EMPIRE, NATION, AND THE PROFESSIONAL CITIZEN Reading Cornelia Sorabji's India Calling

This essay examines the autobiography, India Calling, of Cornelia Sorabji, the first Indian woman lawyer and amongst the first women to study law in England. Reading India Calling alongside Sorabji's other writings, the essay draws attention to the ways in which Sorabji etches a particular idiom of professionalism that negotiates with the otherwise difficult position of women, especially colonial subjects, in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century professional sphere. Analyzing Sorabji's rhetorical strategies, the essay highlights Sorabji's student years in England, as well as her legal work in India that entailed her representing veiled Indian women who were otherwise denied access to male lawyers. In doing so, the essay argues for the ways in which the narrative discrepancy between Sorabji's autobiography and her other writings forges a rhetoric of professional citizenship that enables Sorabji to exceed her ascription as a racialized female subject and also model an expansive understanding of citizenship.