Champion of women's rights
GEETA RAMASESHAN
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An insightful biography of the first woman to study law at Oxford and pursue the legal profession in India
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CORNELIA SORABJI — India's Pioneer Woman Lawyer, A Biography: Suparna Gooptu; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 495.
Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman to study law at Oxford in 1889 and the first woman to practise at the Calcutta High Court was a pioneer in many ways. At a time when Cornelia received her training at Oxford, women students were treated as guests and denied the right to receive degrees. When she tried to practise as a `vakil' in Bombay, she was refused enrolment as she could not cite a precedence of a woman `vakil'. The chief justice told her that a woman should not have anything to do with law. The Allahabad High Court refused to permit her to practise law holding that it would be impertinent of an Indian high court to admit women on its rolls before England had given the lead.
Pioneer woman lawyer
Undeterred and wanting to prove that there was a need for a woman lawyer even outside the court room Cornelia presented a scheme for extending help to `purdahnashin' women who because of their social seclusion were deprived the benefits of law. The proposal met with severe objections and criticisms from men in the legal profession both Indian and British but it was approved in 1904 when Cornelia was permitted to provide legal assistance to the `purdahnashins' in Bengal. She started her practice as a lawyer only after 1920 at Allahabad and played a pioneering role in trying to open the legal profession to women.
Displeased with the political and cultural transformation of Indian life in the 20th century, Cornelia became a defender of the Empire and Hindu orthodoxy. Her association with Katherine Mayo's Mother India contributed to her marginalisation from the mainstream of Indian political, social and professional life. She died in 1954 in England a lonely and distressed woman.
Struggles
Gooptu's biography skilfully draws a canvas of an individual who was in many ways ahead of her times and places Cornelia in the intersection of gender, class and racial politics. While tracing Cornelia's education, Gooptu narrates the complex way in which Oxford provided an ideological justification for the notion of the Empire. Gooptu argues that Cornelia's struggles were located within the matrix of imperial politics where the woman's question was also subsumed within the Tory imperial ideology. "Even when British women were provided a public space, they had to work within the parameters of the Empire." Exposed to this complex English political atmosphere of the late 19th century, Cornelia disagreed with Ramabai and felt that social change in India could not be brought through legislation because India was unprepared for it.
Gooptu's analysis and case studies of Cornelia's interaction with `purdanashins' and Cornelia's fight against male bias in the legal profession makes fascinating reading drawing as it were from Cornelia's own struggles in establishing herself as a lawyer and the problems faced by `purdanashins'. `Purdahnashins' could not publicly participate in the management of their estates.
Private self
The male agent, who was her sole trustee, undertook the administration of the trust. Cases of abuses and betrayals of trust were in plenty. Even in such cases a `purdanashin' could complain only through her trustee due to her seclusion. If she was a guardian of a male heir to the estate she and her minor children became wards of the court in British India or the collector. Emphasising the denial of justice for such women Cornelia proposed the appointment of a lady legal adviser to the court of wards for each province who would be able to serve their needs.
The book draws a lot of materials from Cornelia's private papers and correspondence that reveal crucial dimensions of her private self. The author places Cornelia in context while providing a rich analysis of the negotiations she chose in her professional life, the choices she made in her personal life and the ideological beliefs to which she held on. Gooptu provides an insightful biography of a remarkable woman who has remained neglected in studies on India's transition to modernity and also in the historiography of women and gender.
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