MESA Banner
Parsi Tourism: Cultures of Travel between India and Iran during the Interwar Period
Abstract
This paper will focus on the growing desire among members of western India’s Parsi-Zoroastrian community to travel to Iran during the interwar period. By this era many Parsis had come to view themselves as an ‘exilic’ and ‘diasporic’ community, separated from their original Iranian ‘homeland’ since their exodus to the sub-continent following the seventh century Muslim conquest of Iran. The changing political conditions inside India during the final years of the British Raj increasingly made the possibility of remigration to Iran an option that was also increasingly considered by civic leaders of the largely pro-British Parsi minority community now anxious about their prospects in a post-independence India. The paper will document how Parsis assessed their options and expressed their growing fascination with Iran as a possible destination for travel, migration, and possible repatriation. The content of the paper will focus on three specific forms of Parsi engagement with Iran: (1) Parsi plans for commercial and industrial investment inside Iran, (2) efforts for the establishment of a tourism infrastructure connecting Bombay to cities throughout Iran, and (3) plans by some Parsi civic leaders for the purchase of land to establish ‘Parsi colonies’ in the Khuzestan and Fars provinces of southern Iran. The sources will include both Persian-language sources produced by Iranian advocates for a Parsi remigration to Iran, and English-language Parsi sources produced in Bombay. The most important Persian-language source is the periodical Iran-e Bastan (Ancient Iran). This newspaper, published between 1933-35 was the periodical that advocated most vocally for Parsi investment, travel, and migration to Iran. Among English-language sources published by the Parsi community, special emphasis will be placed on the Iran League Quarterly, the principal Parsi periodical documenting the Parsi community’s interests and aspirations for re-connecting to Iran. Finally, the paper will also examine Parsi tourist guidebooks that were published during this period for an audience of potential Parsi travelers. The goal of the paper is to illustrate the renewed Parsi-Iranian relationship, and to argue that these projects of tourism, investment, and remigration were enabled by the growing proliferation of technologies of travel, as well as the political economy of empire and nationalism that defined the increasingly connected histories of Iran and India during interwar era.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Indian Ocean Region
Sub Area
Iranian Studies