Since their arrival in India in the 8th century AD, the landscape of Iran has played a special role in the Parsi Zoroastrian community’s topography of memory. After links between the Zoroastrians of Iran and India were renewed in the 15th century, the priests of Iran conferred legitimacy to the Indian community by arbitrating religious debates. But by the 18th century, this system had begun to break down, causing significant rifts within the community as some groups began to question the authority of the Iranian priests and particularly their connection to the ancient pre-Islamic traditions. In this talk, I will be comparing two travelogues of Indian Zoroastrians who visited Iran during the 18th and 19th centuries: the Persian Din-khirad (Wisdom of the Religion) of Mulla Firuz b. Ka’us (1786), and the Gujarati Ezhar-e Siat-e Iran (Exposition of Travels in Iran) of Manekji Limji Hataria (1865). While these two journeys occurred within a century of each other, the depiction of Iran and of the Zoroastrian communities in Yazd and Kerman differs drastically between them. For Firuz, Iran was a land of prosperity and learning, where the rituals and teachings of the Zoroastrians had been continuously taught and practiced without corruption. On the other hand, Manekji described Iran as ruined, where the glory of Zoroastrianism had been practically extinguished after centuries of oppression. While Mulla Firuz’s travelogue has largely been forgotten, Manekji’s description became the foundation of most subsequent historiography describing Iranian Zoroastrianism. In my presentation, I will situate these texts within the contemporary debates concerning religious authority. Following sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel’s notion of a mnemonic community to describe Zoroastrianism, a group of communities connected in their social construction of shared memory through common narratives, commemoration of sacred places, and through shared, periodically repeated activities, I will demonstrate how the mnemonic landscape of Iran itself became a locus of the controversies of the 18th and 19th century, controversies which ultimately split the Parsi community into two groups, only one of which continued to recognize the authority of the Iranians. By reading these texts alongside an examination of these contemporary debates and the anxieties which constitute them, I will explore the complexity of these texts, and demonstrate some ways in which they reflect the tensions within the Indian Parsi community in their very depictions of landscape and peoples of Iran.