'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 1930 s - India Calling (1934), and a subsequent book, India Recalled (1936) - in order to explore how discourses of space and place shaped the representati ons 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 i n the wake of the Katherine Mayo controversy, how they helped shape the ver sions of the respectable feminine produced in her public writing of the per iod.