Conservative Modernity: The Self-Making of the Modern Colonial Woman in Cornelia Sorabji's India Calling

Abstract: 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.