The Volume Is Collection Of Papers Presented At The Seminar `The Contribution Of The Parsi Community To Western India Between 1818 To 1920. The Seminar Attempted To Make An Assessment Of The Contribution Made By The Parsis In Some Selected Areas.

“Medical knowledge is not communicable to the natives of this country.” With these words, James McAdam, Secretary of the Medical Board of Bombay, sounded the death-knell in 1832 of the pioneering medical school set up in Bombay by Governor Mountstuart Elphinstone. Sir Robert Grant, appointed Governor of Bombay in 1834, disagreed, however. He aimed at ‘the general improvement of medical and surgical science and practice among the native practitioners’. With Dr Charles Morehead, he created a medical college superior to those in Calcutta, and Madras. Parsi philanthropist Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy single-handedly donated an entire hospital to complement this college. Graduates from these institutions, trained in scientific medicine of the highest standards, went on to serve their fellow countrymen with distinction. This book narrates how against great odds, Grant Medical College went on to rival medical colleges in Europe and America, and Dr Morehead was invited to help improve medical education at the University of London.

This title was first published in 2000: This volume collects articles from 30 years of John R. Hinnell's writings. The selection is intended to balance the different areas in which he has worked: the ancient tradition and its influence on Biblical imagery; Parsi history; the living religion; and diaspora communities.

The Parsis are fast disappearing. There are now only around 50,000 members of the community in all of India. But since their arrival here from Central Asia, somewhere between the eighth and tenth centuries, the Parsis' contribution to their adopted home has been extraordinary. The history of India over the last century or so is filigreed with such contributions in every field, from nuclear physics to rock and roll, by names such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Dinshaw Petit, Homi Bhabha, Sam Manekshaw, Jamsetji Tata, Ardeshir Godrej, Cyrus Poonawalla, Zubin Mehta and Farrokh Bulsara (aka Freddie Mercury). This is a revised and updated new edition - engaging and accessible - making it as the most intimate history of the Parsis by senior journalist and columnist Coomi Kapoor, herself a Parsi. The book pores through the names, stories, achievements and the continuing success of this tiny but extraordinary minority. She delves deep into both the question of what it means to be Parsi in India, as well as how the community's contributions-from tanchoi silk to chikoos-became integral to what it meant to be Indian. In Kapoor's hands, the story of the Parsis becomes a rip-roaring, incident-filled adventure: from dominating the trade with China to being synonymous with Bombay, once, arguably, a city defined by its Parsis; from the business success of the Tatas, the Mistrys, the Godrejs and the Wadias, to such current contributions as the manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines by the Parsi-founded Serum Institute of India.

In the nineteenth century, a number of Zoroastrians emigrated from Iran to India. The subsequent importance of the cultural, religious and political ties between the Zoroastrian communities of Iran and the Zoroastrian communities of India has long been recognised. But despite this, there has been little scholarly attention paid to the changing dynamics of this transnational relationship. This book examines the Zoroastrian community in the late Qajar and early Pahlavi period beyond the borders of Iran to trace this Parsi-Persian relationship. A major theme is the increase in philanthropy directed to the Zoroastrians of Iran by the Parsis and the involvement of the British in encouraging Parsi feelings of patriotism towards Iran. The book shows that not only were Parsis affected by events taking place in Iran, they also contributed to the broader change in attitudes towards Zoroastrians in that country. Using a variety of original sources from Britain, India and Iran, Alexandra Buhler looks at the political, legal, and social position of Zoroastrians in Iran and how different events impacted their attitudes as well as the attitudes of Parsis towards their ancestral homeland. Of particular significance, this book shows, are the seminal years of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906-11) and the rise in the glorification of the pre-Islamic past, which culminated in the state nationalism expounded by Reza Shah. These political moments had a profound impact on how Zoroastrians in India felt about their future in the country and reveal a complex web of relations between the Parsis, the Zoroastrians of Iran, and the British.

One of the most heated scholarly controversies of the early twentieth century, the Orient-or-Rome debate turned on whether art historians should trace the origin of all Western—and especially Gothic—architecture to Roman ingenuity or to the Indo-Germanic Geist. Focusing on the discourses around this debate, Talinn Grigor considers the Persian Revival movement in light of imperial strategies of power and identity in British India and in Qajar-Pahlavi Iran. The Persian Revival examines Europe’s discovery of ancient Iran, first in literature and then in art history. Tracing Western visual discourse about ancient Iran from 1699 on, Grigor parses the invention and use of a revivalist architectural style from the Afsharid and Zand successors to the Safavid throne and the rise of the Parsi industrialists as cosmopolitan subjects of British India. Drawing on a wide range of Persian revival narratives bound to architectural history, Grigor foregrounds the complexities and magnitude of artistic appropriations of Western art history in order to grapple with colonial ambivalence and imperial aspirations. She argues that while Western imperialism was instrumental in shaping high art as mercantile-bourgeois ethos, it was also a project that destabilized the hegemony of a Eurocentric historiography of taste. An important reconsideration of the Persian Revival, this book will be of vital interest to art and architectural historians and intellectual historians, particularly those working in the areas of international modernism, Iranian studies, and historiography.

What is the distinctive Zoroastrian experience, and what is the common diasporic experience? The Zoroastrian Diaspora is the outcome of twenty years of research and of archival and fieldwork in eleven countries, involving approximately 250,000 miles of travel. It has also involved a survey questionnaire in eight countries, yielding over 1,840 responses. This is the first book to attempt a global comparison of Diaspora groups in six continents. Little has been written about Zoroastrian communities as far apart as China, East Africa, Europe, America, and Australia or on Parsis in Mumbai post-Independence. Each chapter is based on unused original sources ranging from nineteenth century archives to contemporary newsletters. The book also includes studies of Zoroastrians on the Internet, audio-visual resources, and the modern development of Parsi novels in English. As well as studying the Zoroastrians for their own inherent importance, this book contextualizes the Zoroastrian migrations within contemporary debates on Diaspora studies. John R. Hinnells examines what it is like to be a religious Asian in Los Angeles or London, Sydney or Hong Kong. Moreover, he explores not only how experience differs from one country to another, but also the differences between cities in the same country, for example, Chicago and Houston. The survey data is used firstly to consider the distinguishing demographic features of the Zoroastrian communities in various countries; and secondly to analyse different patterns of assimilation between different groups: men and women and according to the level and type of education. Comparisons are also drawn between people from rural and urban backgrounds; and between generations in religious beliefs and practices, including the preservation of secular culture.

Chef Samin Nosrat’s Top Ten Favorite Books for Vulture Winner, 2008 James Beard Foundation Book Award in Asian Cooking The Persians of antiquity were renowned for their lavish cuisine and their never-ceasing fascination with the exotic. These traits still find expression in the cooking of India's rapidly dwindling Parsi population—descendants of Zoroastrians who fled Persia after the Sassanian empire fell to the invading Arabs. The first book published in the United States on Parsi food written by a Parsi, this beautiful volume includes 165 recipes and makes one of India's most remarkable regional cuisines accessible to Westerners. In an intimate narrative rich with personal experience, the author leads readers into a world of new ideas, tastes, ingredients, and techniques, with a range of easy and seductive menus that will reassure neophytes and challenge explorers.

Muslims formed a disparate and unwieldy community in Bombay in the nineteenth century. The Islam that was professedly held in common by various groups could barely provide a sense of unity or cohesion to people so widely diverse in terms of language, customs, and also of forms and practices of belief. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a class of wealthy ship owners, ship-builders, and merchants, belonging to the varied communities that constituted the city, of which Muslims formed an important part, had emerged. This class was outward-looking, modern, and generally reformist in outlook: Gujarati or Maharashtrian, its goals of social reform, education, as well as political awareness, were gradually beginning to be perceived as goals held across communities, and increasingly across different regions. The questions that were being raised in the social turmoil of the period amongst Hindus were over issues of female education, the age of marriage, widow remarriage, and female seclusion. These issues were not foreign to the Muslim community; and the part played by Muslim leaders in Bombay in discussing and negotiating them was not an insignificant one, taking into account the size and relative backwardness of the community. Within this context, this book traces the evolving identity of a Bombay family and its changing social and political views in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using three main sources: their family journals, an individual memoir/journal, and letters written home from Europe.