Parsi community. He was ostracised by the community and disinherited by his family. Langrana withstood these attacks and moved even closer to his new religion. He devoted his entire life to the Church Missionary Society and became an effective teacher and social worker. The translation of the Bible into Gujarati was his major achievement. In 1853 he married Francina, a Hindu convert to Christianity, whose adoptive mother was an Englishwoman, Lady Cornelia Ford. Cornelia was the fifth girl in a total of seven girls and one boy that Francina bore to her husband. The isolation of the Sorabjis from both their Parsi as well as Hindu milieu because of the conversion of their parents, meant a dependence on and closeness to the colonial world, even greater than that experienced by other colonial elites, who mirrored themselves in the looking-glass of the Master Race. Thus even by colonial standards the identity construction of Cornelia Sorabji is more complex than that of other members of the elite sections of colonised India.
It is interesting to note that in spite of the Parsi community having disowned him and his family disinheriting him and his mother dying as a result of the trauma of losing her son to Christianity, Sorabji himself never repudiated his Parsi self, although he had embraced the religious other. He continued to claim for himself, his seven daughters, one son and even his wife the Parsi heritage. Cornelia has put this aptly in her autobiography India Calling (1834),where she writes that when her father had changed his religion he had displayed the same conviction of the spirit that had led his ancestors to leave Persia after the Arab conquest to preserve their right to practice their ancient Zoroastrian religion: ‘My father’s ancestors did that, when they set sail from Persia; he did the like when his personal conviction compelled the course he took, in glad fearlessness and with thanksgiving – to the very end’ (14).

Thus from the very beginning Cornelia was exposed to multiple worlds, multiple cultures and multiple languages as her parents moved from Nasik where she was born, to Belgaum and then to Poona. The identity choices made by the father were inherited by the daughter, who describes herself as a ‘Parsee by nationality’ (12), who was ‘“brought up English” – on English nursery tales with English discipline; on the English language…But [author’s emphasis]…was compelled to learn the languages of the peoples among whom we dwelt. We were told tales of our ancestors in Persia, and of our forbears and immediate family in the Parsi community in India. We were made proud of that community; but from our earliest days we were taught to call ourselves Indian, and to love and be proud of the country of our adoption: while the history of our parents made us love also the people and country to which George and Cornelia Ford belonged’ (15).

So Cornelia grew up a Parsi-Christian Indian who under the influence of her mother was taught to feel concern and responsibility for less advantaged Indian women, who unlike her did not have the privilege of education. Francina Sorabji was if anything a woman of greater spirit than her daughter Cornelia – a woman who in the portrait included in Cornelia’s autobiography, India Calling, looks very much the Parsi matriarch. Francina Sorabji was passionate about the education of Indian women and deposed on their behalf before the Commission on Indian Education in 1882. In 1886 she was invited to England by the Indian Female School and Zenana Missionary Society. She founded the Victoria High School at Poona in 1875, where Cornelia was a pupil along with children of all castes and creeds. It was under her mother’s guidance that Cornelia took her first step towards her life long mission of the betterment of Indian women. Francina was proud of her seven daughters because “they were women that India wanted, just then, for her service” (19). This was the “pukka Sorabji code” (20) that Cornelia was faithful to all her life.

At the age of twelve Cornelia began assisting her mother at school, even as her own education was taken over by her father who grounded her in Mathematics, Sanskrit and Science. At the age of sixteen she matriculated from the University of Bombay and went on to graduate from that university in 1884. She had kept her terms at the Deccan College Poona where she was the only girl among three hundred male students and life at college was often difficult and unpleasant. She took this in her stride as she was to other difficulties that she had to face in later life and stood first at the B.A. examination. So she was the first woman graduate of the University of Bombay and also the first at the university examination. This entitled her to the Government of India scholarship for study at an English university.

Brought up by a strong woman in a home where being a woman was never considered a disadvantage, Cornelia was for the first and not the last time made aware of her gender and the subordinate position she was to occupy by virtue of her femaleness. Having her rightful scholarship snatched away from her – ‘they dangled a gilded prize before eyes that should have been male eyes alone!’ (24) was something Cornelia never forgot.
The male edict of female subordination Cornelia was never to accept and as though to make up for this indignity began treading in spaces no woman had gone before – both academically as well as professionally. This was in spite of never having projected herself as a feminist or even a ‘New Woman’, although she was once called that in England. Cornelia’s personal and professional career graph for the rest of her life reveals her to have been a strong-minded woman, who charted her own course and treaded upon uncharted ground in the cause of her beloved ‘purdahnasheens’, for whose welfare, well-being, education and finally emancipation, she fought colonial male authority, often represented by what she called ‘England-Returned’ Indian men. This was the resistance she offered to the social order of her time, without overt manifestation of either a nationalist or feminist temper. In fact, her discourse has often been termed anti-national and she had openly critiqued Gandhi and Sarojini Naidu in the cause of her zenana ladies and their children – the wards of Sorabji in much more than legal terms alone.

Deprived of the scholarship, Cornelia accepted a position as lecturer of English at the Gujarat College in Ahmedabad. Here her pupils were all male and possibly older than their 21 years old teacher. She overcame their initial hostility and was even offered the temporary position of the principal of that college. She accepted the responsibility as it would enable her to save money to go to England – she wanted to become a doctor to serve the Indian women she had seen at her mother’s home. Her hopes of regaining her scholarship were revived when the substitute candidate – naturally male – returned to India from Aden after suffering serious bouts of sea-sickness. The scholarship however was not offered to her even then and she put in the money she had saved by teaching in Gujarat and borrowed more from her friends and set sail for England in 1888, to study medicine.

Patriarchy and gender discrimination coupled with her own lack of financial resources meant she could not study medicine at the Oxford University. She was instead channelled towards the more socially acceptable course of English Literature and took up residence in 1889 at the Somerville Hall, Oxford University. Cornelia was however determined not to study English Literature, which then as even now, was a discipline considered suited for the female psyche. Denied access to a medical career, Cornelia turned towards Law. In her autobiography however she would have us believe that this was what she had always wanted to do and writes of how her mother had once been visited by a purdanasheen (veiled) woman who was being cheated of her legal rights by male relatives and her mother had said to Cornelia, ‘There are many Indian women who are in trouble…when you grow up and are able to choose the special thing you want to learn, ask to study the law. That will show you the way to help in this kind of trouble’ (22).

There is a considerable distance in the remembering Cornelia has done in 1934, when she wrote her autobiography and her letters of the period when these events were unfolding in her life. Her private voice is more evident in her letters to her parents she wrote from England where she told them how diplomatic she was especially with the English people who were partly sponsoring her education, or the English friends who had taken her into their homes – the exotic Indian with her wonderful silk saris - or the Mission Society that was funding her mother’s school in Poona. Chandani Lokuge who has edited a new edition of India Calling: The Memories of Cornelia Sorabji, India’s First Woman Barrister (2001), says in her introduction that the public role that Cornelia played to perfection in England of the loyal Indian subject of Imperial England was ‘the public voice paying homage to imperialist England’ (xviii).

In her letters home Cornelia said that she had submitted to the change in her education ‘not because I easily relinquish my plans, but if my health would not stand it and if the money cannot be procured – then the wisest thing is to give up [medicine]’ (MSS EUR F 165/1, 26 September 1889). Genuine though her ultimate commitment to legal help and social uplift of her purdahnasheens was, the inability to pursue medical studies rankled in Cornelia’s psyche for a long time. Her public voice in India Calling, has glorified contemporary Hindu women such as Rakmabai, Pandita Ramabai, Anandibai Joshi and Tarabai Shinde who campaigned for gender justice but her private letters home (MSS EUR F 165/2, 2 February 1890 and 165/4, 30 March 1891) display jealousy and resentment, especially of Rakmabai who was able to realise her dream of becoming a doctor, in spite of more disadvantages than Cornelia.

Current feminist scholarship has taken up Cornelia Sorabji and not just Chandani Lokuge but also women like Antoinette Burton in Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India, Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2003 and Sonita Sarkar in her paper ‘Cornelia Sorabji Among Contemporary Women Thinkers on Fascist Modernity’ have focussed on diverse aspects of Cornelia’s life and work. Burton has seen Cornelia’s zenanas as the quintessential symbol of home, an architectural wonder, an archival evidence of ‘authentic India’ and above all as a site of British control and reform. According to Burton the zenana was ‘a microcosm of colonial governance, a kind of domestic miniature’ (75). She has dubbed Cornelia and her women as doubles, the one constitutive of the other, as Cornelia’s position was dependent on her control of the knowledge about the zenana women. She feels that this is the way in which all of Cornelia’s writing has to be considered, her private letters, the government reports she prepared, her creative writing and her memoirs – India Calling (1934) and India Recalled (1936). To her all this writing is ‘fundamentally self-representational’. Sarkar has placed Cornelia alongside Victoria Ocampo of Argentina, Grazia Deledda of Italy and Virginia Woolf of England and investigated the geopolitical links among these women, ‘as representatives of cosmopolitan women thinkers’ in the context of the modern nation state and focussed on their creativity and their representation of the ‘fluid spaces’ of home and nation. She has seen Sorabji as representative of national, cosmopolitan and local/global modernities.

Such representations of Sorabji makes it necessary to look again at her writing, especially her memoirs. Lokuge has pointed out the conventional representation of Cornelia as anti-national, anti-feminist and pro-imperial. Cornelia was often chastised by her contemporaries. Krupabai Satthianadhan, a fellow Christian convert and creative writer thought that Sorabji was ‘too westernised and critical of India’ (See Padmini Sengupta, The Portrait of an Indian Woman, Calcutta, YWCA Publishing, n.d.: 41:42). Sorabji’s assertion of gender equality at Oxford, where she was the first woman to graduate with a BCL degree in 1892 and her subsequent struggle to gain the right to practice in India and in England, should have placed her in the same bracket as women like Sarla Debi and Madame Bhikaji Rustomji Cama, but her site in the male colonial world turns her into an accomplice of colonialism. It is not enough to say with Lokuge that in spite of this she should be given her due place in Indian-English scholarship, especially on the strength of her unveiling of the lives of the purdahnasheens. Such a location has never been denied her even by conventional Indian English Writing scholarship. M.K. Naik’s A History of Indian Literature in English, Sahitya Akademi, Delhi, 1982 has given her her due as a writer of short stories and also considered her autobiographies and other work. He has also called her a Parsi writer, although a Christian convert.

So Cornelia does not really need Twenty first century feminist scholarship to acknowledge her credentials as an Indian English writer. What is needed is to establish her resistance if any to colonial and patriarchal discourse. Internalisation of subordinate status is a colonial phenomenon noted by many including Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), where Fanon has spoken about the colonised subject’s atavistical desire to be white. More contemporary critics of Parsis in India such as Tania Luhrmann (The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1996) have written (mistakenly I think) about the ultimate tragedy of the Parsis not being able to become White British.

Cornelia does identify with the British colonisers in her work and Sarkar and Lokuge have both noted the Tourist guide like nature of much of her discourse where she seems to be leading her Western reader by the hand or eye, through the mysteries of India. The question of audience has haunted not just colonial Indian writers in English but continues to trouble their postcolonial descendents too. In 1904, when Cornelia wrote Sun Babies, or even in 1934 when she wrote India Calling who would have been her readers? Why just pick on a colonial loyalist like Sorabji? Who would have Mulk Raj Anand had in mind when he wrote Untouchable in 1935? Was he describing the caste system and the life of Bakha for fellow-Indians? Surely that would have been like taking coals to Dhanbad? Cornelia might have in Ngugi Wa Thion’go’s terms needed to decolonise her mind, but nowhere in her writing does one find the cringe factor – Oh I am so inferior, you are so superior. Oh I wish I were White – in her writing. This is not an attempt to whitewash Cornelia’s imperialist sympathies but to relieve her of the burden of blind imitation and support of the colonial regime.

In India Calling, Cornelia is more than proud of her Parsi Zoroastrian lineage and does not attempt to hide her non-Christian ancestors. Her first chapter is devoted to her Parsi heritage. As for her identification with India she writes that ‘I have been privileged to know two hearthstones, to be homed in two countries, England and India. But though it is difficult to say which “home” I love best, there has never, at any time, been the remotest doubt as to which called to me with most insistence…Always, early or late, throughout the years, it has been “India Calling”…’(5). Cornelia had retired in 1929 and eventually settled in England where she died a lonely death in 1954 in a hospital where she was placed in 1947. However, while her mental faculties were still sharp, as late as the mid-1940s, although in ill health and with deteriorating eyesight she continued to be connected with her purdahnasheens and was involved with socio-political issues.

Cornelia’s commitment to India and her purdahnasheens had begun when she returned to there in 1894 and began to represent the secluded women who were the wards of the British Government, in Agency courts of Indore and Rajkot. However, it was not until 1904 that she was given recognition as woman zenana official to the Court of Wards in Bengal. This meant she had to move to Calcutta and as she writes in India Calling, she had failed to negotiate a salary or a gazetted status for herself, so lacked even office space and had very little money to live on or even travel to meet her women clients. It was only in 1907 that Cornelia was finally granted a gazetted officer status. Although a qualified lawyer, gender inequities had meant that she was admitted to the Rolls of the Allahabad High Court only in 1919, official acceptance came even later in England and the BCL (Bachelor of Civil Law) degree she had earned in 1892, under considerable humiliation, (she had not been allowed to write her exams in the same room as the male candidates and had either been patronised or insulted by the all-male faculty) was conferred on her and she was admitted as member of Lincoln’s Inn only in 1923. Cornelia had to thus wait for almost thirty years before she was an officially recognised lawyer and could be enrolled in the Calcutta High Court only in 1924. Thirty odd years is generally the span of most people’s careers and Cornelia had to wait for a very long time for official recognition by a male dominated society and when it finally came it was almost towards the end of her career.

Yet as her writing shows she did not let this lack of official recognition in any way handicap her work among her beloved purdahnasheens, nor did she turn bitter towards either the British or the Indian men who did her such injustice and continued to hamper her work with her wards of the court. She notes this in her memoirs, but in passing, the focus is on her women, their worlds and her overarching concern with the need to protect them and to provide them with justice. Page after page of Sorabji’s memoirs shows how she travelled miles, forded rivers, first on elephant back and then in motor cars to reach her remotest clients, how she dealt with murderous male relatives and became the confidante of the women who would deal only with her and shouted for ‘Sorabji’ to any male Indian or British Colonial officer who would have the temerity to approach them instead of Cornelia.

It would be interesting here to compare and contrast Cornelia’s writing about India and her women with the texts of Anglo-Indian women such as F***y Parks and the Laat Sahib’s Memsahib, Emily Eden. Both belonged to an earlier era, the 1830s and 1840s but had access to the zenanas, but they could only record the lives of the secluded women and in the case of Parks befriend them (See F***y Parks, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, during Four and Twenty years in the East; With revelations of Life in the Zenana, 2 Vols.,London, Reprinted OUP, Karachi, 1975 and Emily Eden, Up the Country, Letters to her Sister from the Upper Provinces, 1866, Reprinted Virago, 1983). They could not ameliorate their condition like Sorabji could. Parks had learnt to speak, read and even write some Urdu and was hence able to converse with the women of the zenanas who she travelled to meet on elephant back and boat usually alone and in complete contravention of the conventions of social in*******se between the memsahibs and the native women. But even Parks was helpless when it came to protecting these women from their rapacious relatives, pre-empting the forcing of sati on them or looking after their physical and psychological wellness.

Cornelia was able to do this because she in many ways transcended her colonial space and her later nationalist time. This she did with single-minded focus on her wards to the exclusion of all else. This is not to suggest that she did not associate herself with women’s groups in urban India and isolated herself in the Raj intrigues of her women’s states. Sorabji was instrumental in starting the Indian chapter of the Federation of University Women and was on the Executive Committee of the National Council of Women. She cannot also be accused of centering all her attention on the elitist zenana women for she formed the League of Social Service to educate rural women, for which she used the services of the women of the zenana. Never a radical she gradually drew out her women, who went in purdah carriages and cars to the villages, where the men withdrew themselves, so they could interact with the village women and teach them and provide them with medical help. Cornelia had opposed female franchise and had first wanted the women to be educated so that they could not be politically manipulated by their men folk. Women like Sarojini Naidu had been angered by her stance and first wanted the franchise and then special education for women. Shades of this argument still haunt Indian socio-political spaces in the context of women in politics.

In this context it is interesting to note that although Cornelia opposed female franchise and did not approve of the mimicking of male privileges, she jealously guarded her own autonomy, which in the manner of most dominant women, who do not feel the need to take recourse to feminist ideology, she saw herself as above gender politics. In a revealing sequence, in India Calling, Sorabji writes that once when she was being carried in a palanquin the bearers in the accepted manner of the time glorified her bravery – she had just saved a purdahnasheen from dacoits who had been set upon her by her avaricious male relatives – and sang: ‘“She spoke like the Burra Lat Sahib…Who can she be?”’ (88). This is a crucial moment in Sorabji’s remembering as it brings into focus the entire question of her identity – male/female, Indian/English – as well as her own magnification of her self.

In India Calling, Cornelia’s antipathy towards the nationalist movement which she saw as premature is clear enough but her work with not just the purdahnasheens but also the Federation of University Women and her pioneering efforts in Food Processing ensure that she can never be seen as anti-Indian. In the aftermath of the First World War when imported English food became scarce, Cornelia’s indomitable women put up an exhibition of indigenous food products and then went into food preservation and canning of vegetables and fruits. As the cultivation of fruits and vegetables in rural India is generally in the hands of women, it is they who were the beneficiaries of such a movement. Cornelia in her usual dominant fashion roped in the Directorate of Agriculture and took the help of her brother who was with the Agricultural Station in Western India to standardise her products. In a humorous aside she tells us how years later at a Swadeshi Fair held in Delhi in 1931, the Gandhian stall owners begged her to visit their stalls where they had on display Cornelia’s Food Products Certificates.

Long before she finally retired in 1929, Cornelia’s battle with ill health had begun. The chief among her problems was deteriorating eye sight which began troubling her in 1918. She was treated for this in England and America and was told that nothing further could be done for her and she would have to reconcile herself to blindness. Cornelia however continued to see ‘as if by a miracle’ (210) as she tells us in India Calling. She also carried on with her work in the Calcutta High Court, although she avoided the hot months, she did go back to her Purdahnasheens in the winter months. Her work in this later part of her career included a study of caste and membership of the committee of an All-India Investigations of Prisons. This investigation looked at how the British Indian jails complied with the Geneva conventions and how they treated political prisoners.

This gave her utmost satisfaction as it enabled her to comply with the basic tenets of her father’s ancestors Zoroastrianism – ‘following goodness’ and weaving in ‘the fine gold thread’ which she hoped was ‘revealed shining through the coarse warp and woof of [the] weaving’ (210) of her texts. India called out to her daughter again and again and Cornelia obeyed the call until the political events in the country, with which she could not relate, made not just her but all her siblings retire one by one to England. When Europe was once again plunged into a war in 1939, Cornelia was already there and as her nephew Richard Rustom Sorabji writes in an afterword to Lokuge’s edition of India Calling, his Aunt Cornelia swept through wartime London in her bright saris and faced falling bombs with the same aplomb as she did dacoits in the service of her pudahnasheens. The ‘pukka Sorabji code’ that had demanded she continue with her work in India, even though she could barely see anything, was what sent her out on the morning after a bomb had destroyed the church where she used to worship in London and order the startled clergyman to conduct his service amidst the ‘steaming ruins’ (214). Yet this woman who called two countries home and laid claim to multiple identities, was sadly not fully acceptable in any one of them. Though literary critics today call Cornelia a Parsi and she claimed that lineage for herself and even her mother, she was not one. Parsi Zoroastrians in India do not recognise those who have converted to other religions as had Cornelia’s father as belonging to their community. In spite of her life-long adherence to saris (worn in the Parsi fashion) and her insider knowledge of the languages and customs and traditions of India, to the nationalists she was anti-Indian. As for her imperial identity, in spite of her loyalty to the Empire and the trips she made to America and Canada in the 1930s to put across the case of the British there, she remained an outsider. An invitation to talk at the convention of the ‘Daughters of the Empire’ in Canada could not vouchsafe passage from the USA into Canada. The problem she writes in India Calling was with the non-recognition of Canada as part of the British Empire for which she had a visa, by the Canadian visa officer. Sorabji calls this ‘an amusing thing’ (205) and once again it’s the public voice we hear as she refuses to reveal any inner anger or humiliation she might have felt regarding a Canadian emigration officer in 1931 not knowing that his country was a part of the British Empire. If she suspected her attire and British Indian passport had anything to do with this refusal, she does not share the suspicion with the reader. She also found hilarious an English woman approaching her in London and saying, ‘What a pity you are not a Christian’ and then upon learning that she was one saying, ‘But you look so very heathen’ (215). These were the kind of prejudices and oppositions Cornelia battled with until her near-blindness and physical deterioration, was compounded by mental illness and she had to be institutionalised in 1947. The spirit though did not give in for many more years and she finally passed away only in 1954.

Cornelia might have been on ‘the wrong side of history’ (Richard Sorabji, 215) but her grassroots approach to social welfare has only been validated by time and contemporary theory. She never opposed anything or anyone openly but tried to convince them by respecting their different opinions but gently directing them into a different path. Her juggling with multiple identities can also be a learning experience for men and women in the twentieth first century as they too like her have to often contend with confusing loyalties and selves in an increasingly global world. This is the reason why it becomes important to excavate women like Sorabji and recalling them to life today.

References:
Anand, Mulk Raj. 1935. Untouchable. Reprint Penguin U.K., 1989.
Burton, Antoinette. 2003. Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Eden, Emily. 1866. Up the Country, Letters to her Sister from the Upper Provinces. Reprint Virago, 1983.
Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Black Skin White Masks. Translation Charles L. Markmann, Grove Press, 1987.
Lokuge, Chandani (Ed). 2001. Introduction in India Calling: The Memories of Cornelia Sorabji, India’s First Woman Barrister, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
Luhrmann, Tania. 1996. The Good Parsi: The Fate of the Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society, Oxford University Press, Delhi.
Naik, M.K. 1982. A History of Indian Literature in English. Sahitya Akademi, Delhi.
Ngugi, Wa Thion’go. 1986. Decolonising the Mind. Heinemann Educational Books, U.K.
Parks, F***y. 1850. Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, 2 Vols. Reprint OUP, Karachi, 1975.
Sarkar, Sonita. 2009-10. “Modern America: Gwendolyn Bennett and Victoria Ocampo Capture the Continents”. In Review of International American Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2-3, Fall Winter 2009-10, pp. 14-20.
Sengupta, Padmini. N.d. The Portrait of an Indian Woman. YWCA, Calcutta.
Sorabji, Cornelia. 1902. Love and Life Behind the Purdah. Freemantle and Company, London.
______________. 1904. Sun Babies. Murray, London.
______________. 1908. Between the Twilights: Being Studies of Indian Women by one of Themselves. Harper, London.
_____________. 1917. The Purdahnashin. Thacker Spink, London.
_____________. 1924. Therefore. Reprint Hart Publishing, Toronto.
_____________. 1930. Gold Mohur: A Play. Alexander Moring, London.
_____________. 1934. India Calling. Nisbet, London.
_____________. 1936. India Recalled. Nisbet, London.
Sorabji, Richard Rustom. 2001. Afterword in Lokuge Chandni (Ed.) India Calling: The Memories of Cornelia Sorabji, India’s First Woman Barrister.