Returning to India after her studies at Oxford, Sorabji became involved in social and advisory work on behalf of the purdahnashins, women who were forbidden to communicate with the outside male world, but she was unable to defend them in court since, as a woman, she did not hold professional standing in the Indian legal system.

[2] Her mother, Francina Ford (née Santya), had been adopted at the age of twelve and brought up by a British couple, and helped to establish several girls' schools in Poona (now Pune).

[5][6] In her books, Cornelia Sorabji barely touched on religion (other than describing Parsi rituals), and did not write about any pressures relating to religious conversion in her autobiographical works.

She enrolled in Deccan College, as its first woman student, and received the top marks in her cohort for the final degree examination, which would have entitled her to a government scholarship to study further in England.

This was championed by Mary Hobhouse (whose husband Arthur was a member of the Council of India) and Adelaide Manning, who contributed funds, as did Florence Nightingale, Sir William Wedderburn and others.

[9] In 1892, she was given special permission by Congregational Decree, due in large part to the petitions of her English friends, to take the post-graduate Bachelor of Civil Law exam at Somerville College, Oxford, becoming the first woman to ever do so.

[10][11] Sorabji was the first woman to be admitted as a reader to the Codrington Library of All Souls College, Oxford, at Sir William Anson's invitation in 1890.

[12] Upon returning to India in 1894, Sorabji became involved in social and advisory work on behalf of the purdahnashins, women who were forbidden to communicate with the outside male world.

Sorabji was given special permission to enter pleas on their behalf before British agents of Kathiawar and Indore principalities, but she was unable to defend them in court since, as a woman, she did not hold professional standing in the Indian legal system.

[1][13] Sorabji began petitioning the India Office as early as 1902 to provide for a female legal advisor to represent women and minors in provincial courts.

[1] Although an Anglophile, Sorabji had no desire to see "the wholesale imposition of a British legal system on Indian society any more than she sought the transplantation of other Western values.

Although she supported traditional Indian life and culture, Sorabji promoted reform of Hindu laws regarding child marriage and Sati by widows.

She favourably viewed the polemical attack on Indian self-rule in Katherine Mayo's book Mother India (1927),[1] and condemned Mahatma Gandhi's campaign of civil disobedience.