Conservative Modernity:The Self-Making of the Modern Colonial Woman in Cornelia Sorabji's India Calling
Through a reading of Cornelia Sorabji's autobiography India Calling, this essay argues that the modern Indian colonial woman was a paradoxical and conservative figure. I examine Sorabji's employment of Western genres of women's autobiography and harem literature, which produces hierarchic intimacies between traditional womanhood and the exceptional category of the modern colonial woman. Reconstructing her contradictory allegiances to Indian women and British audiences, I draw attention to the resultant impossibility of creating a coherent self. Her failures at self-construction, I argue, prove that to be modern as a colonial woman is to keep modernity from others.
In her 1899 essay, "Stray Thoughts of an Indian Girl," Cornelia Sorabji, British India's first woman lawyer, addresses an urgent issue preoccupying the Subcontinent and its administrators: the modernization of the Indian woman. Written as she was still getting her degree at Oxford, this piece outlines a well-developed set of ideas that [End Page 583] would be foundational to her career as an author and an advocate for the purdahnashin (women sequestered within the harem/purdah/zenana).1 Indian women, Sorabji argues, are not ready for modernity. While they are subject to oppressive anti-feminist practices such as perpetual widowhood, child marriage, and purdah, they "have hitherto been content with their lot and have not dreamt of resistance" ("Stray Thoughts" 153). Thus, to demolish the traditional patriarchal systems Indian women live within through "too rapid and ill-based reform" would cause them harm. Modernity, Sorabji intimates, cannot be rushed. This is not an unusual stance for that time. It was an established thread in contemporary conversations about Indian social reform that gradual educational and social change was preferable to radical legislative redress since the latter would release turbulent and unsavory energies. What is unusual is Sorabji's own positionality as the author of this piece. As an unmarried, educated, professional woman, she embodies the very modernity for which, she claims, Indian women are not ready.
This dichotomy is present throughout her oeuvre and is particularly clear in her 1935 autobiography, India Calling. The first-person narrator stands in for the author and performs the latter's modern identity. Sorabji draws on her experiences as a lawyer working among upper-class Indian women in the zenana and advocating for changes in their living conditions. I argue that her attempts at women's reform and her self-making as a modern professional woman are contradictory. To be authoritative and trustworthy, a professional Indian woman must be exceptional in the eyes of the British reader. Thus, if the objects of her reform achieve the same degree of authority as her professional endeavours, this very success could lead to her losing her status as a unique and significant voice. I explore this tension within her subjectivity through the hierarchic opposition between Sorabji the narrator and the other women characters in her autobiography. The text is structured such that these women never get to a point where they could challenge the narrator's authority. As a result, the modernizing reformist project that Sorabji advances in her writing ultimately develops fault lines that impede its fulfillment. While Sorabji undoubtedly embodies the changes wrought by modernity in women's lives, I am interested in how she exemplifies modernity's capacity for simultaneously encouraging social stasis and conservatism. This essay demonstrates how colonial modernity, as instantiated in Sorabji's self-formation, could be an agent of progress and of preserving long-existing sexist and racist notions about Indian women. Sorabji, I argue, creates a well-curated, easily legible public [End Page 584] persona that she instrumentalizes to make space for herself within the masculine imperial hierarchy as a non-threatening figure. To be accepted as a professional woman who is subverting several gender norms, she colludes with other more conservative forms of classed and ethnicized misogyny. Sorabji's self-making is an early example of the unexpected imbrication of modernity and misogyny within Indian feminism.
Scholarship on Sorabji has focused on her transcendence of well-defined social categories. Part of this is driven by her life circumstances, as Sorabji was born into a Parsi-Christian family whose children were all educated in British universities and went on to have successful careers. Sorabji herself spent a substantial part of her professional life working for the British government, providing legal assistance to upper-class Indian women in purdah. Her family celebrated her career and was supportive of women in general but she herself was politically conservative. A self-described "'ardent … little Tory'" (Burton, At the Heart 111), she opposed Indian independence and the vote for women. Critical work highlights this ambiguity that marked her persona: Sonita Sarker finds her "uncontainable in obedient subjecthood to British ideology" (278). Antoinette Burton's archival work highlights a woman who self-consciously performs the role of the exceptional Indian elite in England. Jessica Berman and Sukanya Banerjee focus on her liminal position—between India and England, between the zenana and the outside world—as self-created and socially endorsed. Berman reads her as a modernist intermediary who stages transformative encounters between zenana inhabitants and visitors from the outside, whereas Banerjee frames her in-between identity as interpellating her into the nation as an exceptional "professional" (118) who can claim imperial citizenship as an Indian woman. While acknowledging her as a complicated figure, most critical accounts concentrate on how the modernity she epitomized and instrumentalized was a force of change. This essay, however, dwells on the ossifying capacities of that colonial modernity.
I use the terms "modern" and "modernity" throughout this paper as they are conceptualized within critiques of Indian nationalism.2 This is a historicized understanding of colonial middle-class modernity as it developed in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century India. Defined in opposition to Indian "tradition" (which was framed as "unmodern"), modernity was read as a Westernized construct whose workings were gendered. Men inhabited the public world of professional competition and could therefore legitimately participate in Western modernity with their British counterparts. Women were [End Page 585] the guardians of the home and part of a superior Indian spiritual tradition untainted by this foreign modernity. As Partha Chatterjee argues, while the position of upper- and middle-class Indian women underwent reform in the early twentieth century, it was restricted under the aegis of a "new patriarchy" ("Colonialism, Nationalism" 627) that explicitly differentiated the modern Indian woman from the modern Western woman. Indian women were still largely confined to the private sphere; their education was to make them better wives and mothers, not to prepare them for a career. Consequently, an Indian woman who was a working professional endangered not just her womanliness, but also her Indianness.
As one of a handful of professional Indian women in the early 1900s, Sorabji provides through her life writing one of the earliest enactments of the ongoing, intense debate surrounding the position of the middle- and upper-class working woman in modern India. "Only too aware of popular reading tastes, a consideration her English editors also made sure she never lost sight of" (Banerjee 133), Sorabji takes advantage of the performative nature of autobiography to produce a continuous and focused self-making. India Calling aims to provide a specific understanding of Sorabji as an exceptional female professional to her Edwardian reading public. She crafts one of the first sustained accounts of the modern Indian career woman's interiority, illuminating this figure's intimate yet antagonistic relationship with the traditional, homebound Indian woman as a necessary condition for its survival.
Sorabji's claim to exceptionality can be read within the context of a cohort of similarly exceptionalized Indian women—such as Kadambini Ganguly, Rukhmabai, and Anandibai Gopal Joshi—who entered white collar professions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 As doctors, lawyers, and social workers, they achieved long-lasting public recognition and notoriety. Public discourses about femininity, class, race, and religion shaped these women's professional self-images and vice versa. The category of the modern Indian professional woman arose out of this imbrication and was legitimized through the ostensible social necessity of its function: the civilization and education of the traditional, unlettered women who lived in purdah. Women like Sorabji—and their supporters—countered misogynistic criticism and justified their position by pointing toward their apparently vital role in emancipating Indian women. The claim to exceptionality was necessary to argue for the importance of their position—if most Indian women were like them, then their civilizing function and thus their careers would not need to exist. Thus, at its [End Page 586] inception, the category of the modern professional Indian woman became associated with the civilizing mission. This connection, while legitimizing the need for professional women, also contributed to the instability of the category. Sorabji's writing illuminates the conservative core of the professional Indian woman's role and how the failure of its avowed project is fundamental to its very construction.
The uncertainties evoked by a figure like Sorabji are made clear in a 1902 editorial for The Times written in support of an essay she had published in the newspaper. This essay furthers the agenda she had set forth in her "Stray Thoughts," proposing the creation of a government post for women lawyers who could counsel upper-class Indian women in purdah. These sequestered women, often the owners of substantial wealth and property, were at the mercy of their male relatives and employees. Since they could not appear in public before male lawyers or judges, they had to depend on often unscrupulous agents to safeguard their rights. Sorabji's proposal would allow women in purdah to interact directly with their female lawyers. Seconding Sorabji's sense of urgency, the editorial frames this as a problem that is "universal among the higher class of Hindu women" ("Editorial" 295) and their Muslim counterparts. The anonymous correspondent declares that Indian women are unmodern, silent, and helpless; they need external intervention to survive. The paradox is that this scheme for maintaining women in their cloistered state is being laid out by an ambitious, professional, thoroughly modern Indian woman.
The editorial is aware of this contradiction. Framing her as a "remarkable Indian lady … whose talents, education and practical training [are] equal to that of the most advanced of European ladies," it attempts to resolve this tension by echoing the rhetoric of Sorabji's self-making. She possesses the "peculiar qualifications" (297) of being Parsi by birth, rather than Hindu or Muslim, and of having a British education. While most Indian women are her "own sisters" (295), thus giving her special insight into their backward condition, her religious and cultural position is reconfigured into something "peculiar" to establish her superiority over them through her modern, progressive credentials. This conflict between the modern and the unmodern—and its reliance on constructions of colonial, Indian womanhood—is central to Sorabji's curation of a persona in her legal and literary career. Her writing illuminates the ambivalent, ever-shifting allegiances to both British and Indian ideas of femininity that shaped the figure of the modern colonial author. Her body of work performs the continual self-presentation necessary for a woman author who wants to create a space for herself within a [End Page 587] colonial market. The failures and contradictions in this process prove to be at least as revealing as the successes. Despite its progressive and feminist promise, Sorabji's writing reveals the conservatism lurking within the dream of modern colonial womanhood. The existence of the modern colonial woman does not automatically inaugurate new possibilities for Indian women's lives and capacities. Instead, this figure's modernity is exceptional and exists only to confirm the perceived inferiority of Indian women as potential political subjects. Modernity is not only synonymous with progress narratives; it can also be used as an apparatus to maintain the colonial status quo.
Women Constructing Women: Harem Literature, Autobiography, and Women's Authority
To consolidate her exceptional role, Sorabji recycles existing tropes prevalent in British women's genres, particularly harem literature and women's autobiographies. In this section, I show how the dialogue between these genres shapes the creation of her unique status in her work. Harem literature developed as a women's genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and primarily consisted of first-person accounts by European women describing their sojourns in Ottoman Empire harems. These works are notable for their emphasis on women's unique narrative authority—since men were not allowed into harems, their claims about them had little truth value and were largely read as fantasy. In Gendering Orientalism, Reina Lewis remarks that "the cult of the harem was central to the fantasies that structure Orientalist discourse" (111). The development of international transport in the mid-nineteenth century allowed middle-class European women to travel to the East in increasing numbers, not just as tourists and wives of colonial officials but as professionals in their own right. A major shift had taken place: the European gaze could penetrate the harem through the presence of White women.4 It led to the widespread popularity of harem literature as a species of travel literature by European women who had spent time in these segregated spaces.
Harem literature and life-writing have much in common. Both were popular among Victorian women and were central to the legitimization of a hard-won gendered authority. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson examine how "women engage autobiographical discourse to renegotiate their cultural marginality and enter into literary history" (141). Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley emphasize "the contradictory demands that a modernizing [End Page 588] patriarchy made of women" (20) as it shaped their "nascent voice [that was] articulating a self within." Mary Jean Corbett observes that the popularity of women's memoirs rested on their ability to "narrate the self by indirection" (101). The focus was not primarily on the authorial persona being narrated, but on the author's ability to "offer an insider's perspective on a sphere to which the common reader ordinarily has little access." This indirection is also true of harem literature; both genres established textual authority not by focusing on the narrator but on the subjects being narrated. Sorabji uses this indirect "insider's perspective" in two ways: first, by focusing on her unparalleled professional qualifications that put her on par with European women; and second, highlighting her own unusual origins that gave her unprecedented access to harems. She adapted and combined harem literature and autobiography, fitting both genres to twentieth-century British India, to create an authoritative persona for herself as an Indian woman studying Indian women and advocating for their cause. However, due to her specific racial and national position that was much closer to the objects of her inquiry, she inhabited a far more unstable narrative space framed through the troubled language of gendered modernity.
Unlike Sorabji, the autobiographical self-making of White women authors of harem literature was rooted in their ability to embody and confer gendered modernity. As professional, traveling, middle-class women, their authority lay in their ability to contradict male primitivist fantasies about harems and frame the women within them as actually relatively progressive and modern; women with whom they could form friendships. Simultaneously, they maintained their superior position in a hierarchical system within which—as White British subjects—they were clearly the more modern. There is thus a curious combination of authority and reciprocity implicit in women's harem writings. This combination arises from a dual investment in their own (and their readers') desire to maintain their superiority and in their actual friendships with Ottoman women. While these investments are unequal, with Britishness being the dominant framework, there are moments of engagement that transcend a rigid hierarchy and at least resemble mutuality.
Crucially, these moments of mutuality are not incompatible with the White woman author's superior stance. Indeed, her expertise arises out of the privileged knowledge she gains from her close relationships with these women. However, their racial and national identities are more distant from the zenana women compared to Sorabji's. As White, British women, they are doubly removed from their [End Page 589] subjects. Even if they form friendships with women in the harem, they are in no danger of becoming like them. Their self-making remains separate from their constructions of non-White women. They can safely confer a modicum of modernity on women within the harem because they belong to the community that is arbitrating on what is modern in the first place. Their access to modernity is unmediated and unconditional compared to the non-White, non-British women they describe.
The Limits of Colonial Women's Narrative Authority
Sorabji does not share a stable relationship to modernity with White women harem writers. Her adaptation of autobiographical harem literature in India Calling sheds light on the particularities of creating an authorial persona as a colonial Indian woman writing to a White British audience. Much like the Ottoman women authors who wrote about harem life, Sorabji too enters a genre that was created by Western women and premised on the irreducible racial difference between White and non-White femininity. In Rethinking Orientalism, Lewis explores how these Ottoman authors had a mobile relationship with orientalist stereotypes: both repudiating them as reductive and mobilizing them to reach a wider European audience. Similarly, Sorabji repurposes narrative strategies used by White women authors of harem literature while modifying them in significant ways to suit her objectives. She is, however, neither harem inhabitant nor foreign visitor. Her distinctive departures from the conventions of harem literature—as an anglicized Indian woman lawyer and bearer of a hybrid identity—become the loci where her conflicted subject position reformulates the genre. One of the main elements of harem literature is that of the foreign gaze: the White man or woman gazing at the non-White woman. As an Indian woman who writes about Indian harems, Sorabji does not, at first glance, occupy that outsider status. She is intent on reinforcing her special authority as an Indian woman. However, this authority was equally predicated on her being a Parsi-Christian anglophilic Indian woman, who was clearly superior to her "little ladies" (India Calling 197), the Hindu/Muslim zenana women whom she advised. Sorabji premised her authority on being able to access both occidental and oriental worlds (implicitly, even more effectively than White women) due to an ideal combination of birth and education.5
Her Indian birth and British education, however, are not as compatible as she claims. Rather, they destabilize her self-making as [End Page 590] a modern colonial woman author recording harem life. While her British education provides her with the framework of superior modernity through which to view her harem clients, she fails to create a safe distance from them like White women writers. Instead, she must retain a special closeness with her Indian charges and allow them to have an independent voice so that they can validate her position as a privileged insider. However, this strategic intimacy exposes her to the dangers of becoming too much like zenana women. Her racial and cultural similarities with the harem inhabitants entail that if they share too many of the qualities that define her as a modern Indian woman—competence, professionalism, intelligence—then her own authority comes into question. Her self-positioning as an anglicized, civilized, Oxford-educated, Parsi-Christian woman is endangered. Therefore, Sorabji must perform her attachments to both Indianness and Britishness and inhabit an uncertain, interstitial space to retain her unique authority.
Sorabji lived in the intersections of not just Britishness and Indianness, but different kinds of Indianness. In India Calling, the narrator variously refers to herself as being "Parsee by nationality" (3), "brought up English" (7), and "taught to call [herself] Indian." This points to a more fluid and heterogenous collection of identities rather than a relatively straightforward Indian/British duality. Her "cosmopolitan" (9) upbringing is "untypical of the Indian home of the period" (7) and is framed as unique. Sorabji's parents are Anglophiles, but with the "wisdom" to teach their children to be "proud of the country of [their] adoption" and appreciate their distant Persian heritage. Sorabji establishes this exceptionality at the very beginning of her autobiography, framing it as the origin story of her career as India's first woman lawyer. She views herself as possessing a complicated Indian identity that sets her apart from her future zenana clients and other women who might occupy her professional position.
This exceptionality translates into her inhabiting a uniquely valuable subject position that is part external observer and part native informant.The production of colonial knowledge—via ethnography, administrative reports, and sociological studies—requires native informants whose usefulness was predicated on their belonging to the community they were informing on. In Dwelling in the Archive, Burton puts Sorabji in the position of the native informant creating an ethnography of the zenana, a stance that she sees as being consistent throughout the sum of Sorabji's published works, letters, diaries, and official reports. "As the first Indian woman to be salaried as a native informant for the government of India" (70), Sorabji made [End Page 591] a concerted effort to represent herself as not one among several authorities on zenana life, but as the preeminent one to a British audience. However, while Sorabji is a conduit of information about Indian zenanas for a British audience, the "native" element of her native informing is not straightforward.
Sorabji is very much not a member of the zenanas that she visits for her job as Lady Assistant to the Court of Wards in Eastern India. As a single Parsi-Christian professional woman, Sorabji's subject position is significantly removed from that of a married Muslim/Hindu upper-class, upper-caste woman who lives in purdah. The narrator herself is careful to mark this difference as indelible. She tells us at the beginning of the introduction to India Calling that she "has warmed her hand at two fires, without being scorched" (ix) and is "homed in two countries, England and India." She is not like the women in purdah who, for her, represent a "flesh-and-blood India" (80). These women are locked into their singular identities as representatives of an unalloyed Indianness. According to Burton, Sorabji's reports to the Court of Wards reflected her view that the "zenana was the exemplary Indian home and, as such, represented the heart and soul of 'true' India" (Dwelling 72). That she does not belong to this India about which she is "informing" her audience is, Sorabji implies, crucial to the accuracy of her information. In his essay on Sorabji's desire for anglicization, Sayan Chattopadhyay argues that Sorabji's preoccupation with creating an "English" self comes into conflict with her Indian identity. As a result, she is forced to occupy the paradoxical position of being both an Indian native informant and an English paternalistic imperialist. While Sorabji's Anglophilia is undeniable, I argue that she is equally invested in performing both her Englishness and Indianness. Instead of what Chattopadhyay calls the "anguished quest of an Indian to fashion herself as English" (2), I read Sorabji's self-making as a strategic exercise in emphasizing both facets of her Indian/English persona. She mobilizes the in-betweenness of her identity to argue for the preeminent value of her view; as an Indian woman, her access to information about Indian zenanas will always be superior to Western visitors, while her anglicized education and upbringing ensures that this information is gathered and presented via a British colonial lens.
This declaration of exceptionality does not, however, go uninterrogated in the British reception of her works. This was primarily framed through questions of authenticity. As Madhumita Lahiri notes in her analysis of Sorabji's reception in England, her professional access to the zenana was the most valuable feature of her writing: "The [End Page 592] Yorkshire Post classifies Love and Life Behind the Purdah [Sorabji's first publication] among 'books to read rather than as fiction' because 'although it is a book of [short] stories, these are true pictures of Indian home-life'" (138). Sorabji's access to what was seen as two opposite worlds via her Indian origins and her Western education made her the ideal ethnographer. This was, however, an unstable duality. While her outsider position added to her credibility as an objective narrator, this very position could be used to question the authenticity that lent value to her writing: "An extremely negative review … suggests that Sorabji as a Parsi Christian would not know 'Indian' customs, which, this reviewer claims, leads to multiple errors in her work" (139). Sorabji's writings are judged according to an imaginary metric of hybridity. They, and therefore their author, need to be the "correct" admixture of Indian and British to be deemed noteworthy of a British readership.
This ineffable standard is not reliably achievable. Thus, Sorabji could, at any moment, lean too far into either her Indianness or her Britishness. Her reception reflects the instability of her self-making in the public sphere. Her very claim to exceptionality as the only woman who can successfully inhabit this in-between identity brings into question the actual success of her venture. If no one else but she can truly represent women in the zenana to a British audience, can her claims as an authentic ethnographer be verified? The answer to this question is complicated by the fact that Sorabji's self-construction as a unique career woman is partially accurate. Most Indian proponents of women's education did not actually advocate for true equality but rather enough education to create a "modern" wife who would be able to run a "household according to the new physical and economic conditions set by the outside world" (Chatterjee, "Colonialism" 629). As Tim Allender writes in Learning Femininity, "proportionately speaking, very few Indian girls ever secured careers as a result of their education under the raj" (6). While certain traditionally male professions did, gradually, become more accessible to middle-class women, the actual number of working women remained small.6
Sorabji's position as an unmarried woman lawyer therefore was deeply unusual. She inhabited a far more Westernized identity than most of her Indian peers, one that allowed her to speak more effectively to a British readership. She used this platform to call for women's reform. However, in keeping with her desire to retain her exceptional status, Sorabji's reformist tendencies were in accord with a gradualist view of women's freedom and education. Women within the zenana, she believed, could be educated on how to be [End Page 593] good wives and mothers, but they required patriarchal control. Her single departure from this traditionalist position was her advocacy for a select group of professional women as the ideal patriarchal guardians. Sorabji is invested in the figure of the professional woman as a civilizing social worker. Her description of Rukhmabai in her autobiography is also her own professional persona. A woman of an "unusual and fine character" (79), Rukhmabai is "unemotional, and untouched by the hysteria of politics or 'Women's rights'" and one of the "steady workers who refused to be entangled with the moment's politics" (79–80). Sorabji sees herself as part of an exclusive group of women professionals who, through their superior selfhoods, are closely guiding Indian women toward enlightenment, while keeping themselves distant from the hazards of any collective political action that might bring them too close to their zenana clients. In the following section, I explore the fragility of this position and the ever-present danger of "becoming unmodern" that threatens it, through an extended close reading of a section in her autobiography titled "The Victim of a Horoscope."
Sorabji and the Maharani: The Precarity of Modern Womanhood
The concerns of "The Victim of a Horoscope" are in keeping with Sorabji's oeuvre, which is largely autobiographical and ethnographic in nature. The stories she tells of women in purdah emphasize her agential role in their lives. She discusses how her intervention led to not just material but psychological and affective improvements in her clients. In India Calling, she narrates how when the time comes for one of her clients to marry, the client's mother asks Sorabji to evaluate the potential bridegroom and find out if he is "good and kind" (130). Sorabji attributes this concern for the quality of her son-in-law's character to her own influence over the zenana. The mother "was evidently learning something: her test was not only, as formerly—the right caste, the right conjunction of horoscopes, [or] the advisable income." Similarly, in India Recalled, Sorabji saves Giribala, one of her young, widowed charges, from forming a socially unacceptable liaison through her physical and moral intervention. She keeps an eye on her, preventing her from meeting her lover. Later, Giribala tells her that what she was doing was "naughty" (27), and she knows that she is now good because she is "no longer ashamed when [she] look[s] into the face of the Miss Sahiba" (28). Sorabji's influence over her clients extends far beyond the legal and into the realms of social, moral, and affective instruction. She guides them into behaving and [End Page 594] living in the so-called right ways, slowly leading them along the path to emancipation while maintaining prevailing gender norms.
In instances when these women who live restricted lives aspire to exercise their own agency by overstepping traditional gender roles, the narrative punishes them with death. In Love and Life Behind the Purdah, Sorabji's best-known work, multiple stories end with the deaths of their female Indian protagonists who contravene traditional gender roles. The first story, "The Pestilence at Noonday," ends with its main character contracting the plague when she defies purdah and goes out alone in public. "Love and Life," "Love and Death," and "Urmi: The Story of a Queen" all feature protagonists who aspire to a Western education and a more companionate relationship with their husbands/suitors. Each story ends not only with the frustration of their desires, but their deaths. This structure of a slow, conservative path to women's rights that is always being threatened with failure if it goes too far, and Sorabji's ambivalent self-making as the facilitator of this process, is explored in particular detail in "The Victim of a Horoscope."
The explicitly autobiographical status of this story reveals the close connection between Sorabji's fiction and autobiography. Both serve a common purpose: producing an authorial self that is a zenana expert and also a professional Indian woman in charge of other Indian women. As Ana Quiring discusses in her reading of Sorabji as a feminist intermediary, her fiction often uses critical, tongue-in-cheek narrators to reveal the dangers and inadequacies of both zenana inhabitants and White women visitors, thus indirectly establishing the preeminence of Sorabji's unique position. While her stories from Love and Life Behind the Purdah emphasize the dangers of the zenana but also of its hasty abolishment, her autobiography takes it another step further by explicitly inserting Sorabji as a character into the story. Not only does she opine on the state of the zenana and women's rights in India, but she also makes clear what was only implied in her fiction: the necessity of a character like her in the lives of zenana women. As a zenana expert, she scolds, cajoles, and counsels, basing her authority on her superior knowledge of Indian women and her legal position. She articulates the gap she strives to fill—"Hindu women might be said to have had greater rights than English married women … the difficulty was, and still is, in getting into touch with those rights" (85)—neatly summing up why she sees herself as a crucial figure in the lives of her clients. She is the only one who correctly understands their condition and can appropriately guide them on their journey to regaining their rights. [End Page 595]
"The Victim of a Horoscope" is a particularly effective amalgamation of these thematic strands—the dangers of zenana life, the client in need of saving, and the zenana woman who is too agential for her own good. In India Calling, violent death is a constant in the zenana. Several stories tell of familial murder or attempted murder. While in tales such as "The Imprisoned Rani," "The 'Squirrel Lady,'" and "Oaths and Curses," death is (often narrowly) avoided due to Sorabji's intervention, multiple tragic murders populate "The 'Dog-Girl'" and "The 'Cross-Eyed Boy.'" Sorabji explicitly connects violence in the zenana to Indian women's shortsightedness: "I have learnt in India that women, with a motive good or bad, can see no further than that particular immediate end" (80). They are incapable of imagining a better long-term future. Since the zenana is a dangerous place and its inhabitants are unable to effect change on their own, Sorabji becomes a crucial intermediary figure. As stories like "The Imprisoned Rani" and "The 'Squirrel Lady'" demonstrate, death and violence are only avoided through Sorabji's skillful intervention and undercutting of traditional superstitions and unjust traditions.
On the other hand, the dangers of unmoderated reform within the zenana—usually undertaken without Sorabji's guidance—are equally present. To become modernized too quickly is also a path to destruction. Her story, "The Blind Rani's Daughter," tells the tale of a widowed queen, an "intelligent woman" (210) who brings up her daughter, the heir apparent, with many freedoms and an English education usually only allowed to men. The queen, in her progressive wisdom, wishes for her daughter to delay marriage till her ascension to the throne. However, the manager of her estate, fearful of losing control over the heir apparent, successfully arranges a marriage for her when she is twelve to a "penniless and landless" (212) prospect who is under his thumb. Sorabji reports the tragic end of this story. Unable to prevent this terrible fate for her daughter, the queen dies "of a broken heart" (213). This story illustrates Sorabji's formulation of the impossible and paradoxical line that Indian women within the zenana must walk in order to survive. "The Victim of a Horoscope" draws together all these facets of the problematic modernization of the zenana woman and explores Sorabji's ambivalent self-making as an expert and guide within this space.
The protagonist is a young widow who is simultaneously framed as both willful and childlike, and as an intelligent, efficient manager of her life and property. This contradictory representation is an instrument of Sorabji's own narratorial self-making within the text. At twenty-five, this "Maharani" is the sole inheritor of her husband's [End Page 596] estate, "a very large property in one of the most fertile tracts of India" (154), since he had died childless. Her property, managed by the Court of Wards, was "able to make the best of it for the benefit of the Ward." The narrator explicitly depicts this as a desirable situation as this woman has no formal education and is under the influence of an unscrupulous priest. Emphasizing her infantilization, the Maharani remains nameless throughout the text and is variously referred to either by her title or as the "little lady."
This namelessness is a rhetorical device that contributes to transforming the Maharani, who is the protagonist of this story, from a unique agential subject to a recognizable character type within the genre of harem literature. Her two epithets—"Maharani" and "little lady"—contribute to her place in her own tale as a familiar character: the elite but child-like harem woman who needs the help of the zenana visitor in negotiating her life. This framing also has the effect of implicitly transferring agency and individuality to the less-visible second protagonist, Sorabji herself. As the zenana lawyer who is managing the Maharani's estate and counseling her on all aspects of her life, it is Sorabji who the authorial voice frames as the agential, individualized protagonist. This moment is exemplary of how Sorabji the character—the "I" or the first-person narrator of the story—overlaps with Sorabji the author and how this lack of differentiation bestows authority on both. By using omniscient first-person narration, a standard autobiographical mode, Sorabji brings together the figure of the author and narrator, highlighting both her own control as the author over the Maharani's story and infusing the Sorabji-figure in the story with the authority and trustworthiness of the omniscient writer. In contrast to its authoritative framing of Sorabji the narrator, the account clearly condescends to the Maharani. It consistently frames her as a lovable but inconvenient and unruly child: "The little lady was, however, difficult." She throws temper tantrums, "fly[ing] into uncontrollable rages" (155) but is quickly distracted from her anger by the antics of her "page-boys." Sorabji keeps her occupied with childish make-believe games. The Maharani, however, does not agree with this formulation of her as a helpless woman. This disagreement between Sorabji's narrator and her narrated subject creates a textual gap through which a different reading of the Maharani emerges.
The text gives us repeated glimpses of her wit, intelligence, and willpower. The Maharani openly resists Sorabji and the British government. She petitions for her estate to be turned over to her sole control and is deeply dissatisfied with her managers and the British [End Page 597] courts, going so far as to violate purdah to give a proper "scolding" to an official who had frustrated her plans. Even the apparent markers of her immaturity read differently on closer inspection. Her interest in the childish games Sorabji thinks up to amuse her is contingent on their relevance to her case against the British Court of Wards: "The games 'Halma,' Hoop-La,' card games, had to be 'pretend' appearances in Court" (157). Sorabji and her client pretend to play cards in front of various levels of the justice system and the latter shows a detailed awareness of their relative importance—she tells Sorabji, "I'll let you win before the High Cour-ut [High Court]. It knows nothing … But I win in Ph-ri-vi Cōnsil (Privy Council). Khabar dar, take very good care." The Maharani warns her not to get too complacent, as she intends to win where it matters. Before trusting Sorabji with her estate, she makes extensive enquiries about her and even has her followed. As the narrator herself admits, "no detective could have shadowed me so closely" (156). In fact, the Maharani has a significant number of qualities in common with the exceptional modern Indian woman as instantiated in Sorabji. Importantly, the representation of the Maharani as competent is an integral part of the narrative strategy: The Maharani cannot be entirely discredited since she needs to affirm Sorabji's privileged position as an Indian zenana expert to the British readers. While the narrator patronizingly describes the Maharani as a silly child-widow, this image is simultaneously and repeatedly undercut by information to the contrary. The contradiction is clear from the surface features of the text. Sorabji's narrative both undermines and supports the agency of the Maharani. The necessity of this double move becomes legible when we examine it in relation to the other protagonist of this story—the autobiographical narrator herself.
Sorabji's narrative persona is both Indian and not-Indian, a precarious identity that brings her closer, structurally and emotionally, to the Maharani. To situate Sorabji's narrator, it is useful to return to British women's harem narratives. These were fantasies of and bids for authority that White women targeted toward a primarily White audience. In India Calling, there are racial and national borders that need to be crossed between the author and her readership. Thus, Sorabji's position and purpose are somewhat different: she wants to be respectable and authoritative in the eyes of her White, British audience as an Indian woman. This becomes clear at several junctures. Sorabji narrates her experience of being carried on a palanquin through a forest. The palanquin bearers sing songs to lighten their load and several of them express their surprise at Sorabji's unusual [End Page 598] behavior and in-between identity. She is a woman, but she speaks "like the Burra Lat Sahib (Viceroy) to the guard … And they obeyed" (115). Her bearers are confused because she is clearly not anglicized in her self-presentation. She might sound like the British Viceroy, but she wears saris, or "garments of silk," like other upper-class Indian women. "Who can she be?", the chorus periodically sings. This is a sentiment that is repeatedly voiced by other characters in India Calling and foregrounded in the text: Sorabji is a woman who cannot be easily categorized.
This uncertainty about her identity extends to her self-framing. In her bid for authority among her White readers, she does not, as might be expected, try to portray herself in as un-Indian a light as possible. Instead, she performs a difficult balancing act: teetering between distancing herself from her objects of study and becoming intimately involved with them. Sorabji's narration of her engagement with the Maharani is not a straightforward account of distant benevolence toward a client she condescends to and objectifies. It is clear from the story that she is emotionally attached to the Maharani. She writes, "I persuaded her to come and live in Calcutta, where I could see her more often than when hundreds of miles lay between us" (157). Evoking the pain of distance and emphasizing the "hundreds of miles" that would otherwise keep the two from each other, this image of separation is surprising in its intensity, given the professional nature of their relationship. The Maharani agrees to the move and the narrator describes an almost idyllic friendship where she visits her "as often as [she] could." She makes the Maharani tell her stories, gets her to read to her from "vernacular books and papers," and teaches her new games. This is a description of reciprocity that positions Sorabji as her client's friend, not just her benefactor.
The Maharani too displays qualities that reveal her ability to keep up with Sorabji. She has little respect for incompetent British officials, declaring that she could do better as a woman in purdah "with bandaged eyes, and hobbled feet, than [they] do with [their] eyes open and [their] limbs unfettered!" (156). She pushes back against attempts to construct her as a helpless purdahnashin, particularly in moments when she demonstrates how invaluable she is to her lawyer. Sorabji, who grew up in Maharashtra, lives and works primarily in Bengal on the opposite side of the country. She does not speak the language, nor does she know the customs of the community she is serving. The Maharani does her a valuable professional service by reading to her from local newspapers and educating her in the ways of the people she is working among. The extent of her usefulness [End Page 599] is revealed when the narrator admits that while the Maharani compelled her "to tell her every detail of the fight [court case]" (158), Sorabji "thoroughly enjoyed her comments, and was often helped by the information which she gave." The relationship between the two is figured as being at least somewhat reciprocal. What does this textual description of reciprocity serve? What does this closeness signal to her readers?
Burton's account of Sorabji's life in England while she is studying at Oxford is enlightening in this regard: although fraternizing almost entirely with White people, she deliberately retains visible markers of Indianness. In letters to her family, she makes much of her iconic red sari. This conscious stylistic choice signals her singularity. When Rukhmabai comes to visit her in Oxford, Sorabji complains to her family that Rukhmabai has copied her style by wearing a red sari. Sorabji approaches her White audience, and implicitly the privileges of a White identity for herself, not by trying to take on a White self-presentation, but by framing herself as the exceptional Indian, the Indian who performs in certain professional and cultural ways (getting a law degree at Oxford or being presented to the Queen of England) that are recognizable and admirable to a White audience but is still reassuringly Other.
To retain this status as a knowledgeable insider to her British readers, Sorabji's narrator needs to be validated in her Indianness by her Indian clients. If she became indistinguishable from the British women who were also allowed into the zenana for similar philanthropic and professional purposes, the framing of her account as insider knowledge would be lost. Thus, Sorabji's double-sided portrayal of the Maharani as naïve and childlike, as well as an intelligent, enterprising woman is a strategic device to affirm the doubleness of her narratorial position. She requires the Maharani to acknowledge her Indianness while, at the same time, foregrounding her own exceptionality as a modern colonial woman. The narrator's credibility depends, in part, on the Maharani's. If the latter were to be constructed as typical passive purdahnashin, her assessment of the narrator would have no value.
Sorabji's narratorial inhabiting of modernity as confirmed by the Maharani results in denaturalizing her gender position. When the Maharani decides to trust Sorabji with her estate, this trust is framed as being reasonable due to the latter's unusual nature and position as a modern, professional woman who is intent on making her own living. The Maharani says to her: "You are either mad or a puja-in (a religious [saint]), or why should you live like a man or [End Page 600] a tiger, eating out of the hand of none: eating only what you kill" (157). Sorabji's subjectivity only make sense if she is either "mad" or a saint who has devoted both body and soul to her God (which, in her case, is her profession). In this moment of establishing Sorabji as a unique Indian woman, the Maharani codes her as a man. She is constructed as a tiger, a symbol of masculine power and strength, one who hunts and is self-sufficient. The Maharani repeats and affirms Sorabji's self-making as exceptional. Sorabji's narrative frames her professional life as a heroic journey: traveling alone across the length and breadth of India, living an itinerant life, and selflessly assisting the helpless women she meets. To emphasize her exceptional status as an independent working woman in this formulation, Sorabji casts herself as a man.
This masculinity is in direct contrast to the Maharani, who is described in hyper-feminine terms. She is "most attractive to the eye" (153) and her approach is always signaled by her "heavy anklets jingling" (162). Even her methods of trying to gain any power or control are stereotypically feminine and are contained within the category of the cunning, underhanded woman. She is indirect and, it is implied, devious, unlike Sorabji's straightforwardness. She has Sorabji followed to gather information about her instead of asking any direct questions. She is exasperated that the official in charge of her case will not accept a bribe. The framing of Sorabji's gender position becomes uncertain and troubled in this search for narrative authority. Gender confusion is not a common move in harem accounts by British women. They are trying to gather authority as women. Sorabji, on the other hand, distances herself as much as she can from any stereotypes of traditional Indian femininity.
Sorabji's disavowal of femininity in her autobiography is integral to the paradoxical double movement that she performs in her bid for authority: while the objects of her study need to be trustworthy enough to reassure her audience of their commonly held Indianness, they must also be clearly inferior to her so that her position as their savior remains undisturbed. White women writing harem literature established their gendered similarities to women of color without any danger of being confused with them. This racial narrative privilege is unavailable to Sorabji who is in constant danger of being conflated with her objects of study. To avoid this problem, she splits the singular category of Indian woman into two: one inhabited by Sorabji's narrator (the authorial stand-in) alone, and the other by all the other women in her autobiography. The first category is occupied by a masculine, English-educated, Anglophilic, professional, [End Page 601] single woman. The second is figured as the opposite—the women inhabiting it are illiterate, home-bound, and defined in relation to their husbands. The maintenance of this clear dichotomy is necessary for Sorabji to retain her position of authorial superiority, but at the same time leads to failure in her broader reformist project. While the zenana is not a happy place for women's lives and development in Sorabji's texts, neither is the outer world. The stability of Sorabji's self-making depends on the maintenance of an explicit distinction between herself and her zenana clients, and this difference is maintained by their failure to successfully emerge from purdah.
This is clear from the fate that befalls the Maharani. The title of the story—"The Victim of a Horoscope"—gestures toward her unfortunate end. At the very beginning, as Sorabji is narrating her protagonist's history, we are told how curses play an important role in her life and that the government was eventually "compelled to hold a Commission in Lunacy" (153) on her. Even before she is properly introduced to the reader, we know that her life will take a tragic turn and become mired in madness and superstition. All the information we later gain about her cleverness and resourcefulness is thus filtered through the lens of her eventual mental instability. This keeps her from being seen purely as an intelligent woman caught in a set of difficult circumstances. The accounts of her intelligence are undermined by the shadow of mental illness. When the time comes, the Maharani is gripped by sudden and uncontrollable delusions that lead her to rush unveiled into the garden—"It was a violent type of madness: no one dared approach her" (167). She attacks her caregivers who need to be protected from her "attempts at murder" (168). The juxtaposition of these two violent "symptoms" creates a correlative effect: she loses her mind just as she loses her veil, or rather she loses her mind because she loses her veil. The veil, while it limits her capacities and keeps her from living a full life, creates even more havoc when lifted. Unlike Sorabji, the Maharani does not have the psychological capacity to successfully negotiate the processes of self-determination. Life in purdah is the lesser of two evils.
The Maharani's downfall is caused by her attempts to extricate herself from a passive life behind purdah. The narrator implies that this madness was deliberately brought on by a priest who had been favored by the Maharani. According to her servants, "he had administered the concoction of dhatura [a psychoactive plant] which caused her madness" (169) to steal her money and flee. That he had access to the Maharani's money at all was a result of one of her attempts at economic independence. After all the debts and administrative costs [End Page 602] of her estate are paid off in a particular year, she asks that the surplus be paid to her in cash instead of being invested, as Sorabji advises. Further, much to the narrator's shock, she intends to use this money to "put curses on people" (165) who are her perceived enemies. The Maharani remains adamant in her decision, refusing to invest her money in the "rational" causes that the narrator espouses, such as charitable works. In response to the narrator's attempts at interesting her in "works of charity" (166), she declares that "the Government maintains [the] schools and hospitals" within her estate and that is sufficient. The Maharani, the text implies, is not suited to public life because of her self-absorption.
Her "selfishness" is read as a byproduct of her ignorance. She points out that she gave money toward the building of a hospital for purdahnashin when Princess Mary had visited India. "Tell me when the Prinseps [princess] comes again. I'll make a bigger hospital" (167), she says. Not only does the Maharani not understand the wider implications of being a generous civic patron, but her self-promotion is also not very effective. The narrator emphasizes how she cannot correctly name the British royal she is trying to impress, calling her "Princeps" instead of "Princess." Sorabji's insertion of an authorial note regarding this in the middle of the Maharani's speech about her attitude to charity is revealing: "So they [the purdahnashin] called our Queen upon her visit to us as Princess, confusing 'Princess' with the familiar Prinseps Ghat [waterfront], beside their sacred river" (166). This patronizing note to the reader dilutes the seriousness of the Maharani's opinions and extends this imputation of ignorance to a collective "they," that is, all purdahnashin.
Sorabji's use of authorial asides as a rhetorical device to remind us of her superior distance from the Maharani's story extends beyond this one moment. The most notable instance occurs when the Maharani is in a state of extremis. The government holds a "Commission in Lunacy" (168) to determine her fitness to access even limited financial freedom. During the proceedings she rightly castigates the High Court judge in charge of her case for posting the notice of the case at the gate of her house, an area inaccessible to purdahnashin like her. At this point, while narrating the Maharani's crisis, Sorabji employs an authorial aside that explicitly distances her subject position from the Maharani's. She directly addresses her readership—"'Who says this woman is mad!' said the Judge in an aside to me. It really was very funny." This aside reduces the Maharani's illness to a moment of frivolity when she and the British judge are united in their condescension toward her and we, as her readers, are invited to join [End Page 603] them. Overarchingly, Sorabji's narration undermines the Maharani's moments of self-sufficiency, pointing out the ridiculousness of her opinions and desires.
Sorabji's narrator is especially derisive of her client's wish to have independent use of her own money. When the Maharani tells her that she intends to use her income to put curses on her enemies, her reaction is an incredulous "What?" (165). She calls the Maharani "silly" as she tries to explain to her that curses are not real. The narrative refers to this behavior as an "amazing" (166) aberration that is at odds with her being "shrewder than most … careful about business, suspicious, even miserly in relation to all money transactions." Since she wants to use the money for superstitious, and thus illegitimate, purposes, the text reads her very desire to control her own income as similarly illegitimate. Her claims to her own economic independence are not taken seriously. In fact, they are held responsible for her tragic end. The Maharani, after she gets her money, stores it in a strongroom. After her turn to madness, the strongroom is found to be "empty of all but Rs. 16 [22 cents]" (169), and the priest is gone. The Maharani's bid for self-determination—her desire to step into a public sphere where she handles her own income—is framed as misguided and even dangerous as it leads to her losing her sanity. Her story ends with her incapacitated, spending her days in the care of her paternal family, fulfilling the promise of a tragic dénouement that had been made at the beginning.
The Maharani's inability to successfully create an identity for herself as a modern woman in charge of her own life imperfectly shores up Sorabji's exceptional narratorial status as an authoritative Indian woman. For a modern woman, the stability of her subject position depends on her successes in the public sphere. Sorabji's identity as a reformer of the zenana and its inhabitants was a large part of her authorial persona. Despite her attempts to improve the Maharani's life, what does it mean for her to fail in effecting any long-lasting changes? In an unexpected turn of events, Sorabji and the Maharani are linked through their common experiences of failure. While the Maharani cannot flourish outside the zenana, her inability to do so reveals Sorabji's deficiencies as a reformer who cannot imagine and facilitate lives for women like the Maharani in the outer world. At the very moment when she most strenuously tries to differentiate her identity from her client's by detailing the latter's inability to function as a modern woman, she also ends up evoking her own failure in this professed role. The gap between the two positions of the modern professional Indian woman and the traditional backwards Indian [End Page 604] woman that were initially proposed as absolute opposites begins to close, and the specific fragility of Sorabji's self-making as a modern woman author is revealed.
As she is summing up her life's work in the final pages of India Calling, Sorabji acknowledges the indeterminate success of her attempts at both women's reform and self-making. Using the metaphor of life as a tapestry, she sees hers as a patchwork creation, marked by "signs of carelessness, unfinished ends; here and there too much tension, or again too heedless a slackening" (300). Along with a sense of hasty improvisation and indeterminate openness, Sorabji's image invokes an understanding of her life as being either too much or too little, never exactly right. Providing critical commentary on her own embodiment of the role, she acknowledges modern colonial women's identity formation in the early-twentieth century to be a quixotic project. As an overdetermined figure policed and mobilized by both colonial and anti-colonial forces for their own ends, Sorabji experienced less radical possibility and more a difficult and endless negotiation fraught with compromise.
As instantiated in Sorabji, the category of modern colonial womanhood reveals unexpected energies within modernity, questioning its potential for effecting change and revealing its imbrication with conservatism. Her framing of this category includes several precursors to contemporary constructions of neoliberal feminism in South Asia with its focus on the modern woman as an agential subject whose agency depends on denying it to less privileged categories of women. Instead of being a harbinger of progress, modern colonial womanhood insists on its fragile exceptionality and affirms long-held beliefs about Indian women's backwardness. Sorabji's life and writing are representative of how modernity within colonialism was framed as an unusual and rare quality that was only granted to the worthy, a perception that uncoupled it from ideas of widespread political change. Associated with the concept of individual merit, modernity bypassed the necessity for rethinking long-held racist and sexist views about Indian women as a group. Instead of being the automatic ally of anti-colonialism or women's rights, colonial modernity could also be a tool to maintain the status quo, a position it continues to occupy in contemporary, postcolonial/neocolonial India. In Sorabji's writing, the modern colonial woman takes the well-known mobility of modernity as a concept to its logical (if unexpected) conclusion by unveiling its ability to harbor the unmodern. [End Page 605]
ANWESHA KUNDU <[email protected]> is an assistant professor of English at Centre College. She works on diaspora studies, US multiethnic literature, postcolonialism, affect theory, and gender and sexuality studies. Her current monograph in progress, Keeping Up with Whiteness: Racial Assimilation and the Multi-ethnic Nation in the Transatlantic Diaspora, focuses on racial assimilation within Black British and South Asian American diasporas as catalyzed through discourses of Whiteness, racial liberalism, and multiculturalism in the post-1945 US and UK.
Notes
1. I have used the terms "harem," "purdah," and "zenana" interchangeably to mark their sameness to a British audience, not to suggest that the material practices of veiling or segregating women within the domestic space are identical across South Asia or the Middle East. As Inderpal Grewal writes in Home and Harem, the figure of the nonwhite woman secluded within the home was powerful and evocative precisely because the colonial imagination had emptied it of any local signifiers that tied it to a particular geography or community. Instead, harems evoked generalized ideas about imprisoned and helpless women, sensual overindulgence, and female sexuality that was unavailable to the European male gaze. Sorabji herself had worked in enough zenanas to know the ways in which they varied from place to place even within India. However, she deliberately does not mark these differences in her work and instead mobilizes the suggestive figure of the harem inhabitant for her own literary and professional ends. I use these terms interchangeably in this essay because this non-specificity is instrumental to Sorabji's own self-positioning as a woman who is an external expert on harems and is writing to a British audience.
2. See Kumari Jayawardena's Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, Partha Chatterjee's The Nation and Its Fragments, and Sangeeta Ray's En-gendering India.
3. Joshi was the first Indian woman to qualify as a doctor with a degree from the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania (although her premature death kept her from practicing). Rukhmabai and Ganguly were the first women to practice modern Western medicine in India. Significantly, both trained as gynecologists and many of their patients were women in purdah who were unwilling to or prevented from going to public hospitals. Much like Sorabji, these women lived their lives under the public gaze and were subject to intense scrutiny, both positive and negative.
4. I capitalize "White" in this essay to undo any idea of it being neutral or the default. As much as Blackness or Brownness, Whiteness is a racialized identity with its own set of political, social, and cultural values and my capitalization of it draws attention to that fact.
5. Sorabji's work can be positioned within a tradition of Indian women writing in English about Indian women's domestic lives—outlining social problems vis-à-vis gender and taking a range of positions about reform—despite her departure from them in terms of her unique professional position. Krupabai Satthianadhan, a Dalit Christian author, wrote Saguna: A Story of Native Christian Life (serialized between 1887–1888, and later marketed as an autobiographical novel) and Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life, both of which reveal the restrictions placed on their protagonists' lives due to gender, religion, and caste. The upper-class, Parsi Dosebai Cowasjee Jessawalla advocates for British education to make Indian women into more enlightened wives and mothers in her autobiography, The Story of My Life. Iqbalunnisa Hussain's three volume novel, Purdah and Polygamy: Life in an Indian Muslim Household, offers an auto-ethnographic view of Muslim women's lives in purdah, describing it as a practice that was so deep-rooted that slow, progressive change was the only path to reform. The most obvious outlier in this cohort is Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's short story Sultana's Dream. While the rest are realist narratives, Hossain uses the genre of the dream-vision to write a science fiction account of Ladyland, a realm where men are confined to the zenana while women rule in a rational, scientifically progressive, and politically peaceful manner. Significantly, Hossain's text is both the most radical vision of women's liberation and the one most clearly divorced from both ethno-religious identifiers and the realist tradition.
6. Most of these were professions that could be seen as an extension of feminine care work. For more on this see Srirupa Prasad's discussion of the emergence of women doctors in early-twentieth-century India.
