‘The Purdahnashin in her setting’: Colonial modernity and the Zenana in Cornelia Sorabji’s memoirs

This article focuses on two memoirs written by Cornelia Sorabji in the 1930s - India Calling (1934), and a subsequent book, India Recalled (1936) - in order to explore how discourses of space and place shaped the representations of femininity which structure these texts. Specifically, I will examine Sorabji’s apprehensions of femininity in relation to the Muslim and Hindu women she viewed as her legal ‘clients.’ I am equally interested in these texts as evidence of how memory works as a practice of history - how events as they were recalled and recorded in the volatile 1930s and, especially in the wake of the Katherine Mayo controversy, how they helped shape the versions of the respectable feminine produced in her public writing of the period.