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In 1892, a young Indian woman sat the examination for the Bachelor of Civil Law at Oxford. She passed. The university did not give her the degree, because it did not give degrees to women. It would be thirty years before she received it. In the meantime, Cornelia Sorabji became the first woman to practise law in India, and for two decades the only lawyer available to thousands of women whom the law and custom kept behind the purdah.

Early Life

Sorabji was born on 15 November 1866 in Nashik, in the Bombay Presidency, one of nine children of a Parsi convert to Christianity and a mother who founded schools for girls. She was educated at home and at Deccan College in Poona, where she was the first woman student, and graduated from Bombay University in 1888 with a first in literature, the first woman to do so. As the top graduate she was entitled to a government scholarship to study in England. The scholarship was withheld because she was a woman. English supporters, among them Florence Nightingale, raised the money instead.

Oxford

She entered Somerville Hall, Oxford, in 1889 to read law, the first woman to do so and the first Indian woman at a British university. Her mentor was Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol, who arranged for her to attend lectures from which women were normally excluded. In 1892 she was permitted, by special decree, to sit the BCL examination. She passed, but Oxford did not admit women to degrees until 1920, and she formally received hers only in 1922. She later wrote that next to home there was no place like Somerville.

A Lawyer Without a Profession

Sorabji returned to India in 1894 to find that no court would admit a woman to practise. She took the LLB of Bombay University in 1897 and passed the pleader’s examination at Allahabad in 1899, and still could not be enrolled. Instead she found a different route to her clients. Under Hindu and Muslim custom, many women of property lived in purdah, unable to consult male lawyers, and were routinely defrauded by relatives and agents. Sorabji petitioned the India Office to be allowed to advise them.

In 1904 she was appointed Lady Assistant to the Court of Wards in Bengal, with responsibility for advising purdahnashin women and minors whose estates were under government protection. Her work later extended to Bihar, Orissa and Assam. She travelled to remote estates, often by bullock cart and boat, to take instructions from women no male official could see. A report in 1916 recorded her work on 110 estates for 176 women and 139 boys. Over her career she is estimated to have assisted several hundred women and orphans.

Called at Last

The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 opened the legal profession in Britain to women, and India followed in 1923. Sorabji, then in her fifties, was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1922 and called to the Bar in June 1923. She began practice at Calcutta in 1924, one of the first women to appear as an advocate in an Indian court. Practice was not easy; the profession was unwelcoming, and she was by then past the age at which most careers begin. She retired to London in 1929.

Writings and Views

Sorabji wrote extensively about the women she served, in Love and Life behind the Purdah (1901), Between the Twilights (1908) and The Purdahnashin (1917), and about her own life in India Calling (1934) and India Recalled (1936). Her political views were controversial: she opposed the Indian independence movement and Gandhi, believing that reform should come gradually and within the imperial system. Later generations have found that harder to admire than her legal work. Both are part of the record.

Legacy

Sorabji died in London on 6 July 1954. For decades she was largely forgotten. Recognition has come since. In 2012 a bronze bust was unveiled at Lincoln’s Inn by Lady Hale, then the only woman on the UK Supreme Court. Somerville College established a scholarship in her name in 2016. The Inner Temple, the Oxford Law Faculty and her Inn now list her among the pioneers of women in law.

For readers in Bangladesh, her story has a local dimension. The women she served in the Court of Wards were the women of Bengal, in estates that now lie on both sides of the border. Nearly a century after she was finally called, the profession she entered alone is one in which women still make up a small minority of judges in this country. Her career is a reminder of how recently that door was opened, and by whom.

Sources

1. Somerville College, Oxford, Cornelia Sorabji: https://www.some.ox.ac.uk/eminent/cornelia-sorabji/
2. Oxford Law Faculty, Alumna Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954): https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/content/alumna-cornelia-sorabji-1866-1954
3. Lincoln’s Inn, Tales from the Archive: Cornelia Sorabji: https://www.lincolnsinn.org.uk/library-archives/tales-from-the-archive/july-2018-cornelia-sorabji/
4. Inner Temple, Pioneering women in law: Cornelia Sorabji: https://www.innertemple.org.uk/who-we-are/history/women-in-law/pioneering-women-in-law/cornelia-sorabji/
5. Wikipedia, Cornelia Sorabji: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelia_Sorabji