Bombay, 1922. India has exactly one female lawyer. Her latest case arrives looking like a contract dispute, which is how many bad situations introduce themselves.
The Star of Calcutta | Sujata Massey | SoHo Crime (384 pages)
Perveen Mistry moves through a city still deciding what she is allowed to do: in court, in public, in the daily practice of a profession that has not fully accepted her. The case that tests her in this novel involves a film star, a vanished client, and a government censor found dead after a private screening. It is, like all of Perveen’s cases, considerably more than it first appears. Sujata Massey’s The Star of Calcutta is the fifth Perveen Mistry novel, and this was my first. Perveen proves herself as both investigator and attorney, navigating ethical boundaries carefully to protect her clients’ confidences. The plot delivers genuine twists, red herrings, and surprising turns before reaching a deeply satisfying conclusion.
What makes it linger, though, is the texture of her actual legal work — the contract language, the coroner’s court, the quiet negotiation of who leads the case and why.
The Real Lawyer Behind the Fiction
Massey has been explicit about the historical spark behind Perveen’s creation, and it clarifies both the ambition and the method of the series. On her website, she writes:
“When I was working on an earlier India historical novel… I printed out an article I saw on the Internet about India’s first woman lawyer, Cornelia Sorabji… Not only did I have Cornelia’s caseload to serve as inspiration, I realized that the regulations governing Parsi marriage and divorce could affect a female lawyer character’s life… Perveen’s commitment to social justice leads her to yearn for independence, yet she knows her family’s fortune was built on their relationship as building contractors for the British.”
That sent me straight to Wikipedia, where I lost an hour I do not regret. Cornelia Sorabji’s life startles. She was the first woman to graduate from Bombay University, the first to study law at Oxford, and — after years of advising clients without formal recognition — the first woman to practice law in India once the profession finally opened to women in the early 1920s.
Much of her work centered on purdahnashins, women whose strict seclusion meant they had no access to male lawyers and therefore no effective legal voice. Sorabji became their intermediary and advocate. Her politics were complicated. She supported the British Raj and opposed rapid reform, which put her at odds with the nationalist movement and has complicated her legacy ever since. Not a tidy heroine. Excellent raw material for fiction.
The parallel is most direct in the first Perveen Mistry novel, The Widows of Malabar Hill, where Perveen investigates a suspicious will on behalf of three Muslim widows living in full purdah — women who, like Sorabji’s clients, had no effective legal voice of their own. By The Star of Calcutta, Perveen has moved into the bright lights of the film industry. The cases may be more glamorous; the constraints remain.
Perveen is not a portrait of Sorabji so much as an imaginative extrapolation. As a Parsi woman educated at Oxford and working in her father’s Bombay law firm, she inhabits a similarly layered world of privilege and restriction. If Sorabji had to find ways to practice law without being fully admitted to it, Perveen practices it in public view, under scrutiny, in cases that are anything but straightforward.
It Is Not Safe
The case begins simply. Perveen and her father have secured an important client: Champa Films, a Bombay studio headed by director Subhas Ghoshal and his wife Rochana, a film star known for her daring action scenes. Rochana has recently left the Calcutta studio that made her famous, and her former employer alleges breach of contract. Paperwork, negotiations, perhaps a discreet settlement. It should be straightforward.
A government censor is found dead after a private screening. Rochana disappears. What began as a contract dispute opens into a murder investigation, pulling Perveen into a world where reputations are manufactured as carefully as films themselves — and where blackmail, romantic entanglement, and carefully kept secrets sit just beneath the glamour.
Early Indian cinema was becoming a space where nationalist sentiment could be expressed obliquely, where stories told in Indian languages to Indian audiences carried their own cultural charge. Massey uses that atmosphere without turning it into a lecture.
Massey is precise about how professional constraint plays out in practice. When Perveen introduces herself to a hat maker connected to a potential suspect, his confusion is genuine: “I didn’t know women could be lawyers.” Her response — “And I didn’t know men could design ladies’ hats” — plays as banter. It is a professional boundary being negotiated in real time.
The deeper friction is closer to home. Her father Jamshedji is supportive until the case becomes complicated, and then hierarchy reasserts itself with uncomfortable clarity. When Perveen pushes back on being sidelined from the murder investigation, his response is blunt: “I am the firm’s owner.” Factually correct. Strategically deployed. Three years of experience against twenty-five. Perveen steadies herself so as not to sound emotional — which is, of course, exactly what the situation invites.
Alice Hobson-Jones, a mathematics lecturer and Perveen’s closest friend since Oxford, is navigating her own version of the same tension: thriving in public, constrained in private. Her father, a British government official stationed in Bombay, intends to marry her off to a suitably respectable Englishman. Alice has other ideas.
As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that her evasiveness after the fatal screening — and her connection to the vanished film star — has everything to do with who she is. It is a secret in 1922. It reads as a life in plain sight to a modern reader. Massey handles this with generosity and without fanfare.
Both women at the center of the novel are professionally capable and personally hemmed in. Perveen carries the weight of a brief marriage she left behind and a relationship she cannot openly pursue because of religion and expectation. She has claimed considerable freedom in her working life and almost none in her private one.
The Bombay Massey evokes is vivid. The monsoon shapes movement. The shadows of the First World War linger in the city’s political undercurrents. The same society that produced an Oxford-educated female lawyer also maintained systems of seclusion so strict that many women could not speak to men outside their families. These realities coexisted; not as paradox but as the ordinary condition of a world in transition. Massey’s fiction occupies that space with sensitivity and without sentimentality.
This was my first Perveen Mistry novel. It works beautifully as an entry point. The relationships are sketched clearly enough to orient a newcomer while rewarding readers who have followed the series from the beginning. I am going back to start at The Widows of Malabar Hill. That, for a fifth book in a series, is the best thing I can say.
Massey’s larger argument is that history is not made only by formal declarations — laws passed, barriers lifted — but by the quieter acts of individuals who behave as though those changes have already occurred. Cornelia Sorabji advised clients before she was formally recognized as an advocate. Perveen Mistry insists on her authority in a legal culture still adjusting to her presence.
Fine Print: Many thanks to Soho Crime and NetGalley for the ARC.