Cornelia Sorabji was born on 15th November 1866 in Devlali, Nashik, then British India. She was one of the nine children of Reverend Sorabji Karsedji and Francina Ford.
Sorabji's life was greatly influenced by her parents as it was her father that helped her get admitted in Bombay University under degree program. Her mother, who was adopted and raised by a British couple, helped in establishing many school for girls in Pune. Many of Sorabji's career choices were influenced by her mother.
Cornelia Sorabji received her education at home and mission schools.
She was the first women graduate from Bombay University. She was enrolled in Deccan College and claimed to have topped the University in her final year but was denied scholarship for England. She started working permanently as an English Professor in Gujarat.
After becoming the first female graduate of Bombay University, Sorabji wrote in 1888 to the National Indian Association for assistance in completing her education. Sorabji arrived in England in 1889. In 1892, she was given special permission by Congregational Decree, due in large part to the petitions of her English friends, to take the Bachelor of Civil Laws exam at Somerville College, Oxford, becoming the first woman to ever do so.
Graduating two years later in 1894, she returned to India and became a specialist advocate for purdahnashins, women prohibited from communicating with men. Unable to represent them in court due to a blanket ban that would not be overturned until 1922, Cornelia nevertheless fought courageously for both the inheritance rights of these neglected women and her own as a professional.
She became a government legal adviser on the issue and won the right for purdahnashins to train as nurses. Cornelia was awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind Gold Medal in 1909 for her social reforming efforts on behalf of these women and other causes, not least her fearless opposition to orthodox Hindu attitudes to child marriage.
When the legal profession finally opened its doors to female lawyers in the 1920s, Sorabji opened her own practice in Kolkata but was even then denied the chance to make her pleas in person before the court, reduced to preparing arguments in absentia.
