‘The Purdahnashin in Her Setting’: Colonial Modernity and the Zenana in Cornelia Sorabji's Memoirs

What kinds of memory has colonial modernity required of Indian women? And how does the representation of femininities, in all their symbolic and material presence, figure in such memory-work? In the face of such daunting questions, this article has a modest aim: to explore the ways in which the memoirs of Cornelia Sorabji (India Calling, 1934, and India Recalled, 1936) make use of the zenana and its inhabitants to commemorate a certain version of ‘traditional’ culture at a time when such culture was believed to be both in crisis and in peril. The zenana emerges in Sorabji's inter-war writings as the ‘vanishing monument’ of a bygone India which, like all monuments, cannot escape the politics of the present in which it was constructed. In this case, the ‘rhetoric of ruins’ she produced enables Sorabji to claim authority about the past and, in turn, to critique the gender politics of Indian nationalism in the 1930s. The zenana cannot, therefore, be viewed merely as an overdetermined female space from which to recuperate knowledge about ‘Indian’ or even ‘Hindu’ women. Sorabji's memoirs offer us, rather, an opportunity to read the zenana as a dynamic and above all material subject through which competing memories of ‘Indian women’ are articulated – a ‘narrative matrix,’ as James Young has argued elsewhere, from which a variety of contradictory histories must be imagined (see Young, 1993: vii–xi).

Several presumptions warrant attention from the start. First, and in keeping with recent feminist and anti-imperialist scholarship in the Indian context, I understand modernity and tradition to be highly contingent and fundamentally relational concepts which, in the context of modern European colonialism, are the very grounds upon which the operations of imperial power, nationalist patriarchy and Indian feminism can all be discerned and historicized (Mani, 1998; Sinha, 1999). Second, I treat Sorabji not as a sub-altern figure but as an élite, educated, England-returned Parsee Christian woman – not, in other words, as a self-evidently resistant actor but as a particular example of the female cosmopolitan traveler who can tell us much about what Uma Narayan calls ‘the complex interaction of local and colonial structures’ on the ground in India (Narayan, 1997: 23). Limitations of space regretfully preclude an elaboration of two equally important themes. Primary among these is Sorabji's hybrid location: her identity on the one hand as a Parsee Christian and her identification as a secular professional woman seeking legitimacy as one of the first women lawyers in British India (Burton, 1998: ch.3). Just as crucial is the sedimented history of the zenana itself, which by the 1920s had become a site of programmatic medical, scientific and educational intervention, mostly in service of a male bourgeois modernizing and nationalist project but also through the appropriations of female reformers in and outside India as well (Hancock, 1999). I well understand the risks involved in subordinating these narratives to an analysis of the memoirs which highlights Sorabji's claims to an apparently unproblematic, and avowedly colonial, cosmopolitanism. I do so in order to underscore her contradictory responses to colonial modernity and its gendered expectations, as well as to try to think through the relationships between material culture, memory and the historical imagination.

Although it describes her early childhood, her family life in Poona, and her sojourns to Britain, the greater part of Sorabji's autobiography, India Calling, is given over to narrating her life after her legal training at Oxford in the early 1890s (see Burton, 1998: ch.3). And although the text describes her various career moves and her international travels between 1889 and 1934, these are subordinated to the task of making her purdah clients visible not just ‘in their setting,’ but as evidence of ‘a hitherto unexplored country’ – that country being ‘the Orthodox Hindu community’ (Sorabji, 1934: 299). Sorabji had always had a knack for informal ethnography, as her letters home to her family from Oxford testify. She now saw herself as more of a legal sociologist, referring to India Calling as a ‘record’ and a ‘survey’ and cataloguing her cases into a series of categories designed to render ‘my purdahnashin’ (as she often called them) the right and proper objects of juridical surveillance. Sorabji probably envisioned her audience as middle class and British, anti-Congress if not anti-nationalist, and predisposed to be interested in the condition of Indian women in ways that harkened back to late-Victorian preoccupation with the orthodox Hindu wife and mother. This is not to say that Sorabji's ideological concerns were anachronistic or even out of step with contemporary interests. As Mrinalini Sinha has argued, Sorabji had been actively involved in the India-wide Mother India controversy sparked by Katherine Mayo's pathologizing account of Hindu women in 1927–8, taking up a position in defense of the much-vilified book in ways that anticipated many of her descriptions in the autobiography, though admittedly in more polemical tones (Sinha, 1996: 477–504). Nor was this the first occasion that Sorabji had used zenana women as evidence of her professional achievements or expertise (Sorabji, 1917, 1901: 623–38). What is distinctive here, in the 1930s, is Sorabji's investment in representing the ‘imprisoned’ Hindu woman as a particularly poignant contrast to her own life story. It was a contrast reliant on the distinction she insisted upon between her work as ‘a roving and privileged Practitioner of the Law’ and the purdahnashins’ immobility in the precincts of the zenana (Sorabji, 1934: 99). What guaranteed their femininity as Hindu women, in other words, was the fact of enclosure and the isolation and timelessness it apparently imposed on them – phenomena which made them seem like inhabitants of a country within a country, and Sorabji herself a belated traveler constantly stumbling onto, and into, a past as yet untouched by modernity.

The glimpses of zenana life recorded throughout India Calling follow a fairly standard procedure: they telescope Sorabji's arrival, her approach to the walled courtyard, her exploration of the inner quarters, her conversation with the Rani or other inhabitants, and her analysis of the customs, practices, and conditions of life on the ‘Inside’ (Sorabji, 1934: 67). Sorabji often recounted the variety of forms of transportation available to her for getting to zenanas, as when she visited the Maharani of Baroda: ‘I moved from point to point … by train, riding an elephant, in palanquins, camel carts, in old-fashioned barouches … [and] in a “coach and four.”’ Sorabji, 1934: 66. In this way she was able to dramatize the geographical isolation of purdah women and signal the mixture of urban and rural, traditional and modern conveyances to which she had access as a professional woman. Once inside, she produced elaborate verbal pictures of zenana life which conjured up the sparseness of the furnishings, the closeness of the quarters, and the intimacy of an all-female space. But it was the physical interiors of the zenana complex which captivated Sorabji's roving eye, and to which she devoted the most attention in the scenes she recreated. On her visit to the Maharani of Baroda, she focused on the bath, the bedroom, and the dressing rooms, mapping the layout and elaborating the accouterments (basins, dressing-table, saris, and jewelry) which could be seen there. Evocative and precise, the catalogue of objects is not merely descriptive, but is designed to specify the material practices of Hindu femininity in its most intimate spaces:

Sorabji deems the only mirror in the dressing room ‘bad,’ thereby guaranteeing that her account serves as the only reliable technology through which the interior is made visible, let alone representable. Of equal significance is her insistence that the scene she recounts is of days gone by, when authentic Hindu femininity could be counted upon, in contrast to the ‘progressive’ habits of her Hindu women contemporaries, who prefer the aesthetic to the symbolic and, in any case, are incapable of fully appreciating traditional customs and their meanings. Rarely do Sorabji's engagements with modernity address the tropes of consumer culture common to the West, but here her reference to cosmetics resonates with European discourses which linked the modern woman with gloss, artifice, and superficiality (see Husseyen, 1986; Pollock, 1988; Felski, 1995: 1–18).

In contrast, Sorabji's cosmopolitan vision routinely breaks the surface of India Calling, thereby revealing her determination to be seen as the bearer of ‘traditional [read Hindu women's] India’ to the threshold of modernity itself: the reader's sightline. Although photographs are sprinkled throughout the text, they only capture outdoor scenes – children playing, guards at the zenana gate, temple scenes. The closest we get to the purdahnashin themselves is through images of their conveyances: an ox-cart (‘for the rich’) and a dhuli (‘for the poor’). This tension between drawing us in and keeping us at bay – that is, at the threshold of the zenana interior – is typical of Sorabji's rhetorical mode in the autobiography, and it effectively highlights our dependence on her as the purveyor of an otherwise distant and unreachable world. The fact that a number of the most detailed zenana visits in the autobiography recall Sorabji's experiences in the 1890s further underscores the distance in time and space these women are made to represent, as well as Sorabji's own indispensability as a witness to their primitive isolation both in and as history. And, as it turns out, Sorabji's testimony is also crucial to securing the purdahnashin's identities as women. For underlying all the accounts of zenana visits is the quest to explain, and to justify, her professional work among her purdahnashin clients – work necessitated by their inaccessibility to male lawyers, but also by the dishonesty of male relatives eager to sue for inheritance and/or property under false pretenses. In cases like this, the woman in question was driven to court by a male relative ‘who acted as a “carrier” during her examination, speaking to her through a slit in the doors of the palanquin and broadcasting her answers to the Court’ (Sorabji, 1934: 103). In a case in Bombay, a suspicious judge ordered the plaintiff to be escorted to his chambers by the matron of the hospital. When the shutters were opened and the curtain was drawn, ‘a bearded old man stumbled to his feet’ and into the judge's chambers (Sorabji, 1934: 103). The anecdote ends here, and although Sorabji offers no comment, clearly we are meant to understand that her presence in the zenana guarantees that, for the purposes of legal procedure, purdahnashin are in fact the women they claim to be. Thus, the rhetorical maneuvers Sorabji performs in India Calling do more than imagine Hindu women in their settings. They help to align Sorabji herself with the modern, secular, and male colonial/legal establishment while stabilizing secluded women as the pathetic objects of modern technologies of surveillance inside the zenana itself.

The extent to which Sorabji pathologized the world of the purdahnashin need not prevent us from appreciating what they can tell us about the socio-economic conditions of zenana life at the turn of the century. Although she was sometimes called in to mediate by male relatives, Sorabji was also often called to the zenana by a ‘senior thakurani,' ¹ and a number of those fended off Sorabji's curiosity about, and criticisms of, their seclusion even as they negotiated advantageous settlements of their court claims using her legal knowledge and contacts (Sorabji, 1934: 67–8, 86–94). At the same time, Sorabji tended to represent Hindu women's attempts to control their destinies as quaint remnants of a bygone era and herself as the all-knowing, wise counselor trying to do her job under the most primitive of circumstances. The case of the woman Sorabji called the ‘Squirrel-Lady’ (because she allowed squirrels to climb all over her, believing she had been one in a previous life) is an interesting example. At her client's insistence, and despite Sorabji's skepticism about the success of the case, Sorabji tried to negotiate a rent settlement for her from her estranged step-grandson, who proceeded to try to palliate the old woman by sending her a new garment and urging her to come and meet him and settle the matter in person. The Squirrel-Lady's waiting-woman, ‘skilled in the intrigues of the Palaces’ (Sorabji, 1934: 91) warned against it, and when Sorabji had the garment analyzed chemically it was determined that it had been threaded with a poison designed to kill. Sorabji was impressed by the fact that the Squirrel-Lady bought annuities for the waiting-woman and her husband from the arrears she eventually won, but she ended by terming the whole event ‘mediaeval’ and speculating that in death the old woman had returned to the squirrels she had been so fond of in life.

At one level, Sorabji's investments in remembering the Hindu woman of the turn of the century as the quaint and harmless remnant of a more placid time may seem benign enough. In a context where representation was presumably a critical component of her legal duties and her claims to professionalism, it was undoubtedly crucial for her to demonstrate her capacity to observe and then to represent purdahnashin precisely as dependent clients. At the same time, Sorabji's recourse to the simple if misguided Hindu woman of the past to elaborate her own social reform mission had decidedly political purposes as well: for the return to the zenana offered her an opportunity to unmask what she believed to be modernity-gone-badly-wrong at the heart of contemporary nationalist projects in 1930s India, especially where women were concerned. Indeed, her quest to make ‘the purdahnashin in her setting’ visible became an opportunity for anti-modernist nostalgia, as the volatile events of the 1930s repeatedly returned Sorabji not just to the peace and calm of the zenana courtyard but to earlier historical moments (namely the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century) when the nationalist movement had not yet mobilized on a mass scale and when images of the Indian woman had different (though no less ideologically charged) valences. Sorabji's accounts of purdah women in India Calling is intended to serve as a counter to the versions of ‘the modern woman’ that were on offer, in public, and increasingly visible in 1930s nationalist politics, even as her stories tend to strand women like the Squirrel-Lady ‘outside’ history.

The account Sorabji published of ‘A Bengali Revolutionary’ for the British periodical, The Nineteenth Century and After, in 1933 helps to frame the more immediate political context in which she wrote her autobiography and to shed light on the ways in which her commemorations of the past were not merely self-interested, but advanced an agenda that was as anti-nationalist as it was anti-modernist. The point of departure for this article was the recent wave of terrorism in Bengal in which ‘women confederates … prove[d] a useful and unsuspected asset to the machinery of revolt’ (Sorabji, 1933: 604). Significantly, Sorabji's piece turns immediately back to 1907 and the protests surrounding the Partition of Bengal – as much to suggest the long history of terrorism connected with Indian nationalism in that presidency as to emphasize Bengali nationalism's Hindu bias. ² Sorabji was then Legal Advisor to the Court of Wards in Calcutta. A deputy of the Commissioner of Police brought a woman to her who claimed to be responsible for terrorist acts; the British authorities, claiming to ‘have no war with women,’ professed to be able to do nothing with her and turned her over to Sorabji asking for her help. Sorabji's first observation of the woman decided her upon a plan:

Sorabji judged this woman ‘dangerous’ and decided that the best place for her was her own house. Having been told that she was a zenana inhabitant (though certain that she was lying), Sorabji set her up on the lower floor of her home and treated her as if she were a purdahnashin, vowing to respect her as ‘an Orthodox Hindu of the highest caste … and while you are my guest I promise you that nothing to which you might as a Hindu object shall come in at my gate or be cooked in my own kitchen.’ In addition to informing the servants of what the woman was to be fed, Sorabji ordered them to secure her in the house and limit all communication with the outside world. ‘For the rest,’ Sorabji explained:

In order to break her cover story, Sorabji had a ‘Purdahnashin party of my Wards – genuine Orthodox women of Raj families.’ She took this opportunity to reassure her readers of her special knowledge of and relationship to them, emphasizing how carefully she protected their seclusion by erecting ‘tent-walls from the doors of the carriage … through the hall and all the way to my drawing-room.’ She also insisted on her importance in the local community by underscoring that ‘they loved these outings, the only ones allowed them, and allowed them only because they call me “Aunt-Mother” and were my official children’ (Sorabji, 1933: 606). Sorabji claimed that it was after the purdah party that the woman broke down, in large part because she was tired of being enclosed like an ‘orthodox Hindu.’

Though Sorabji never names her, the woman turned out to be an agent of the local terrorist organization working out of the Maniktolla Garden area of Calcutta – one of many hundreds of women galvanized by partition to support secret societies by providing food and shelter to revolutionaries, carrying messages, and hiding weapons (Forbes, 1980: 1–15; Mandal, 1991: 3, ff.). Despite her disapproval, Sorabji could not resist reproducing her story. Here it is difficult not to read the woman terrorist as Sorabji's double and her opposite: as she is represented in the article, she emerges as the mobile modern woman, not just in the employ of the rebels but enlisted specifically to travel all over India and to lecture zenanas about the necessity of revolution. As her story unfolds, the woman intimates that the purdahnashin were not as docile or unworldly as Sorabji liked to presume. ‘“Yes,” – [she said] defiantly – “we made bombs to kill you while you and your friends were having tea parties for us … we laughed a great deal at that”’ (Sorabji, 1933: 607). If this report was unsettling to Sorabji, she had the last word, for the woman claimed that what precipitated her confession was Sorabji's determination to treat her like a purdahnashin:

Sorabji's triumphal conclusion was: ‘So it was vanity which had betrayed her after all!’

This facile ascription – together with Sorabji's account of how she turned over the woman's confession to the Commissioner of Police – indicates how thorough her identification with the British government in India was, as well as how crucial her reductive representations of ‘the Hindu woman’ were to her ideological collaboration with it. Her embrace of what Christopher Pinney calls the ‘detective paradigm’ in this case further suggests her determination to mimic the strategies of visual control characteristic of colonial modernity in situ (Pinney, 1998: 45). And finally, her decision to place the woman under her own version of ‘house arrest’ makes clear how readily she could adapt her preoccupation with the pedagogical function of the zenana to what she perceived of as the necessities of colonial rule in crisis. Such political canniness makes it impossible to read Sorabji as innocent about the revolutionary potential of the purdahnashin. In fact, she volunteers that she was aware of how the zenana was used to collect money for ‘the bomb-makers,’ and that she herself, as a local intermediary with both zenana women and Lord Minto's government, had been warned against letting unknowns into the women's quarters (Sorabji, 1933: 610). Moreover, the whole account in The Nineteenth Century and After is driven by the rivalry between herself and the unnamed woman revolutionary for access to them and their political allegiance – a rivalry so politically charged that Sorabji felt compelled to turn the modern nationalist woman into a zenana inhabitant precisely in order to thwart her access to the same secluded women she counted on as her clients and her ‘children.’ That she does so by bringing the zenana itself into the interiors of her own home, and focusing her surveillance techniques on those same spaces, suggests how intimate a struggle over Hindu women's bodies this contest was – as well as how tenuous Sorabji's attempts to (re)domesticate the purdahnashin might have been in the context of the political battles of this period.

In a very real sense, then, the Hindu woman of the zenana was what Sally Alexander has called one of ‘the metonymic signs of femininity particular to a generation,’ regardless of people's specific political allegiances (Alexander, 1995: 234). In the 1933 periodical article, as in the autobiography, Sorabji's response to this crisis of modernity – i.e. the politicization of the zenana woman – was to return to a less complicated historical moment (namely, 1907) when the possibility of continuities with the past seemed more realistic, and conspirators masquerading as orthodox Hindu women could be seen for what they were and suitably dealt with – via privatized, individualist, and semi-legal solutions. In so doing she placed ‘her’ purdahnashin within the reach of memory but just outside of contemporary history, and helped to secure her own role as arbiter of what counted as legitimate political action in both the past and the present. This is especially evident if we understand Sorabji's narrative in The Nineteenth Century and After as an attempt to trivialize the anti-partition movement, and read her representation of the Bengali woman terrorist as a figure of fun, offered up for the amusement of the (British) reading public in service of a larger critique of what kinds of nationalist protest ought to be taken seriously in the context of 1930s politics – interpretations born out by her insistence that the pranks carried out by the rebels to get into the zenana were nothing more than ‘childish,’ compared presumably to the official business which brought her to ‘her’ purdahnashin (Sorabji, 1933: 609).

The zeal with which Sorabji sought to commemorate the zenana as the site of ‘real India’ and of the ‘authentic’ Hindu woman is an index of how elusive they had both become by the mid-1930s as unproblematic subjects of either modernity or tradition. Despite the fact that feminist historians have questioned the extent to which Gandhian nationalism challenged, rather than effectively reorganized, gender norms in the various campaigns and agitations of this period, many contemporaries believed they were witnessing the emergence of a radically new, and at times questionably respectable, ‘Indian woman’ – especially in the person of those Hindu women who left the confines of home to protest in the streets and in salt marches under the banner of Bande Mataram (see Kishwar, 1986: 43–61 and Patel, 1988: 377–87; for a different take see Fox, 1996: 37–49). Nowhere is the anxiety prompted by these spectacles more clear in Sorabji's writings than in her professional memoir, India Recalled, published in 1936. Whereas in India Calling readers were left to draw their own conclusions about the symbolic meaning of her focus on the zenana, here we are pointedly informed that the zenana is directly analogous to, and synonymous with, the orthodox Hindu home – a symbolic and material space in need of attention precisely because it is in crisis (Sorabji, 1936: vii). The urgency of this quest to fix the purdahnashin in their ever-changing settings may be evidenced in Sorabji's approach to the terms of the narrative itself, which opens with an even more marked commitment to the sociological perspective than she had espoused in the autobiography – in part because the stakes of scientific objectivity and accuracy about the enduring value of the zenana as an enculturating and (conservative) pedagogical site were so great in the face of increasing popular evidence to the contrary. Simultaneously with her disclaimer that the book was not a ‘learned disquisition,’ therefore, Sorabji insisted that ‘this is not fiction, but a record of living India’ prompted by westerners’ curious questions about ‘how secluded Indian women live’ (Sorabji, 1936: vii, viii, x). Even more intriguing is her invocation of the camera as the medium best suited for capturing the images she wished to preserve. She called the book ‘a film of living pictures … [which] tell their own story’ – thus evoking the technology of looking common to her writings in this period and signaling a more disembodied, and it must be said, more modernist, authority than before (Sorabji, 1936: viii). As in India Calling, Sorabji insisted on the juxtaposition of the modern and the traditional here in order to ally herself with her subjects and create a recognizable distance from them – for as she informed her readers, ‘storytelling is a traditional past-time with us; and we speak in parables as do other races’ (Sorabji, 1936: x). But while the mixture of modern lens and traditional story established her privileged point of view at the intersection of past and present, it also conveyed a revealing sense of urgency that these ‘pictures’ of zenana life had to be captured in whatever medium possible before the occupants escaped through ‘that open Zenana door’ (Sorabji, 1936: xiii).

The cinematic stance taken up early on is maintained throughout the text, continuing Sorabji's commitment to making zenana life visually accessible as well as spatially concrete for the reader. Indeed, the episodes recounted in India Recalled have a snapshot quality first announced in the photograph which appears opposite the title page (entitled ‘Outcastes at the Temple Door’) and sustained throughout by a dozen illustrations – many of which position the viewer at the threshold of a ‘Hindu’ ceremony or scene. In contrast to the autobiography, however, the photographs in India Recalled end up being the most telescoped feature of the text. For what begins with the promise of a photo-essay on zenana life quickly turns into a more generalized view of the joint-family system in Bengal, with freeze-frames of ceremonies like marriage and Ganesh-worship, local festivals, pilgrimages, household duties, and prayers. The zenana itself goes in and out of focus as the subject of the narrative, which opens continually out from inner quarters onto a variety of landscapes. As narrator, Sorabji herself rarely proceeds inward from the outside, as was typical in India Calling, but more often than not wanders across properties and estates and vast tracts of countryside – in pursuit of her legal business, to be sure, but also in search of an authenticity which apparently eludes her now within the confines of the zenana itself. She zig-zags across the pages, eschewing carefully crafted verbal images of interiors and inner sanctums for the more sweeping views made possible by the technology of the camera she has introduced at the start. One notable effect of this panoramic approach is the depersonalization of the memoir: Sorabji disappears from view, but so do the individual Hindu women – there are no ‘Squirrel-Ladies’ or Maharanis to particularize zenana life. By the end of the book, purdahnashin are scarcely even recognizable as the motivation for the project, as aggregates like ‘Village India’ and ‘Sadhuins’ (holy women) displace them, erasing them almost completely. ³ On those rare occasions when individuals do stand out, their attachment to seclusion is seen to be eroding, as in the case of Giribala, a young widow whom Sorabji visited as part of her Court of Wards business in Bengal. Though Sorabji's legal interventions on her behalf constitute the core of her story, it is Giribala's frustration with the loneliness and ‘neglect of human contacts’ in the zenana which frames the tale (Sorabji, 1936: 19). And here, in contrast to India Calling, we see how ineluctably modernity is making its way into purdah: for Giribala ‘had a great and secret surprise which she sprung upon me. She had acquired a Singer's sewing machine, and had made loose covers for her chairs, because she had found my room in its summer chintzes’ (Sorabji, 1936: 20). Sorabji could not but signal the precarious vulnerability of the purdahnashins’ world; she had to admit that signs of the modern and of ‘progress’ were to be seen pressing up against the very windows of the zenana. As she wrote in connection with Giribala's situation, ‘the emancipation of women … [was] seeping through the closed door of the Zenana, when restless young things, their blood stirred by quite other causes, felt its hot breath upon their cheeks’ (Sorabji, 1936: 18).

The race against time which impels the narrative forward in India Recalled allows us to see with particular vividness how determined Sorabji was to fix Hindu women as pathetic yet romantic subjects trapped at the crossroads of then and now – thereby securing them as objects of the accelerating, nostalgic desire for the traditional woman which is among the many contradictions at the ideological heart of modernity. The vulnerability of purdahnashin to the temptations and corruptions of modern life dramatizes the equally precarious status of Sorabji's authority over what could even count as ‘the zenana,’ especially when something as emblematic of modern consumer culture as the Singer sewing machine could be seen to have made its way into the innermost quarters of purdah life. As a consequence, she ended up consolidating herself as ‘the active, newly autonomous, and self-defining subject’ against which the traditional figure of the orthodox Hindu woman might be measured and appreciated, largely by means of her own remarkably cinematic vision (Felski, 1995: 2). Despite her professed admiration for the pristine quality of zenana life and its isolation from the trappings of the modern world, it was Sorabji herself who prompted and even enabled the pathway to modernity which purdah women like Giribala sought: for it was her sitting room that the young widow aspired to imitate, and her chintz pillows she used as the model for aestheticizing daily life in the zenana. What appear as paradoxes – ironies, even, given Sorabji's attachment to the isolated, authentic, recoverable, Hindu woman of the recent past – are, in fact, symptoms of her ambivalence toward ‘the modern woman’ as she was being imagined and remade in the Indian context, as well as evidence of the kinds of ‘split allegiances’ that any engagement with, let alone articulation of, femininity could produce under colonial modernity. ⁴

Sorabji's insistence on the zenana as the sign of authentic India is undoubtedly a hallmark of her unique political commitments. Rather than interpreting her memoirs as proof of her peculiar politics or contradictions, I want to read them as evidence of modernity's often unpredictable intersections with colonialism, its languages, and above all, its multiple genealogies (Appadurai, 1996: 2; see also Bagchi, 1996: 10, ff.). And I want to end by underscoring that it is the use she makes of the zenana – as material culture, ‘historical’ evidence, tourist site, museum exhibit – which finally and most fully signal the commemorative quality of her inter-war writings. The museological character of her memoirs is instructive here, insofar as it reflects Sorabji's commitment to understanding the zenana and its inhabitants as relics of the past and herself, by extension, as the representative not simply of a contradictory but of an unwilling modernity as well. Sorabji's repeated return to and disavowal of the zenana tells us much about the ways in which the public and the private, the home and the world, were being challenged and refigured in late colonial India. Her writings also provide us with evidence of how politicized the zenana had become by the period, not merely as a site of social and cultural reform but at the level of colonial and nationalist politics as well. Her failed attempts to redomesticate the zenana – and thereby, in her view, to depoliticize it – signal the inevitably unfinished ideological work of all representations, and ultimately allow us to appreciate how complex a figure in and of colonial modernity ‘the Indian woman’ could be. In the end, Sorabji's determination to preserve ‘her’ purdahnashin in the domain of memory could not but implicate her in the politics of colonial modernity, and in its uneven histories as well.