A light read by me about the person who became India's first woman lawyer over at dailyo.in:
Read more.
2017 tweets:
Cornelia Sorabji is, of course, best-known as India’s first woman lawyer, after having been the first woman graduate of Bombay University and the first woman to study law at Oxford University. It is easy to co-opt her into the role of a committed feminist who changed women’s lives but to do so would likely be to essentialise her life, flatten the many layers of her personality, and possibly to impose on her philosophies which she would not immediately have claimed as her own.
Read more.
2017 tweets:
India's first woman lawyer, Cornelia Sorabji, born #otd 1866, didn't have an easy start despite being privileged but that didn't stop her.
She managed to begin practising not as a lawyer permitted to but as a "person for the defence", thus exploiting a legal loophole. pic.twitter.com/iSQ6S61Zdf— Nandita Saikia (@nsaikia) November 15, 2017
Unsurprisingly, Cornelia Sorabji didn't always rely on either the law or on anecdotes to say what she had to say.— Nandita Saikia (@nsaikia) November 15, 2017
She turned to literature. Her stories highlighted how the combined forces of law & societal contempt for women not backed by men circumscribed women's lives. pic.twitter.com/G81EZmroD1
Cornelia Sorabji belonged to a class which wasn't always antagonistic to the British; she herself was a conservative social reformer without strong nationalistic aspirations.— Nandita Saikia (@nsaikia) November 15, 2017
She left for London after she retired and died there. Her family home in Pune, India, is now a hotel. pic.twitter.com/daAvNGcBGY