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The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji - Reformer, Lawyer and Champion of Women's Rights in India Transcript

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The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji - Reformer, Lawyer and Champion of Women's Rights in India Transcript Opening Doors: The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji - Reformer, Lawyer and Champion of Women's Rights in India Transcript Date: Thursday, 17 June 2010 - 12:00AM Location: Barnard's Inn Hall Opening Doors: The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji Reformer, Lawyer and Champion of Women's Rights in India Richard Sorabji 17/6/2010 When I was nine, my Aunt Cornelia invited me to Lincoln's Inn as part of her campaign to make me become a lawyer. Her campaigns were pretty formidable. She took me to lunch and in front of all the judges and barristers, she said, "What are you going to be when you grow up?" and I am afraid I gave the wrong answer. I said that I was going to be a teacher. She did not give up, but then took me to a court with quite a distinguished judge. He had tried the case of the assassin who had assassinated the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab for supporting the Amritsar massacre. Still aged nine, I went to listen to a trial, and he came up afterwards and asked, "Did you believe that man?" and I said, "No," and he said, "Oh, what a relief - neither did I!" So, even that failed to work, so then she took my sister and I to tea to meet this judge when he came to Oxford, where we lived. He told us in the grandest house in Oxford, the Judge's lodgings, the most wonderful murder stories. If anything could have persuaded me into wanting to become a lawyer, those stories would have done, and I did see the use of the law and the interest of the law, but I am afraid I still stuck to being a teacher. She wore the most wonderfully brilliant saris and dangling jewellery, of great length, and I thought of her and her sisters as the brightest thing in London during the blackout of the 1940s, when I first knew them, or I knew four of them, at any rate. She wrote her own autobiography called "India Calling" but what I found out is that about 50% of what happened, she had to conceal because it was too sensitive, and so I have called my book "The Untold Story". She wrote an account of her life in up to three versions every day for 50 years. I have read every single word and a lot of the official papers too. Many of them were sent to the British Library, passed through my mother's hands, and hence to a great friend, Eleanor. However, when I cannot find them in the British Library, I find them in my attic, because not all of them got through to the Library. It is a story of a life of cliff-hangers. She never knew whether it was going to be triumph or failure next, and indeed, this continued for the whole of her life. This story of cliff-hangers is set against the background of huge movements which were going on in India. I am not pretending to be a historian who can explain what was going on in India, but I have to be conscious of the background all the time. Her father, my grandfather, was born in 1823 in Bombay. He was born a Zoroastrian by religion, but in the 1840s, there were some conversions of Zoroastrian boys. The first two were very aggressive conversions, with the Christians saying that this was Satan's religion or was not even a religion at all, and so the Zoroastrian community was very incensed by the first two conversions. My grandfather, as a 16 year old, was writing against the Christians, but he did need to improve his English for business purposes. He was the apple of his family's eye, and was meant to carry on, or succeed in business, and support his six sisters, so he thought he needed to improve his English. To this end, he went to a different school, not the school that had been banned by the Zoroastrians, and one day, he was sent for punishment to his headmaster, and he went in defiance because he thought he had been wrongly accused. However, instead of beating him, his headmaster simply told him about the Sermon on the Mount, and he was so absolutely astonished that he converted on the spot. His family were absolutely horrified! He was their pride and joy, and, over the next two years, three attempts were made to murder him. These were rather thorough efforts: they cast him out to sea on a boat without any provisions, but he was washed up three days later, and eventually was ordained. My grandmother was a Hindu but had been brought up by Christian missionaries because her mother died very shortly after her birth. She married my grandfather and they moved to Pune and, by great chance, I went with my daughter, also called Cornelia, 16 months ago, and we found the family home, with all the original furniture. There was the grandfather clock of which there is a picture in the book. There was the grand piano and all the same pictures on the walls. There were the beds they all slept in. There was the family carriage, for a horse of course. It remained intact because it was sold 100 years ago, to a hotel, which had two careful owners who thought that this was the furniture that would attract guests, so they kept it. My Grandmother founded four schools. The two big ones were actually in the house, or rather, they built over the garden, and they are still there. When they first started in 1876, there was room in the house to have just a few children, but they had to cover every inch of the garden before they had finished. They then had to build two schools elsewhere: one school was a free school, for very poor Hindus, with Marathi as the language; another was an Urdu-speaking school, for poor Muslims; and then the main school was English-speaking, mostly for Zoroastrians; and then there was an infant school, again, mostly for Zoroastrians, who had not yet learnt English, but they would have to learn English if they wanted to be successful. She was a very strong character, very proud of having so many daughters - seven daughters to one son, my father - and very much outgoing to all communities, absolutely regardless of race or religion. My grandfather pressed very hard to get his two oldest daughters into Bombay University, but they were refused on the grounds that no woman had ever been to university. However, with Cornelia, he finally succeeded in having her admitted and she matriculated at the age of 16. Six years later, she came out top of her college in English Literature. Her college was in Pune, which was a branch of Bombay University, one of the only four first class degrees of that year. She managed this despite most of the boys slamming the lecture doors in her face, trying to prevent her going to lectures. They were so unused to a woman that they simply did not know how to handle it. Having done so extremely well, she had very good reason to think she might get a scholarship to come to England and continue her studies. The scholarship was refused on the sole ground that she was a woman, and a question was raised in the House of Commons, by an old man with a beard. This was Sir John Kennaway, who had an enormous beard, and it is thought that he inspired Edward Lear's poem "There was an old man with a beard". He asked the question of whether a woman had been refused in the British Empire a scholarship to an English university, on the grounds that she was a woman. The Secretary of State for India said the answer was yes but, meanwhile, some ladies, including Florence Nightingale, got together the money anyhow, out of their own pockets, to create a scholarship for her to come to Oxford. In order to raise the scholarship, they had her photograph in the Queen, which was certainly one of the society magazines, and had been the society magazine, with a description of her, and so, when she arrived, as a young student from a remote town in India she thought nobody would ever have heard of her but she was actually a celebrity. She thought people were pulling her leg when she arrived in Somerville College Oxford which was only 10 years old, and said, "Now, we've asked senior people in Oxford to come and meet you." She was very used to being teased and she assumed this was a continuation of that. Actually, some of the most distinguished people in Oxford wanted to meet this celebrity. The first head of Somerville, Miss Shaw-Lefevre, had supported her coming to Somerville, but she had known about the schools of her mother, my grandmother, and been a great admirer of these schools. A new head of Somerville had just been appointed, a rather glamorous lady, aged 40 called Miss Maitland. Miss Maitland had to be Cornelia's chaperone everywhere. If Cornelia went to have tea with my father or with one of my father's friends, a chaperone had to go there because this was 1889. Miss Maitland, the head of Somerville, was the chaperone However, she was told that, nonetheless, as she was a woman, she could only read English Literature. Law was not an option open to women.
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