Conclusiones y recomendaciones de la Experiencia Profesional

Cornelia Sorabji was born into a Parsi family in Bombay in 1866. Her family had converted to Christianity, her father, Sorabji Kharsedji (who later changed his name to the Christian name Richard Sorabji), was a Parsi and her mother was a low caste Hindu who had also converted when she married Sorabji‟s father. The family in Sorabji‟s words were „brought up English … with English discipline; on the English language … in a home furnished like an English home.‟ (Sorabji, India Calling, 12) This familial paradigm presented Sorabji with an avenue into a world that would not have been accessible under a traditional Indian upbringing. Cornelia‟s mother Francina was a committed social activist who sought to engage in the modernising projects that had been initiated by the variety of Christian missionaries who flourished all over India. Her father was also committed to raising his daughters with good education and for them to aspire for professional careers; expectations that were anathema to the social expectations of Indian women across all communities in India at the time. Sorabji was born into a hybridised family that had already sloughed of the weight off cultural expectations; her father‟s conversion to Christianity was especially contentious in regards to the minority status of Parses in India. Both parents „in their different ways represented ... minorities within minorities (Christianised groups within Parsee/tribal groupings): this special if somewhat beleaguered position would inform and reinforce Cornelia‟s self perceived outside status.‟ (Introduction, India Calling, x) This identity formation was intrinsic to both Sorabji‟s subsequent attempts to insert herself within the imperial project and the various ways in which she was able to anachronistically adopt, appropriate, reverse and subvert dominant Orientalisms.

Cornelia Sorabji became the first woman graduate in Western India when she obtained a first class degree in English literature from Bombay University. She subsequently secured a job at Gujarat College in Ahmedabad teaching literature. With the aid of a scholarship from her British patrons, Lord and Lady Hobhouse, Sorabji then moved to Somerville College at Oxford University in 1889 to study law and train for the Bar. She moved to England with special dispensation, this was because no woman was allowed to proceed to a degree at Oxford until 1922, even though they were permitted to attend the classes and take the exams. Historically, Sorabji became the first woman in the entire British Empire to pass her Bachelor of Civil Law exam; although, it was not until she returned to Oxford in 1922 that she received her law degree. Subsequently, she was also called to the Bar in the same year. In the interim between these periods, however, she served the Court of Wards in Calcutta as its legal adviser for a period of eighteen years in between 1904 and 1922. Suparna Gooptu, in her excellent biography of Cornelia Sorabji‟s life, has stated that her professional career during this time was punctuated by „a continuous struggle to negotiate the multiple layers of power relationships structured on race, class and caste,‟ where „her work involved regular office work and extensive district tours under very trying conditions.‟146

This established the structural and thematic basis of her texts, which detailed her extensive periods of travel, whilst also developing a political subjectivity that allowed her to manoeuvre between the various bureaucratic minefields that sought to exploit her minority voice. Her mobile subjectivity enabled Sorabji to navigate between the patriarchies of India as a society and the Empire as a political hierarchy.

Before and after the time she had relocated to Britain, Sorabji produced a variety of interdisciplinary texts that could be described variously as

autobiographies, ethnographies, memoirs and histories. The majority of her literary corpus concentrated on the social welfare and reform of the Zenana inhabitant and Indian women in general, across all communities in India. Her first text, Love and Life behind the Purdah was published in 1901, followed three years later by a text actually focused on Indian childhood, Sun-Babies, Studies in the Child-Life of India

(1904). However, her subsequent texts reoriented her focus back onto Indian women specifically: these included Portraits of Some Indian Women (1905) and Between the Twilights: Being Studies of Indian Women by One of Themselves (1908). She also composed a profile of Florence Nightingale in A New Story about Florence Nightingale in 1910. Six years later she wrote a children‟s book called Shikhandi: The Maiden-Knight and Other Stories (1916) that was illustrated by the Victorian illustrator Warwick Goble. Further literary output in the decade following included the ethnographies Indian Tales of the Great Ones Among Men, Women, and Bird- People (1916), The Purdahnashin (1917) and Shubala: a child-mother (1920).147

Once she had settled in Britain, Sorabji wrote a succession of books about her time and career spent working for the Court of Wards in India. These also incorporated her legal work and time spent living in Britain, most notably her two autobiographies/travelogues: India Calling (1935) and India Recalled (1936). A biography of her sister entitled: Susie Sorabji, Christian-Parsee Educationist of Western India; A Memoir was also composed in 1932. Two historical narratives:

India: Ancient Heritage (1934) and Queen Mary's Book for India (1943) were published either side of Sorabji‟s two autobiographies.

Cornelia Sorabji, throughout her writings, positions herself in a variety of contradictory settings, where „as a citizen of empire, she effectively found herself at

the intersection point of any number of fault-lines in the colonial establishment ... both affiliation and isolation informed her life: her identity was constituted within the tension of their interplay.‟ (Introduction, India Calling xi) This conflicting sense of affiliation can again be partially attributed to her father‟s decision to convert to Christianity whilst continuing to identify himself and his family with his Parsi heritage. A resulting polyvalent sense of identity is expressed in vivid terms when Sorabji declares:

We were made proud of [the Parsi] Community; but from our earliest days we were taught to call ourselves Indian and love and be proud of the country of our adoption: while ... our parents made us love also the people and country to which George Valentine and Cornelia Ford belonged.148 (Sorabji,

India Calling,12)

The fact of travel was again instrumental in fashioning this mobile identity as her parents moved from Nasik where she was initially raised, to Belgaum and then on to Poona.149 Sorabji and her family‟s identity constructions are not binary; they chose to position themselves outside of coded definitions within the British imperial body politic. This fluid dynamic allowed her to variously fashion herself as an imperialist but also as an Indian with a developed sense of what that meant as a national identity, hence her affiliation to the colonial project was not always in harmony; tensions and disagreements were readily expressed.

Sorabji‟s endorsement of British imperialism can be explained by the analogy she draws between the benefits she perceives the Parsi community had engendered within India and the modernity that British colonialism promised to deliver:

They have, like the British helped the development of trade, and being, as a community, rich prosperous and generous have been responsible for many public benefactions in the cities, where they dwell; giving the lead, indeed, in these directions to native Indians themselves. We have lived in real isolation,

but in real friendship and understanding with all races and communities in India. (Sorabji, India Calling, 10)

The Parsi contribution to Indian culture and civilisation at the beginning of her autobiography acts as a surrogate emphasis for what she believed the influence the British imperial project had, and could continue to have, over Indian progress and modernity. The benefits and benevolence of the British imperial project are explicitly laid out by Sorabji when relating her own position within the reforming and missionary structure. She proclaims that within reformism: „coercion would be useless as well as foolish. And coercion was against the principles and promises of the British.‟ (Sorabji, India Calling, 133)

Explicitly and at times implicitly, Sorabji co-opts herself into an Orientalist and particularly Anglicist discourse. Her Christian faith was one such affiliation with Western value systems that facilitated her co-option within Victorian discourses of reform. She states: „it is my considered belief that India cannot attain to the expression of her highest self … without the continued example and teaching of the devoted and efficient men and women who throughout the country represent the church of Christ.‟ (Sorabji, India Recalled, 267) Conversely, Sorabji is also quick

to tap into the romanticist nostalgia that had characterised much of the early part of the nineteenth century. Her tone and language in this passage are adopted from this discourse: „I have a sneaking conviction that the ancients understood the Oriental temperament as modern educationists cannot do, and that India will not enter upon her inheritance till she returns to her second century ways.‟ (Sorabji, India Calling,

125) India, in order to fulfil its promise, must look to its own ancient history in order to paradoxically extricate itself from the past. Thus, Sorabji proves dextrous in her miming of various Orientalist positions. In this respect, she aligns herself with her

European readership, adopting „the all seeing eye of the imperialist, playing to the scopophilia, disguised as reforming interest, of her Western audience.‟ (Introduction, Sorabji, India Calling, 125) Sorabji consistently places herself within the exalted place of the Orientalist whose job was to sanitise and restructure its subject, a position she wilfully adopts, especially in the way the zenana is positioned as the site of her reforming agenda.

In framing the zenana as an antiquated site, she metaphorically acts as the figure of modernity steadfastly sure of her power to transform and puncture Indian beliefs in idols and black magic. She stresses the potential commensurability of Indian belief systems and Western modernity when she exhorts: „if one only knows enough there is a way of getting round most of the centuries-old difficulties.‟ (Sorabji, India Calling, 152) Her ability to overcome these differences is reiterated when she precociously anoints herself as the bringer of enlightenment:

After years of experience, in untrodden ways, I conclude that the only way to help the illiterate and superstitious is to proceed from the known and accepted to the unknown; to base the enlightenment which you would bring upon the superstition; not to flout the superstition. (Sorabji, India Calling, 153)

Cornelia Sorabji consciously places herself within the epistemological framework of the classic Orientalist, an administrator convinced of the importance of their work, who figured as a pioneer and writer of history: „I had in short, learnt that the work which I had prescribed for myself met a real need: that it was worthwhile and satisfying, and should be carried on after my time.‟ (Sorabji, India Calling, 79) To do this, she makes a promise to her readership to become intimate with and subsequently render intelligible her subject: „I had realized from the beginning that I

could never understand my wards, unless I understood their attitude of mind towards religion; and I had not before.‟ (Sorabji, India Calling, 85)

As opposed to the more opaque relation to the domestic in India Calling the reader in India Recalled published in 1936 is „pointedly informed that the zenana is directly analogous to, and synonymous with, the orthodox Hindu home – a symbolic and material space in need of attention precisely because it is in crisis.‟150 The zenana in Orientalist terms becomes the mythologised terrain that needs to be accessed, conquered and then controlled and Sorabji forwards herself as the imperial conqueror.

The figures of the Indian woman and ancient India become intertwined when Sorabji profiles Girish Babu, an elderly woman who proved immune to her rhetoric of modernity. She concedes that: „the centuries of looking at life from a different angle, had fixed her pupils, so to speak, and they could not expand or contract to suit the luminosity of the West – of other latitudes of thought and light.‟ (Sorabji, India Recalled, 100) However, Sorabji postulates Babu and others like her, who act as metaphors for the zenana as a whole, as the final obstacles in the way of modernity and its spread over Indian society. Sorabji identifies „the urge of the young, for Western contacts, [that] had already in [Babu‟s and] Arnakali‟s lifetime, knocked at the Zenana door.‟ (Sorabji, India Recalled, viii)

Sorabji explicitly Orientalises the zenana in formulaic Orientalist terms, by portraying it as ancient, unchanging, and fundamentally anti-modern:

Those of us who know only the modern progressive India of the things that are visible, are apt not to realize – maybe we have had no opportunity to discover – the fact that that historical anecdote [the Zenana] is symbolic of orthodox Hindu India in this twentieth century; that it breathes the atmosphere, and describes the foundations of the life lived in every orthodox

Hindu home … tied and bound by traditions – spiritual, tribal, dynastic, domestic. (Sorabji, India Recalled, vii)

Modernity is fixed as inevitable and Indian society is placed upon Western teleologies of progress. Sorabji concedes the need to „prepare our children for that open zenana door, for that speeding – up of the pace, which cannot be evaded.‟ (Sorabji, India Recalled, vii) Antoinette Burton has emphasised the „museological character‟ of her memoirs, insofar as they reflect „Sorabji's commitment to understanding the zenana and its inhabitants as relics of the past and herself, by extension, as the representative not simply of a contradictory but of an unwilling modernity as well.‟ (Burton, „The Purdahnashin,‟ 156) Her co-option within the

colonial project is at its most explicit here; she can be viewed as a genuine Orientalist in Saidian terms as she constructs India and its domestic sphere as incapable of reforming themselves in accordance to these teleologies of modernity; India needs and unconsciously desires her intervention as the purveyor of modernity.

Though her imperial sensibilities and Anglophilia are undeniable, her Orientalist gaze is not merely mimetic of Victorian Anglicist discourse; she is allowed more intimate access to the zenana, a domestic entrance not readily available to Western reformers, male or female. Thus her accounts of Indian domesticity are promoted as pioneering, intimate and rendered with an objectivity and sympathy that she contends a conventional Orientalist account just could not achieve or aspire to. In one encounter in the zenana, she emphasises her ability to penetrate the Indian social curtain, proclaiming: „to my delight, I was invited inside the circle to bestow my blessing: and was able to pull aside the flower – veils a little, to find two very happy and beaming faces.‟ (Sorabji, India Recalled, 220) Behind the purdah we find an objectified sphere „in contrast to most zenana narratives that

alternate between horror at the abjection of the zenana women or a voyeuristic pleasure in their purported exoticism – the actual visit to the zenana is always held up as a much-awaited occasion.‟151 Sorabji recontextualises the Orientalist paradigm here; her influence and input as an Indian woman is invited; a surrogate emphasis that the British imperial project was not so eagerly welcomed.

The framings of the Other, especially the mythologised Indian woman of the zenana and the harem, are rendered with more detail. Her ethnography is imbued with a desire to subvert a variety of dominant Orientalist stereotypes. The perceived helplessness and powerlessness of the zenana inhabitant in comparison to the freedom of Western women is questioned by Sorabji when she explains that „the Indian woman has, generally speaking, greater rights to property than the English married woman … and far less hazard and insecurity in widowhood.‟ (Sorabji, India Recalled, 32) She goes on to caution against the generalisations by which Indian women were encased within the epistemological framework of feminine Orientalist constructions. Sorabji warns that we should „dare not lightly dismiss the thrills or shudders of any single person with inhibitions and raised in circumstances to which we ourselves are strangers.‟ (Sorabji, India Recalled, 264) This exhortation demonstrates a crucial paradox in Sorabji‟s thinking, she calls for universal understanding within a globalised framework but also contrarily pleads for localised sensitivities when accessing and reforming particular Indian traditions and customs, most notably the domesticated zenana inhabitant. Mrinalini Sinha, in her efforts to place the modern Indian woman outside of Western feminist history, reiterates Sorabji‟s point of view:

This reconceptualisation of historiography not only emphasizes the need to historicize the conditions in which politics and identities emerge, but also

draws attention to the writing of history itself ... open[ing] up new possibilities for conceptualizing the problem of locating the Indian woman.152 Sorabji‟s reverse Orientalist account of the native woman is one such possibility.

It is important to note, however, that Sorabji‟s reverse Orientalism is tactical; she is not positioned as an ideological anti-Orientalist, who fully objects to the colonial project, its political machinations and the binary distinctions it makes between East and West. What she does do, is balance her admiration for aspects of British colonialism, with a desire to protect Indian cultural values, because, she believes that successful social change needs to be co-ordinated in gradual and contextually sensitive terms. In her view, an absolute and dogmatic approach to social change, represented by Anglicist Orientalism, can only result in native resistance and social re-entrenchment in India.

Sorabji delineates the zenana outside a series of Orientalist taxonomies. The zenana is not stripped of vibrancy, tenderness and life; she is careful to humanise the domestic terrain. In one description she joyously recalls: „now all was laughter and movement. Indian women are really very witty; and for once the children could speak freely in the presence of their elders … teasing them, calling them by nicknames [they] carefully concealed.‟ (Sorabji, India Recalled, 264) The lifeless and docile zenana inhabitant is reproduced as wilful, exuberant and inquisitive. When describing one such zenana resident, Giribala Devi, Sorabji stresses that „she spoke readily enough, and was really very bright and amusing – a vivid personality, conscious of individual gifts, and longing for expression.‟ (Sorabji, India Recalled,

20) Some of the Ranis in both India Calling and India Recalled are showcased as strong independent women whose free thinking and rationality were beginning to erode the influence of the priesthood and superstition in the domestic sphere:

I have known women who have founded hospitals and schools, boldly facing the wrath of the priests who had hoped expenditure might be on “gifts to the priesthood” or “to buy off the curses of (unknown) enemies.” And, I am full of hope for all that will be done for the country when secluded women are educated and guided along the right lines. (Sorabji, India Recalled, 40) This dynamic lays bare the promise of a new India if channelled correctly. The stereotypes of the docile, weak, unchanging and uneducated Indian woman are