ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the articulation of Cornelia Sorabji’s anglicised self-fashioning in the context of Gandhian nationalism. Sorabji, who was “brought up English” in her parental home in the Bombay Presidency of colonial India, later went on to become the first Indian woman to practice law and earned her fame by working for and writing about the upper-caste Hindu purdahnashins. One expression of Sorabji’s anglicised self-fashioning was her support for the British rule in India. Thus, during the 1930s, Sorabji actively pursued the role of a Gandhi-baiter bent on proving the falsity of the contemporary anticolonial mass movements and Gandhi’s duplicitous role as a leader. For Sorabji, the real people of India not only needed but also welcomed the benevolent patronage of the British Raj. In her 1934 autobiography, India Calling, Sorabji represents this relationship of patronage by speaking of her own association with the purdahnashins and her efforts to protect their traditional way of life from being swamped by the chaos of anticolonial mass movements. The chapter explores how such an authorial stance opened up a contradiction between fashioning herself as an English and attempting to speak on the behalf of Indian womanhood.
