This paper will examine the complex politics that resulted from a remarkable transnational philanthropic project. In the early 1850s, wealthy Parsis in Bombay began to actively assist their Zoroastrian brethren in Iran, who had suffered from centuries of oppression and socioeconomic marginalization. In Yazd, Kerman, Tehran, and elsewhere, Parsis helped to build schools and community institutions while encouraging commercial ventures. They lobbied Iranian imperial authorities to curtail the discriminatory practices and policies that had trapped the community in a cycle of impoverishment. These efforts helped Iranian Zoroastrians emerge as a relatively prosperous minority community by the early twentieth century. But Parsi activities also had distinct and lasting repercussions in the halls of power in London, Tehran, and Calcutta—and helped transform social and political dynamics within the Parsi community. There was a symbiotic relationship between charity and political power. Parsis, for their part, skillfully leveraged the might and influence of the British Empire in their activities on behalf of Iranian Zoroastrians. In Tehran, the Parsi emissary, Manekji Limji Hataria, established close relations with the British legation as he built schools and community institutions. In London, Parsi leaders such as Navrozji Fardunji and Dadabhai Naoroji relied upon British orientalists and diplomats to make direct overtures to the Iranian shah. British colonial authorities in India, meanwhile, sensed a certain usefulness in Parsi activities in Iran. They believed that Parsi endeavors could further British interests in the country and held out hope that, amongst members of the increasingly affluent and successful Iranian Zoroastrian community, Britain would have “a powerful political instrument which should be turned to good account”—especially as the British and Russian empires competed for influence in Tehran. Finally, Iranian government authorities recognized the economic clout of the Parsi community. By welcoming Parsi educational endeavors and cracking down on discriminatory practices against Iranian Zoroastrians, they believed that they could attract much-needed investment from wealthy Parsis—and perhaps even encourage Parsis to “return” to Iran. While philanthropic in nature, Parsi activities in Iran evolved into a clear struggle for power and influence. Parsis, furthermore, were not content to let their endeavors become an arm of British imperial influence. They increasingly saw themselves as concerned stakeholders in Iran’s political and economic modernization in the early twentieth century, using amelioration of the Iranian Zoroastrian community as a stepping stone towards broader influence and involvement in Iranian national affairs.

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.

Cross-pollinating little-known textual, visual, and architectural sources, this paper will tell of a rich history of artistic exchange that was severed in the early 1940s. From the late nineteenth century, wealthy Parsi patrons imported into Qajar and later Pahlavi Iran, an architectural style that could be dubbed, the Persian Revival. Its primary purpose was--from as early as the 1830s--to confirm, in stone and concrete, to confirm the common artistic and racial origins of the Parsis and the Iranians. Minister of Public Instructions Ali Asghar Hekmat quoted the king’s 1932 open arms invitation to the Parsis, “…the sons of Iran though separated from her, should look upon this country of to-day as their own, and differentiate it from its immediate past, and strive to benefit from her developments.” The first to contribute to Reza Shah’s development of modern tourism were young Parsi boys from wealthy families in search of the Urheimat. By then, too, both male and female Parsi patrons from Bombay were heavily invested in erecting significant educational and religious buildings at the heart of Reza Shah's Tehran and elsewhere throughout the country in this new and entirely invented prototype that professed its antiquity. The grand neo-Zoroastrian façades of the Peshotanji Dossabhai Marker Orphanage and School (1934) in Yazd, the Firuz Bahram High School for boys (1932) in Tehran, the Anushirvan Dadgar High School for girls (1936) in Tehran, and the mausoleum of Ferdowsi (1934) in Tus are esteemed not only as early examples of "Reza Shah's architecture" but also influential prototypes to the national canon of architectural aesthetics and Pahlavi conception of good taste.

Despite the implication within Iranian cinema histories that the first Persian-language sound films were intended for audiences in Iran, these first forays into sound film were screened for Parsi audiences in India. While Abdolhossein Sepanta, an Iranian expatriate living in Bombay, paved the way for many of these early films to be made and starred in several of them, his contribution to the creation of Persian-language sound film within more contemporary film histories of Iran overshadows the labor and reception of these films among Parsis at the time of their release. By examining the production of early Persian-language sound films shot in India alongside their screening and reception in India and Iran, I question why film histories have ignored the role of prominent Parsi producer Ardeshir Irani and his Imperial Film Company of Bombay, along with the significance of these films to the Parsi community in India. I argue that, despite the insertion of Bombay within the film plots, the involvement of Parsi labor in producing the films, and the positive reception among Parsis, aspirations for the growth of a Persian-language film contingent in India faded as Parsi political interests in Iran waned. Iranian trade publications and historians of Iranian cinema eventually came to claim these Parsi-produced films to provide evidence for the artistry of the Iranian film industry during the height of the industry’s commercial success and simultaneous poor reputation. Through an examination of Indian newspapers, Parsi archival documents, and Iranian trade publications from the 1930s through 1960s, I address the divergent histories of these films as forgotten in India and glorified in Iran. I position the reception of Parsi-produced Persian-language films and the ever-present role of Bombay as a filming space as representative of the political wrangling of notable Parsi figures who sought to fulfill cultural imperialist ambitions of tourism to and the eventual establishment of a Parsi colony in Iran. As these aspirations dwindled in the face of diminishing support and the end of British rule in India, so, too, did plans for expanding the Persian-language sector of the Indian film industry and memories of the films as Indian productions. In Iran, however, Sepanta and film trade publications desiring prestige and an increase in domestic production campaigned for the Indian-origin films to be included within distinctly Iranian film histories.