Cornelia Sorabji Became India’s First Woman Lawyer When It Was Almost Impossible

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royal elephant had been deprived of his banana grove, and he needed a lawyer. So a woman in a silk sari was carried by palanquin through tiger-inhabited jungles in Gujarat to argue his case before a maharaja sitting on a swing. Before she could speak, the king declared she had won on the grounds that his dog liked her. The woman was Cornelia Sorabji. She was India's first female lawyer, and that absurd anecdote may be the most fitting introduction to a career defined by the constant collision of extraordinary ability and ridiculous obstacles.Also Read: This Indian Scientist Predicted Black Holes Long Before The World Accepted Them

The Girl Who Topped Everything and Was Denied Everything

Sorabji was born on 15 November 1866 in Nashik, into a Parsi Christian family that prized education above convention. Her father, the Reverend Sorabji Karsedji, was a missionary who campaigned to open Deccan College to his daughter at a time when women were simply not admitted. He succeeded. Cornelia repaid him by completing a five-year course in English literature in a single year and topping the Bombay Presidency.Topping the Presidency entitled a candidate to a fully funded scholarship to study in Britain. Cornelia was denied it because she was a woman.

Undeterred, she took a teaching position as Professor of English at a men's college in Gujarat, the only woman on the faculty. Meanwhile, supporters in England rallied funds for her passage to Oxford. Among the donors were Florence Nightingale and Sir William Wedderburn. In 1889, Cornelia Sorabji arrived at Somerville College, becoming the first Indian woman to study at any British university.

Oxford Gave Her an Exam but Not a Degree

In 1892, after a special Congregational Decree championed by Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol, Sorabji was permitted to sit the Bachelor of Civil Law examination. She passed. Oxford refused to award her the degree. Women could not receive degrees there until 1920. She had proven her competence and been told, in essence, that competence was not the point.She returned to India in 1894 and immediately began working on behalf of purdahnashin women: high-caste Hindu and Muslim women who lived in seclusion and were forbidden from speaking to men outside their families. These women could not appear in court, could not manage their own estates, and were routinely exploited by relatives and priests who controlled their wealth. Sorabji wanted to represent them. The Indian legal system would not allow it. Women were banned from practising law.

She took the LLB examination at Bombay University and the Pleader's Examination at the Allahabad High Court. She passed both. She was still not recognised as a barrister. It would take until 1923, nearly three decades after she first qualified, before the law was changed to permit women to practise. She was formally called to the bar in 1923 at Lincoln's Inn in London.

Twenty Years Behind the Veil

In 1904, the Bengal government appointed her Lady Assistant to the Court of Wards, a position she held for nearly two decades. She travelled across northern India, entering zenanas where no male lawyer could go, advising women on property disputes, inheritance, and custody. She fought for their right to education and for their right to train as nurses.She was awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind Gold Medal in 1909 for public service. In 2012, a bronze bust was unveiled at Lincoln's Inn in London. Somerville College launched a scholarship in her name in 2016.Also Read: Threatened With Acid at 11 in Afghanistan, Sola Mahfouz Taught Herself Quantum Physics in a Locked Room But Sorabji was not without contradictions. She supported the British Raj, opposed Gandhi's independence movement, and believed political reform without universal education was premature. History has judged her harshly for those positions, and not without reason.Yet what remains undeniable is this: she passed every examination placed before her, fought for women no one else would represent, and did it all in a system that spent thirty years refusing to call her what she already was. The law eventually changed. But Cornelia Sorabji never needed its permission to be a lawyer. She simply was one.