Exile and the Nation traces the contributions to early Iranian nationalism of five discrete, occasionally intersecting, individuals. An opening chapter on Kaykhosrow Sharokh is followed by revisions of earlier articles on Dinshah Irani and Rabindranath Tagore, then sections on Ebrahim Purdavud and Abdulrahman Saif Azad. These engaging biographies of two Zoroastrians (one Parsi, one Iranian), two poets (one an Iranian translator of Zoroastrian texts, one a Bengali Nobel laureate), and an Iranian journalist with pro-Nazi sympathies contextualize the development of Iranian nationalism between the Constitutional Revolution and the 1930s, highlighting the significance of Parsi Zoroastrians to the related restoration of “Iranian authenticity” (cf. p. 126).
The main title refers to the relationship between “the Parsi community of India”—a remnant Iranian group “in exile” from its homeland—and the formation of modern Iran in late Qajar, early Pahlavi times. But, as Afshin Marashi illustrates, Iranian intellectual expatriates in 1910s Beirut and Paris, and in interwar Berlin and Baghdad, also considered themselves quasi exiles. Several such émigrés reconceived their national identity through encounters with independence activists from India, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Egypt, and later with representatives of German National Socialism.
The Parsi contribution to emerging Iranian nationalist discourse is a fruitful area of research. In 2007, this reviewer examined a doctoral dissertation on the significance of the Constitutional Revolution for Zoroastrians in Iran and India, particularly their respective engagement in Iranian sociopolitical activity. Other recent studies have explored the impact of the “rediscovery” of Iran's pre-Islamic imperial past, as mediated initially through Europeans, then through Qajar rulers, on “modernity” in Iran and India.
This book expands the conversation into the interwar years, when Iran's (idealized) “classical past” was a focus of archaeological research and public exhibition. It introduces a wider range of players and ideologies involved in Iranian nationalism, including Tagore, and Saif Azad's “proto Third Worldism” (p. 205f). The focus on enduring cultural connections across the “Indo-Iranian world,” particularly within the “early modern Persianate context,” holds appeal for those who value a global knowledge perspective.
Marashi's tracing of transnational sociopolitical currents is enlivened by accounts of complicated journeys between northwest South Asia and Iran (pp. 78, 199). Also of interest is the reframing of the relationship of Persian poetics (and its attendant Sufi elements) to an older, “Indo-Iranian”/“Aryan” spiritual expression, in the formulation of Iranian nationalist discourse (cf. pp. 117ff, 91f).
The stand-alone nature of each chapter suits an e-book, but leads to some repetition, and some omission, of information regarding points of contact between individuals and organizations. For example, reference to Irani's English rendition of the Gāthās, mentioned in the chapter on Tagore in relation to the latter's introduction (p. 102f), is absent from that on Irani, where it would enhance analysis of his interpretation of Zoroastrianism beyond the distilled diagramming of its moral principles (pp. 86–90).
Each chapter highlights the tensions between the ideology of an individual or group and that of Iranian political ethos. Particular attention is given to the competing objectives of a Parsi/Zoroastrian liberal, inclusivist agenda, and nationalist readings of Iran's “Zoroastrian” heritage in the late Reza Shah period, which were marked by exclusionist chauvinism.
Throughout, “the Parsi community” refers primarily to well-to-do reformist Parsis in Bombay, whose “authenticity” derives from their status as followers of a “putatively original Zoroastrianism” (pp. 17, 39), in contrast with their Iranian coreligionists, whom visiting Parsis (as also Shahrokh) considered syncretistic and ignorant of their heritage. Might such disparagement explain the scant reference to Iranian Zoroastrian involvement in nationalist discourse apart from that of Shahrokh? Marashi does not address this, nor does he acknowledge socioreligiously diverse Parsi communities elsewhere in pre-Partition India, or in London, whose members also sought to improve conditions for their Iranian coreligionists. Cursory dissection of the Parsi reformism that served to bolster Iranian nationalism depicts it as a transformation from “classical and medieval forms to a modern faith” (p. 140), with ecumenical core values, an “essential monotheism” and “antinomian qualities” (p. 64). A brief examination of the impact of German Iranists (specifically, Haug, Spiegel and Bartholomae) on such interpretation of Zoroastrian texts and theology would offer a more balanced perspective on the reformist “reconstruction” attributed to Shahrokh, Irani, and Purdavud.
While emphasizing the centrality of these modern “intellectual” translations of Zoroastrian texts to a “pre-Islamic revival” (cf. p. 182), the correlation of this corpus in its oral, then literary forms with the stages of Iranian history is not clarified. Lack of specificity as to what is understood by the “classical past” and its associated “heritage” or “culture” raises the larger, unaddressed question of the application of the term “Zoroastrianism” to the ideologies of pre-Islamic imperial Iran.
A timeline of key events to chart interconnections would be a useful resource, as would a glossary of Avestan, Pahlavi, Persian, and Arabic terms (Yashtha, Ameshaspands, Takht-e Jamshid, ‘Atabat). Inconsistencies or mistakes in spelling and definition are surmountable distractions (e.g., misinterpretations of dakhmeh and atashbahram, p. 12), but misunderstandings of the languages of Zoroastrian texts on the part of reformist translators are recorded without comment: for example, the identification of Avestan as a form of Old Persian language (pp. 4, 92: it is Old Iranian). Nor is there awareness that the yasna witnessed by Purdavud (p. 177) was a reenactment in the courtyard of the atash behram, rather than the sacred inner liturgy (my thanks to Dan Sheffield for translating Purdavud's account). These matters will be of concern to some readers, particularly those engaged in Zoroastrian studies.
