Introduction: from Bombay to Yazd

In early 1924, Peshotanji Marker (1871–1965), a Bombay businessman, ordered city automotive mechanics to outfit a Ford van for surviving the roughest of possible driving conditions. Satisfied with the van's performance during test runs in rugged terrain in the nearby Western Ghats, Marker pronounced it ready for use and loaded it onto a train wagon. The vehicle's destination was Duzdab (today's Zahedan), the westernmost terminus of the Indian railway network—a dusty outpost that was just across the Iranian border. Here, Marker, joined by several friends and relatives, planned to commence an automobile tour of Iran.Footnote ¹

Marker and his travel companions were Parsis, members of a tiny Indian ethnoreligious community that had flourished under British colonial rule.Footnote ² Followers of the ancient faith of Zoroastrianism, Parsis had fled Iran for coastal Gujarat some time between the eighth and tenth centuries of the current era, and retained the story of their migration at the core of their identity. Stepping off the train and onto Iranian soil, these Parsis achieved what had been a lifelong dream for many in their community: a visit to what they considered to be their ancestral homeland and the wellspring of their religion.

It was also a visit with a philanthropic purpose. Earlier in his life, Marker had read of the achievements of Manekji Limji Hataria, a nineteenth-century Parsi emissary to Iran, who had spent four decades improving the conditions of the country's oppressed Zoroastrian minority. While Parsis in Bombay had evolved into a spectacularly wealthy community of merchants and industrialists during the nineteenth century, their remaining co-religionists in Iran, as Manekji discovered, teetered on the brink of extinction. Inspired by Manekji's example, in 1923 Marker funded an orphanage and high school in Yazd, then home to the country's largest Zoroastrian population.Footnote ³ He was now keen to find out new ways to assist his co-religionists.

Travel from Duzdab to Yazd, a journey of over 500 miles, was an arduous affair. In spite of its special modifications, the Ford van was no match for the Seistan desert. In several places desert sands entirely swallowed the highway, forcing the Parsis to spread bamboo sticks, wire, or rugs in front of the wheels and push the vehicle so that it would not get stuck. Two or three miles outside of Yazd, however, the struggling party came upon a large group of people yelling ‘zindabad’ (‘long live’) and other slogans. These were the local Zoroastrians, who shook the Parsis’ hands, embraced them, and kissed their cheeks. In the company of these well-wishers, the party entered Yazd, where they were honoured by the city's Zoroastrians, Muslims, and government officials. As Peshotanji's nephew, Kekobad Ardeshir Marker, recalled decades later, ‘It was a sight never to be forgotten.’Footnote ⁴

Peshotanji Marker and his travel companions were members of the Iran League of Bombay, a Parsi organization that promoted community interest and involvement in the land of their ancestors. Founded in 1922, the League built on centuries of religious, social, and familial ties that had bound together the Iranian Zoroastrians and the Parsis of India. It was also a direct heir to recent philanthropic efforts of wealthy Bombay Parsis. In the mid-nineteenth century, these Parsis had funded Manekji Limji Hataria's efforts to reverse the onerous discrimination and socio-economic marginalization that plagued their Iranian co-religionists. They hoped to revive the Iranian Zoroastrian community, whose numbers had been whittled away over the centuries by violence, forced conversions, and financial incentives to embrace Islam. With Manekji as the agent of a new organization—the Society for the Amelioration of the Conditions of the Zoroastrians in Persia—Bombay Parsis sent aid, established schools for Zoroastrians, and lobbied Iranian authorities to reverse discriminatory policies such as the jiziya, a crippling tax placed on non-Muslims. By the early twentieth century, the Iranian Zoroastrian community was showing promising signs of resurgence and prosperity. The Iran League hoped to build upon this success by further harnessing Parsi philanthropy and influence to improve the community's socio-economic position.Footnote ⁵

In many ways, however, the Iran League was a distinct creation of the early twentieth century—markedly different in scope and ambition from the organization that had dispatched Manekji to Iran. It emerged at a time when the Parsis of India, who had largely integrated into Gujarati society, fashioned a distinctly new identity based on the glories of the ancient Iranian empires.Footnote ⁶ Parsis adopted names like Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes. They avidly engaged in scholarly research on the Achaemenian and Sasanian eras and threw up Persepolis-inspired reliefs and motifs on the streets of Bombay. And they were keenly aware of dawning interest in Iran about its pre-Islamic past; indeed, Manekji had played a significant role in helping the Iranian intelligentsia imbibe ideas of a classical Zoroastrian era that vividly contrasted with the country's present, supposedly degraded, state.Footnote ⁷ Members of the Iran League therefore watched with palpable excitement as Reza Khan (1878–1944), an army officer who had staged a coup in Tehran in 1921, crowned himself as shah of Iran in 1925. Inaugurating the Pahlavi era, a name resplendent with classical allusions, Reza Shah institutionalized a brand of nationalism premised on Iran's ancient Zoroastrian heritage. The Iran League responded by pledging Parsi energy and resources for the ‘regeneration’ of their ancestral homeland, heaping praise upon the shah's progressive and modernizing zeal.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the League—having embraced an agenda that went well beyond the welfare of Iranian Zoroastrians—engaged in multifarious activities that bridged differences between Zoroastrians and Muslims, both in India and Iran, and promoted cultural, educational, and economic ties between the two countries. It won acclaim for strengthening personal, cultural, and literary bonds across the Arabian Sea. The Iran League also closely engaged with the ‘official nationalism’ of the Pahlavi dynasty, thus demonstrating this ideology's distinct transnational appeal.Footnote ⁸ Over time, Parsi fervour for the Pahlavi nationalist project, and for Reza Shah, reoriented the activities and demeanour of the Iran League. This article argues that as British colonial authority waned, Parsis’ pro-Iranian sentiments became a reflection of their domestic political concerns in India. Disillusioned with nationalist politics in India—by the late 1930s, the Indian National Congress was believed to have taken an ‘anti-Parsi’ course that portended ominously for the community's future—Parsi members cast Pahlavi Iran as an idealized alternative: progressive, enlightened, and reverential towards their community and Zoroastrian heritage. The Iran League, therefore, was caught between two nationalisms. Its members responded to nationalist apprehensions at home by romanticizing a foreign country. They even briefly considered the possibility of a ‘return’ to their ancestral homeland.

A handful of scholars have recently evaluated the relationship between Parsis and Iran in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how this relationship resulted in broader exchanges of political and historical ideas, particular conceptions of religion and nationalism, and even architectural styles.Footnote ⁹ By focusing on the Iran League, the primary vehicle of this exchange in the interwar years, and its journal, the Iran League Quarterly, this article reveals the stunning rapidity with which Parsi objectives transformed in relation to the rise and fall of Reza Shah. In this light, Peshotanji Marker's adventurous tour of Iran by automobile, and the assistance he provided to the citizens of Yazd, represented only one stage of the Iran League's work. A little over a decade later, the League began to flirt with revivalist, racist, and even fascist ideas and personalities.

What is the broader significance of a small group of colonial elites chasing a fantasy across the Arabian Sea? The story of the Iran League highlights the complex position of minorities vis-à-vis the brands of nationalism in development during the interwar period. Political anxiety about the future, combined with an evolving community identity, fuelled the Iran League's endeavours. This was not a straightforward case of diaspora or exilic nationalism. Rather, the Parsi experience bore some similarities with that of Indian Muslims, who, as the 1930s wore on, increasingly embraced the so-called ‘two nation theory’, which argued that Muslims could shed their minority status in India by becoming their own separate nation.Footnote ¹⁰ Other Indian minorities harboured their own anxieties and tinkered with similar ideas: Sikhs, for example, flirted with demands for their own separate nation a few years after the Indian Muslim League first enunciated its goal of Pakistan.Footnote ¹¹ But a separate nation was simply not an option for a microscopic, dispersed community of 115,000 people like the Parsis.Footnote ¹² Consequently, those Parsis exercised by fears of Hindu domination began imagining themselves to be part of a wholly different nationalist project. Parsi anxieties resulted in the production of many nationalist ideas and tactics in vogue around the world at the time—a fascination with Aryanism and racial purity, the cultivation of pseudo-science and pseudo-history, and an obsession about the originality and authenticity of a particular people or culture—but these ideas and tactics were deployed in a country a thousand miles away, with which Parsis had few real cultural or linguistic ties. Nevertheless, the success of the Iran League's activities, and their eager receptivity by Iranian officials and intellectuals, demonstrate how at least one heady brand of interwar nationalism—the Pahlavi variant—could benefit from minority anxieties generated in a wholly different geographical and political context.

Navigating between two nationalisms was a delicate process and, consequently, the Iran League's engagement with Pahlavi nationalism evolved over a few distinct stages. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, its leaders tried to make the Parsi community into an interlocutor between India and Iran, concentrating its endeavours in education, publishing, and cultural diplomacy. Their efforts balanced affinity for both India and their ancestral homeland. By the mid-1930s, as Parsis’ economic and political fortunes in India began encountering turbulence, League members were cultivating direct Parsi engagement in the Pahlavi nationalist project through tourism and business endeavours. Finally, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Iran League fully harvested Parsi anxieties about post-colonial India and the Indian National Congress, fantasized about ‘repatriation’, and eagerly partook in the creation and dissemination of Pahlavi nationalist ideas.

‘The greatest service Parsis could render’: fostering Iranian education, promoting Indo-Iranian cultural diplomacy

On 10 September 1922, a group of prominent Parsis met in Bombay to found the Iran League. As principal objectives, League members pledged to ‘renew and continue the connection between the old land of Iran and Hind’, ‘confederate the Zoroastrian population in Iran with a view to increase their number, to ameliorate their condition and to strive for their uplift’, and ‘secure the sympathy of the Imperial Iranian Government and the Iranian subjects toward the cause of the Parsis in relation to Iran’. The Iran League, therefore, had at its core the established Parsi objectives of assisting the Iranian Zoroastrian community.Footnote ¹³

From its outset, however, the Iran League also established more ambitious objectives for itself, such as promoting cultural and economic relations between India and Iran. Its leaders eagerly sought to advertise Parsi success in India to Iranian audiences—and demonstrate that the community's wealth, political influence, and lavish philanthropy could have wider relevance for modern Iran beyond the particular affairs of the Iranian Zoroastrian minority.Footnote ¹⁴ As a testament to Parsi success in India, League members highlighted Parsi involvement in Indian nationalist politics—although, by the 1920s, community members were growing increasingly sceptical of the Indian National Congress under Mohandas K. Gandhi. They proudly noted that several Parsis had helped found the Congress and steer the organization through its first decades of existence. Surveying how Parsis helped create the modern city of Bombay, they eulogized figures such as Pherozeshah Mehta, the Congress leader who, beginning in the late nineteenth century, helped consolidate Indian control of the city's municipal government. Pointing to Mehta and other Parsi politicians, the Iran League took pride in how Parsis had become prominent leaders of the Indian body politic and how Parsis had contributed to the cosmopolitan fabric of Bombay.

As its first president, the League elected Hormusji Cowasji Dinshaw Adenwala (1847–1939; he was also known as Hormusjee C. Dinshaw), a Parsi magnate whose commercial influence spanned the Arabian Sea. Adenwala's wealth and prestige instantly augmented the League's profile in Iran, particularly with Reza Shah. In India, meanwhile, the League benefited from its president's vast array of contacts. Adenwala was closely affiliated with the liberal political elite of Bombay, who retained some influence in Indian nationalist currents in spite of Gandhi's rise to power, and he considered Gandhi as a personal friend (although he found Gandhi's politics too extreme and his tactics too confrontational towards British Indian authorities).Footnote ¹⁵ He endeavoured to include non-Parsis in the organization, inviting scholars and prominent Iranian Muslims to join it, and secured the Aga Khan as an honorary patron.Footnote ¹⁶

Under Adenwala's leadership, the Iran League prioritized Iranian educational affairs, identifying the establishment of new schools as ‘the greatest service that the Parsis could render to Persia’.Footnote ¹⁷ The League worked with Ardeshirji Reporter, a Parsi agent in Tehran who continued many of Manekji Limji Hataria's activities, to channel Parsi philanthropy in this direction, opening schools that prioritized the Iranian Zoroastrian community but, importantly, were kept open to students of all backgrounds and creeds. In 1930, Reporter convinced Ratanbanu E. Bamji, the sister of the late industrialist Jamsetji Tata, to donate Rs 100,000 for the creation of a girls’ high school in Tehran.Footnote ¹⁸ Two years later, the Zoroastrians of Tehran gathered to inaugurate the Firuz Bahram Middle School (later High School), funded by another Parsi, Behram Bhicaji, in memory of his son, Feroze, who had died during the First World War.Footnote ¹⁹ Due to such philanthropic efforts, literacy among Iranian Zoroastrian men became almost universal. The female literacy rate also climbed through the establishment of an increasing number of girls’ schools, beginning in the late 1920s.Footnote ²⁰

By supporting educational endeavours, the League achieved its goal of promoting cultural relations—not just between India and Iran, but also between the broader Zoroastrian and Muslim communities in both countries. Its stakehold in Iranian education reaped impressive dividends and catapulted the League into prominence among the Iranian elite. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Parsi-funded schools were some of the few institutions in Iran to provide Western education. Muslim elites, consequently, were eager to enrol their children in these schools, a development that dramatically improved Iranian Muslim attitudes towards the once-downtrodden Zoroastrian community. Reporter told Bombay Parsis that the Zoroastrian girls’ school in Tehran had ‘made a strong impression upon the better class [of] Moslem families in Tehran’. They were ‘eager to send their own girls to be educated in this school of ours’ rather than in alternatives, such as American missionary schools, where study of the Bible was compulsory. Indeed, pupils at the Zoroastrian school included the daughters of Amir Inayutullah Khan of Afghanistan, the Iranian imperial household, government ministers, members of the Majlis (Iranian parliament), and even ‘two daughters of Two High Priests of Islam’. Muslim Iranians were now even keen to support and fund these Zoroastrian schools. When Manekji opened his first-ever school in Iran in 1864, Reporter recalled discriminatory practices towards Zoroastrians but claimed that ‘all these are forgotten to-day. It is realized that Moslems and Zoroastrians are of one race so the latter are called “berādarān-e Zarthushtiān” (brother Zoroastrians) to-day.’ While Reporter's assertion was far too optimistic, he was correct in pronouncing a dramatic improvement in communal relations due to these schools.Footnote ²¹

School dedication ceremonies enhanced the profile of the Iran League while solidifying personal relations between Parsis, Iranian Zoroastrians, and Iranian Muslim elites. For example, the Iranian minister of education and Kaikhosrow Shahrokh, the Zoroastrian member of the Majlis, jointly opened the Firuz Bahram Middle School in December 1932. At the conclusion of the ceremony, the daughter of the president of the Majlis offered a prayer for the soul of Feroze Bhicaji, the deceased Parsi soldier after whom the school had been named. Referring to the history of animosity between Muslims and Zoroastrians, she ‘specially thanked God that all bigotry, egoism and differences of caste and creed were torn away and all had become one now’.Footnote ²² Two years later, in August 1934, the Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Ali Foroughi, laid the foundation stone for the Anoshirwan Dadgar Girls’ High School, funded by Ratanbanu Bamji.Footnote ²³ Shahrokh regularly informed the Iran League of the school's achievements and proudly noted the burgeoning number of pupils from elite Muslim Iranian families, including one of Reza Shah's daughters.Footnote ²⁴

Aside from helping to establish new schools, the League promoted Indo-Iranian cultural relations through a flurry of publications. Its wide-reaching publications made the League into a clearing house for ideas circulating between the two countries and, specifically, made the Parsis arbiters of Indo-Iranian intellectual currents. The League's journal, the Iran League Quarterly—which had sections in English, Gujarati, and Persian—featured the writings of prominent individuals such as the Iranian intellectual Sadiq Hedayat, the Indian Muslim intellectual Muhammad Iqbal, and Parsi scholars such as Irach J. S. Taraporewala and Behramgore Anklesaria.Footnote ²⁵ Parsi contributors consciously wrote for a diverse international readership that included scholars, government officials, and members of the broader Iranian and Indian diasporas. Aside from the major cities of India and Iran, the Quarterly was mailed to subscribers in dozens of cities worldwide, including Cairo, Baghdad, Moscow, London, Paris, New York, San Francisco, and Tientsin.Footnote ²⁶

While promoting Indo-Iranian cultural relations, the Quarterly and other League publications stressed Parsis’ fundamentally Indian identity and their stake in India's political future. In spite of their noticeable unease with Gandhian nationalism, these publications proudly advertised the legacies of past Parsi leaders of the Congress, especially Dadabhai Naoroji and Pherozeshah Mehta. Iran League members regretted that Gandhi's rise had effectively diminished Parsi influence within the Congress, but they applauded the work of the handful of Parsis who remained in leadership positions within the party. The Quarterly even gave favourable coverage to Gandhi's occasional remarks on the Parsi community and its affairs. Parsis, the Iran League wished to convey to its readership, remained Indian patriots. This, one editor of the Quarterly remarked, was because ‘they have become the true children of the soil’ in India, in spite of their ancient Persian ancestry. ‘Every Parsee in India loves this noble land as his dear darling mother,’ he affirmed. ‘He has served her with greater sincerity, selflessness and sacrifice than any other people, and he will continue to do so till the end of times.’Footnote ²⁷

This liberal patriotism might have rubbed off onto the League's remarkably broad-minded communal attitudes. The Quarterly featured numerous articles by Parsis who rejected their community's traditional strains of antipathy towards Islam and Muslim culture—antipathy that had built up through popular accounts of the Parsis’ forced migration from Iran due to Arab Muslim oppression.Footnote ²⁸ Instead, these Parsi authors celebrated India and Iran's rich Islamic heritage. One young writer, Navroze C. Mehta, composed extensive articles on Sa'adi, Rumi, and the teachings of Sufism.Footnote ²⁹ Sufism particularly appeared to capture the imagination of League members: in 1930, the Quarterly praised ‘the grand and beautiful Sufi philosophy of the Islamic poets of Persia’ and, chiding those Zoroastrians who believed that ‘Persia died with the Sassanians [sic]’, suggested to Parsis that ‘the study of these Sufi poets [would make] them more truly appreciate the real spirit of Islam and of later Persian thought’.Footnote ³⁰ Parsi academics reviewed new scholarship on Persian poetry and a professor of Persian at Mysore University, M. A. Shustery, contributed a series of pieces in both English and Persian on the history of Persian literature, surveying material from the Zoroastrian, Christian, and Muslim traditions. Taraporewala, who briefly edited the Quarterly, strenuously argued in favour of ‘an intellectual and spiritual commerce between Indian Parsis and Iran’, one that extended well beyond shared Zoroastrian heritage.Footnote ³¹ In this sense, the Iran League further positioned itself as a cultural interlocutor, claiming that the Parsi community had a unique position in evaluating the broader sweep of Indo-Persian religious and cultural exchanges. It did so, however, while affirming the community's fundamentally Indian moorings.

For its first few years, the League's journal, then known as the Iran League Bulletin, was edited by another prominent Parsi scholar, Gustaspshah Kaikhusroo (G. K.) Nariman (1873–1933). With his talent for languages, Nariman had served as a translator at the chief court of Rangoon and assistant censor for foreign communications in Bombay during the First World War.Footnote ³² Like many of the founding members of the Iran League, he openly expressed scepticism about the direction of Indian nationalist politics under Mohandas K. Gandhi. Consequently, Nariman became an informant for the British Indian government. He was described as ‘the most trusted and probably the most competent’ of collaborators within the Central Bureau of Information during Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22.Footnote ³³ Putting to use his command of Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, and various European languages, he rounded off these activities with a prolific output of articles on Zoroastrian religious and historical topics.

Nariman firmly believed in the Parsis’ special role as cultural arbiters between India and Iran: Parsis needed to ‘strive harder to bring about the unity between the two most ancient lands of Aryan culture’.Footnote ³⁴ Consequently, he played an important role in the Iran League's book publishing programme, intended to broaden knowledge in Iran of the country's Zoroastrian past and thereby emphasize ancient Indo-Iranian connections. In 1925, the League published his book, Persia and Parsis, as the second volume in its Marker Literary Series, funded by Peshotanji Marker. But in this work, Nariman advanced very unconventional arguments for a Parsi: that the Arab invasion of Iran was marked by relative tolerance and respect for Zoroastrianism, and that the Sasanian Zoroastrian church collapsed due to priestly bigotry and corruption. Zoroastrians themselves, not the sword-wielding Arabs, were to blame for the downfall of the religion in Iran. Similarly, Nariman dismissed the Parsi penchant for contrasting the supposedly enlightened Zoroastrian faith with a decisively unmodern Islam. He also decried growing anti-Arab sentiment in Iran, assailing a major plank of Pahlavi nationalism. ‘To this day,’ he lamented, ‘the Persian Musalman, though he is enjoined by the Qoran to be a brother in Islam to the Arab, has unfortunately not abated an iota of his hatred of the latter.’Footnote ³⁵

Through his scholarship, Nariman intended to promote mutual understanding between Parsis and Iranians by combating particular prejudices. But he paid a heavy price for these efforts. Many Parsis attacked Nariman for being ‘pro-Moslem’ and ‘indifferent to the interests of his own religion’. While his work received the praise of Rabindranath Tagore, the Aga Khan, and A. V. Williams Jackson—a prominent scholar of Zoroastrianism at Columbia University—Nariman was, in the words of a fellow Parsi scholar, Rustom B. Paymaster, ‘misunderstood by [his] own people’. In 1929, he resigned from his position as editor of the Iran League Bulletin and severed his connections with the Iran League.Footnote ³⁶ As neither Nariman nor the League offered any explanations for this turn of events, it can only be surmised that Nariman's controversial views put him in conflict with other members of the organization. Nariman's fate demonstrated that the Iran League was only willing to go so far in its promotion of cultural relations: it would not countenance challenges to hardwired Parsi beliefs about Islam or certain ideologies of Pahlavi nationalism.

While G. K. Nariman laboured to break down the centuries-long antipathy that many Parsis harboured towards Islam and Muslims, he also supported Muslim scholars whose work sought to lessen Islamic prejudices towards Zoroastrianism. One such scholar was Syed M. Taher Rezwi of Calcutta's Presidency College who, in 1928, published Parsis: A People of the Book. In his work, intended for an educated Indian Muslim readership, Rezwi explained the teachings of Zoroastrianism while tracing the interaction between Islam and Zoroastrianism in Iran, highlighting both periods of toleration and persecution. From Zoroastrian, Quranic, and later Muslim documents, as well as European and Parsi scholarship, Rezwi acknowledged Zarathushtra as a legitimate ‘Prophet of God’ and explicated on the similarities of the two faiths.Footnote ³⁷ He even came to the remarkable conclusion that ‘the same Ahura Mazda or Allah spoke through the Prophet of Arabia as He had spoken already through Zoroaster, ages before’.Footnote ³⁸ The Iran League published a Persian-language translation of his book as part of the Marker Literary Series. Nariman characterized Rezwi's work as part of a body of scholarship—being undertaken at the Iran League, Aligarh Muslim University, and elsewhere in India, Iran, and Europe—that was ‘bring[ing] about unity between the two most ancient lands of Aryan culture’. Rezwi, for his part, expressed profound gratitude for the support offered by the League's Parsi members. He dedicated his book to the League, ‘in appreciation of its services towards strengthening the ties of fraternity among the various religious denominations inhabiting Persia and India, especially between the Moslems and the Zoroastrians’.Footnote ³⁹

Aside from G. K. Nariman, Dinshah J. Irani (1881–1938), the League's vice-president, was a guiding figure in the League's efforts to strengthen those ‘ties of fraternity’ between India and Iran through scholarship. Unlike most Parsis, Irani could trace a direct link to the ancestral homeland: he was a descendant of Golestan Banu, a Zoroastrian woman from Kerman who, after being threatened with abduction and forced conversion by local Muslims, fled to India in 1796 along with her father. Fired by this intimate family connection to Iran, Irani took up the study of classical Persian literature, Avestan, and Pahlavi. He complemented a successful legal career in Bombay with translating Hafez and Sa'adi and editing a lengthy compendium of modern Persian poetry.Footnote ⁴⁰

However, Irani's greatest claim to fame was promoting and funding the Iranian scholar Ibrahim Poure-Davoud (1885–1968). Born into a pious Shia family from Rasht, Poure-Davoud developed an abiding interest in Iran's pre-Islamic past. While studying in Paris, his interest deepened after he struck up a friendship with Bhikhaiji Rustomji Cama, a Parsi woman involved in Indian revolutionary activities, who discussed aspects of Zoroastrianism with him and introduced him to the kusti and sudreh, the sacred thread and garment worn by members of the faith.Footnote ⁴¹ On moving to Berlin, Poure-Davoud emerged as a promising scholar of ancient Iran. Not long afterwards, in 1924, Irani invited him to Bombay. Over the next few years, the two men collaborated on a range of Persian-language publications—funded and published by the Iran League—designed to introduce an emerging Iranian reading public to both Parsi achievements in India and Iran's own Zoroastrian heritage. Poure-Davoud's greatest undertakings under the League's auspices were Persian translations of the Zoroastrian sacred texts, including the Gathas, believed to be the actual words of the Prophet Zarathushtra. These translations, published in another series endowed by Peshotanji Marker, played a seminal role in the intellectual landscape of modern Iran. As Afshin Marashi notes, they made the Zoroastrian scriptures available in modern Persian for the first time, thus becoming ‘foundational texts in Iran's twentieth century pre-Islamic revival’.Footnote ⁴²

Poure-Davoud's ties with India were strengthened through another major scholarly exchange orchestrated by Dinshah Irani: the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore's 1932 visit to Iran. The visit was part of Tagore's last world tour—his travels also took him to Southeast Asia and Iraq, where he explored the idea of a ‘Greater India’ through India's transoceanic cultural influences. Tagore had already taken note of Irani's scholarship on Zoroastrianism, contributing a foreword to Irani's 1924 English-language rendition of the Gathas. He had also, like the Parsis, stressed a particular familial bond with Iranians, claiming a ‘blood relationship with them’ since he was ‘Indo-Aryan’.Footnote ⁴³ The Bengali poet soon articulated to Irani his ‘great yearning to visit Persia’. Utilizing extensive contacts in Tehran, Irani helped secure a formal invitation from Reza Shah for both men to visit the country.Footnote ⁴⁴

Two parties—Tagore's and a Parsi party led by Irani—arrived in the late spring of 1932 and followed separate itineraries through Iran's major cities. They were reunited in Tehran where the government hosted them at a formal dinner. Here, the foreign minister, Mohammed Ali Khan Foroughi, announced to Tagore that the Iranian government would endow a chair in Iranian studies at his Visva-Bharati University in Shantiniketan. As the first occupant of this chair, the government had selected Poure-Davoud. Faroughi cited the traditional Parsi account of the community's exile from Iran—an account that Poure-Davoud had popularized in Iran through an earlier publication—to explain the reason for the endowment. The chair was ‘a slight token of appreciation and gratitude for what India had done in protecting and preserving our own children’—the Parsis—who ‘had to leave the shores of this country under distressing circumstances’. ‘We drove them out,’ Foroughi lamented, ‘and India gave them refuge and protection.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Through his remarks, delivered before a gathering of eminent Indians and Iranians, the foreign minister demonstrated the dramatic success of the Iran League's scholarly and educational efforts. The traditional Parsi story of their community's exile and migration featured prominently in the cultural diplomacy between India and Iran. It had yielded a landmark scholarly exchange. The League—and the wider Parsi community—were now a central pivot in Indo-Iranian cultural relations.

Meeting ‘Iranian brothers and sisters’: promoting Parsi-Iranian tourism and commerce

Scholarly exchange across the Arabian Sea, complemented by the Iran League's publishing efforts, contributed towards a wider exchange of Parsi and Iranian tourists, businessmen, and professionals in the 1920s and 1930s. This was an important development: through tourism (and, eventually, commercial ties), Parsis engaged with the modern nation of Iran rather than a mythologized ancient homeland. Iranians, for their part, made Bombay an important site for the creation of staples of Pahlavi-era modernity: they collaborated with Parsis, for example, to build up the Iranian film industry. This growing interaction between Iranians and Parsis played a role in making the Iran League more receptive to Pahlavi nationalism. It also occurred at precisely the same time that Parsis began to express mounting scepticism about India's political trajectory.

While an increasing number of Parsis had begun visiting Iran in the early twentieth century, there was a noticeable uptick in travel once Reza Shah came to power and unfurled the ‘official nationalism’ of the Pahlavi era. Parsis were understandably drawn to a society that seemed anxious to rediscover its lost Zoroastrian heritage. In Bombay, the Iran League nurtured this interest by sponsoring classes in modern Persian, urging Parsis that knowledge of the language would ensure that they were not ‘out of touch with their own Persian traditions … with Persia and matters Persian’. The League employed a professor from Iran, Mirza Ali Mazandi, to edit the Quarterly's Persian section and facilitate the spread of Persian-language instruction throughout the Parsi community, especially in Parsi-administered schools.Footnote ⁴⁶ Additionally, League officials began enticing potential visitors to Iran by selling books of postcards—images of modern Tehran streets, famous ancient ruins, scenes from Iranian Zoroastrian life, and, at the very beginning of the series, stately portraits of the shah and the young crown prince.Footnote ⁴⁷ In books such as these, the League neatly conveyed to Parsis an imperial link between Iranian modernity and a glorified Zoroastrian past.

The Firdausi Millenary—declared by Reza Shah in 1934 to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the poet's birth—helped catalyse mass travel by Parsis to Iran.Footnote ⁴⁸ While the shah used the celebration of Firdausi and his epic poem, the Shahnameh, to place a distinctly Pahlavi stamp on Iranian national culture and tradition, Parsis saw the event as yet another indicator of the popular rediscovery in Iran of its pre-Islamic heritage. The Iran League Quarterly observed approvingly that ‘Parsee families have sailed to the holy soil of Iran’ and ‘met their Iranian brothers and sisters’ at the festivities. In Bombay, meanwhile, a spate of events and celebrations whetted Parsi interest in modern Iran and—importantly—cast Reza Shah as a spiritual heir to Firdausi, someone who sought to revive the country's great Zoroastrian past through deeds rather than poetic stanzas. League officials took cues from the Pahlavi court in planning events in Bombay. On the day that Reza Shah proclaimed as Firdausi Millenary Day, Parsi schools and businesses closed their doors.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Iran League began raising funds for a two-tonne statue of Firdausi which it donated to Iran—the statue was first installed in a Tehran square that the government renamed for the poet and, later, moved to the campus of the new University of Tehran, inaugurated by the shah as Iran's first university.Footnote ⁵⁰ A final Firdausi-inspired link between Parsis and Iran was forged when community members prevailed upon the Bombay Municipal Corporation to rename a road after the poet in the city's leafy Dadar Parsi Colony.Footnote ⁵¹

There was, of course, nothing new about these links between Bombay and Iran. Parsi tourism paralleled the centuries-old traffic of Indian Muslim pilgrims visiting Iran's great Shi'a sites, for example.Footnote ⁵² Yet, Parsi tourism was marked by important innovations. Aside from some visits to Zoroastrian religious sites, tourist itineraries were overwhelmingly secular in nature and focused on sightseeing. Modern travel agencies often coordinated these visits, employing special travel guides. One Parsi firm, Jeena and Company, took out regular full-page advertisements in the Quarterly for its ‘Conducted Tour to Persia’ (‘For Gentlemen Only’), displaying tantalizing photos of monuments that its customers would see during 35 days of touring through Tehran, Shiraz, Persepolis, and even Baghdad and Basra, all for the princely sum of Rs 1,500.Footnote ⁵³ Those unable to afford services such as Jeena's embarked on independent travel, relying upon a growing number of Gujarati and English travel guides written especially for Parsi tourists. One such work was Rustam Kharegat's A Tourist Guide to Iran, published with League assistance in 1935. In a foreword to the guidebook, Sohrab Bulsara, the Quarterly's editor, welcomed the growing tourist trade, remarking, ‘We believe it will be an inspiring experience periodically to take our young men in suitable batches to this land of our past glories.’Footnote ⁵⁴

Bulsara wrote these words with a sense of urgency: by 1935, the Great Depression had already hit Parsi fortunes in Bombay, and the passage of the Government of India Act of that year—which began the steady transfer of power from British to Indian hands—brought home the fact that the days of colonial rule were numbered.Footnote ⁵⁵ Allusions to ‘past glories’ sat uncomfortably with emerging apprehensions about the current and future state of affairs in India. Amid the celebration of Firdausi and its promotion of Iranian tourism, the Iran League Quarterly took note of rising Parsi unemployment in Bombay and warily considered the prospect of new government ministries where the Indian National Congress would predominate. The Congress's commitment to certain socialist and redistributive economic principles naturally worried many Parsi magnates, and in one of its editorials, the Quarterly went so far as to criticize the party's economic platform as ‘communistic’.Footnote ⁵⁶ All of this indicated a new stage of development in Parsi attitudes towards Indian nationalist politics. Just a few years beforehand, leaders of the Iran League had not let their anxieties about contemporary Congress politics overshadow their declarations of Parsi patriotism. But such declarations were now hard to find in the pages of the Quarterly and other publications.

In this sense, the League believed, tourism to Iran could present a unique opportunity: it could help catalyse Parsi commercial investment in the country. This, in turn, would help ‘decentralize’ its interests, which were far too concentrated in Bombay, and perhaps even alleviate Parsi unemployment.Footnote ⁵⁷ Appropriately enough, the League began by urging Parsis to find employment in Iran's growing tourist infrastructure.Footnote ⁵⁸ Thus, by the mid-1930s the activities of the Iran League began changing: instead of being a vehicle for broad Indo-Iranian cultural diplomacy, it somewhat narrowed its focus, responding to Parsi economic and political anxieties by encouraging the redeployment of Parsi wealth and commercial energy towards Iranian shores.

More Parsis began visiting Iran to explore the economic climate in addition to the monuments of their ancient forebears. Iranians were, likewise, more than eager to attract investment from these Parsi visitors: Ibrahim Poure-Davoud and other intellectuals had, through their writings, broadcast the community's fabulous wealth and influence in India. One of the most enthusiastic solicitors of Parsi investment was Reza Shah. There was certainly some cold economic logic behind the Pahlavi regime's deployment of Zoroastrian imagery, especially in overtures designed for Bombay audiences. As early as 1924, the future shah had discussed Parsi investment with Peshotanji Marker, noting that he was ‘very keen’ to ‘persuade the House of Tatas … to come to Iran and lay down a railway track’ (presumably the Trans-Iranian Railway) for which the government was at the time negotiating with Sweden for assistance. Marker did approach the Tatas about the scheme and the firm duly sent a representative to Tehran to discuss various proposals. Ultimately, the Tatas decided against their involvement.Footnote ⁵⁹

Unsuccessful in wooing the Tatas, authorities in Tehran nevertheless persisted in encouraging other Parsi investors. In 1932, Dinshah Irani asked Rustom Masani—a Bombay civic leader who would later become a vice-president of the Iran League—to accompany him on Rabindranath Tagore's Iran tour in order to seek out business opportunities for Parsis. The Iranian consul in Bombay gave an enthusiastic welcome to Masani once he had confirmed his travel plans. ‘The Government of Iran want Parsis to develop her trade with India,’ the consul noted. ‘If you come with us and make independent investigations and then advise the community what business schemes could be safely and advantageously undertaken, a good beginning can be made.’ Before departing from Bombay, Masani established the Persia Industrial and Trading Company, with Hormusji Adenwala as chairman.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Iran League thus formalized its new intermediary role in the realm of Indo-Iranian economic relations.

Masani appears not to have been particularly impressed with conditions for establishing business in Iran. Nevertheless, he did suggest that the Company further investigate Iran's burgeoning textile industry.Footnote ⁶¹ The following year, Dinshah N. Pavri, a Parsi mill technician, visited Mashhad to explore opening a mill. With the cooperation of a Parsi mill baron, Hormasji F. Commissariat, the Company founded the Khosrovi Spinning and Weaving Company in September 1934, celebrated by the Quarterly as ‘the first Parsi-Irani venture in Iran’.Footnote ⁶² Parsi shareholders negotiated to retain management of the mill for 50 years.Footnote ⁶³

Unfortunately, Parsi businesses in Iran mostly flopped. The Khosrovi Spinning and Weaving Company was no exception. A short four years after the mill started producing cotton goods, the Iran League's treasurer, Pherozshah Gazdar, travelled to Mashhad and bemoaned that this ‘small textile enterprise’ was ‘hardly run to capacity’. Yet the Mashhad mill's inefficiency was not what truly alarmed Gazdar—he pointed out that Khosrovi was the only example of a major Parsi business in Iran. ‘Our Iranian brothers had expected Parsi enterprise to do in Iran something comparable to Tata Steel and Hydro-Electric Works, and the great Mill Industry we once controlled in India,’ he lectured Parsi readers of the Quarterly. ‘They are therefore sorely disappointed at such cold response from Parsi industrialists.’ This disappointment was only magnified in light of the thriving nature of other foreign firms in the country, such as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In rather melodramatic language, Gazdar urged Parsis to stir from their supposed torpor: ‘So, Parsis! awake, and join in the trend of the high destiny to which Iran is heading now, and re-establish your contact with that ancient homeland of yours and lay thus there the foundation of your present and your future prosperity.’Footnote ⁶⁴

But Gazdar's call to arms had little effect. He suggested Parsi involvement in the Trans-Iranian Railway, nearing completion under European direction. Encouraged by the example of Rustom B. Mirza, a Parsi working on the Southern Iranian State Railway, Hormusji Adenwala agreed to personally fund travel expenses for 27 Parsis to work on the railway as drivers, superintendents, mechanics, conductors, boilermen, and draftsmen. Only six of these Parsis proved qualified enough to retain their jobs. ‘Disunion, unwillingness to face initial hardship etc. were mainly responsible for the return of the rest,’ the Quarterly bitterly noted.Footnote ⁶⁵ Strangely, as is attested by the numerous exploratory delegations, Parsis proved much more interested and skilled in surveying business opportunities in Iran than in actually working or running enterprises there. The case of Phiroz Saklatvala is an apt example. A nephew of Jamsetji Tata, Saklatvala made his fortune in the oil industry after emigrating to New York. As the honorary consul general for Iran in New York, he visited the country in 1930 and compiled a report of statistics and suggestions for American investment, The Rich Fields in Persia, also serialized in the Quarterly. Among the various sectors Saklatvala suggested to American investors was the oil industry—strangely, however, the oil tycoon never followed through on his own suggestion.Footnote ⁶⁶

In spite of such setbacks and inconsistencies in the realm of business, Parsi traffic to Iran steadily increased for the remainder of the 1930s. Such travel and communication across the Arabian Sea did not occur in one direction, of course. Having digested Iran League-sponsored material, numerous Iranians contacted the organization, requesting further literature, such as Marker Literary Series books, or sent letters to the editor of the Quarterly. These letters were postmarked from as far away as Baghdad and Berlin, demonstrating the wide circulation of the journal among the Iranian intelligentsia. Soon, a steady stream of Iranians began sailing to Bombay for the express purpose of studying or working with Iran League officials. Such individuals were visibly fired up by the ideas and objectives of Pahlavi nationalism. In 1934, for example, a young man from Kurdish territory arrived at the League's office ‘with the praiseworthy object of studying the teachings of Ancient Iran’. Once his studies were completed, the Quarterly proudly noted that he was ‘doing very useful work in spreading the knowledge about his ancestors among the people of his place’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Many more Iranian migrants and visitors to Bombay were eventually drawn into the world of Parsi business. Abdolhossein Sepanta, who originally left Tehran for India in order to study and write about ancient Iran with Dinshah Irani, serves as a good example. In time, Sepanta forayed into Bombay's emerging film industry. He befriended Ardeshir Irani, the famous Parsi filmmaker who ran the city's Imperial Film Company, and became a pioneering figure in Iranian cinema. In 1933 in Bombay, Sepanta and Ardeshir Irani together produced the first-ever Persian-language ‘talkie’, Dokhtar-e Lor (Lor Girl), which was, in many respects, a paean to Reza Shah and his supposedly reformist, modernizing ethos. Sepanta went on to produce several more Persian-language films in India with Pahlavi nationalist overtones, filling Bombay studios with Iranian casts and drawing packed audiences of Iranian migrants to the city's cinemas.Footnote ⁶⁸ He relied upon another recent arrival from Iran, Fakhrozzaman Jabbarvaziri (known as ‘F. J. Vaziri’ in Bombay), as a lead actress; positively reviewed in the Quarterly and other Bombay periodicals, she might even have starred in one Hindi production.Footnote ⁶⁹ According to the Iranian film scholar Hamid Naficy, Jabbarvaziri ‘can be considered the first real actress in Iranian cinema’, thus providing another example of how the League contributed to Iran's film industry.Footnote ⁷⁰ Jabbarvaziri forged her own unique link with the Parsis: in addresses to the community, she claimed that Reza Shah's promotion of female emancipation was rooted ‘in the ancient teachings of Persia’ and she therefore implored Parsi women to assist their ‘Persian sisters’ in the cause of reform.Footnote ⁷¹

Finally, in the personage of Saif Azad (1884–1971), we can find the best example of how Parsi enterprise and Pahlavi nationalism converged in the 1930s. Saif Azad arrived in Bombay as a guest of the Iran League in June 1931, describing himself as a ‘distinguished Persian journalist’ and an official emissary of Reza Shah. This description belied a far more colourful career: Saif Azad had taken part in German attempts to stir anti-British resistance in Afghanistan during the First World War, consorted with exiled revolutionary nationalists in Berlin, and, in the 1920s, ran a Persian-German newspaper from the German capital that, as Marashi argues, mixed ‘a proto-Third Worldist nationalism with leftist and Islamist vocabularies’.Footnote ⁷² In his new avatar in Bombay, Saif Azad was an ardent Pahlavi nationalist, donning the stiff Pahlavi hat despite western India's tropical heat. Rattling off the regime's modernizing achievements before crowds of spellbound Parsis, he delivered a message designed to please his hosts. Parsis, he claimed, needed to better broadcast their achievements in India to their Iranian brethren. Iran was still too dependent on foreign experts—Americans, Germans, Swedes, and Japanese—but Parsi skill and expertise would be essentially indigenous, since Iranians were ‘your own brothers, sisters and friends … i.e. among your own nation’.Footnote ⁷³ Such words earned Saif Azad much more than rapturous applause: once he returned to Tehran, he secured generous Parsi financial support for setting up a newspaper, Irān-e Bāstān, and an association, both tasked with promoting Parsi-Iranian relations. In many ways, the newspaper acted as a counterpart to the Iran League's Quarterly, strengthening bonds between the two countries and furthering Parsis’ ‘moral support for the regeneration of Iran’.Footnote ⁷⁴

‘Abandon India’: Indian nationalist anxieties and Pahlavi nationalist fantasies

Saif Azad represented an important turning point for the Iran League. Both during and after his sojourn in Bombay, the self-declared imperial emissary went much further than simply encouraging Parsi enterprise in Iran. He urged community members ‘to abandon India and to re-settle in Persia’, feeding the persistent myth that Parsis were merely exiles in the Indian subcontinent.Footnote ⁷⁵ In his speeches and writings, Said Azad deftly exploited Parsi identity and the community's exaggerated sense of kinship with modern Iran. ‘There was a growing desire in Persia to welcome back Persians who had long since been living in foreign countries,’ he told one gathering of community leaders in Bombay's stately Sir Cowasji Jehangir Hall.Footnote ⁷⁶ In a subsequent letter to the Iran League Quarterly, he even advised Parsis to adopt a Zionist model of repatriation. A number of Parsis, including G. K. Nariman, publicly condemned Saif Azad's statements and called into question the credentials of the ‘distinguished Persian journalist’. After Saif Azad's tour, the Iran League issued an unusually defensive statement, arguing that its activities did not amount to ‘showing ingratitude to this country of their adoption’—India. But its members continued to support Saif Azad's new newspaper in Tehran, which loudly trumpeted a call for Parsi re-migration and tethered it to the Pahlavi nationalist project.Footnote ⁷⁷

This was a rather stunning development. Only a few years earlier, the Iran League had celebrated the careers of Indian nationalists such as Dadabhai Naoroji and Pherozeshah Mehta, men who regularly declared that Parsis’ Indian national identity took precedence over their communal identity. The League had affirmed Parsis’ associations with the fortunes of India and Bombay. Now, some community members were displaying pronounced alienation from the country of their birth and affinity for a land most had never visited.

Parsis’ increased receptivity to Pahlavi nationalism helps explain this change. The Iran League had always been susceptible to the official nationalism emanating from Tehran. As the 1930s wore on, however, the League and its Quarterly became its slavish exponents, demonstrating the remarkable transnational appeal of ideologies propagated from the faraway court of Reza Shah. And the shah always featured prominently in the Iran League's overtures. Parsi celebration of ancient Iran invariably became celebration of the shah—and vice-versa. For example, one of the first Parsis to interview the monarch, an army lieutenant-colonel named Meherban S. Irani, extolled Reza Shah for restoring a more purely Persian line to the throne, denigrating the Turkic ancestry of the overthrown Qajars. He even suggested that, by hailing from the region of Mazandaran—one of the ‘last strongholds … of the Sassanians [sic]’ after the Arab invasion—the shah, ‘such a forceful character and a born leader’, might possess a goodly amount of ancient Iranian blood.Footnote ⁷⁸ Other League officials, such as Dinshah Irani and Rustom Masani, heaped fulsome praise on Reza Shah, hailing him as ‘the symbol of Iran's unity and nationhood’ and comparing him to the great Zoroastrian kings of past eras. Quoting chapter and verse from the playbook of Pahlavi nationalism, they even remarked that he was the first worthy king since the downfall of the Sasanian empire; consequently, Iran had ‘risen from a long and deep slumber of thirteen centuries’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Such words signified another turning point in the organization's history: whereas it had once sought to influence Iranian intellectual currents with a distinctly Parsi perspective, the Iran League was now becoming a mere mouthpiece for propaganda emanating from Tehran.

Parsis were equally fawning of another aspect of the Pahlavi state—what Homa Katouzian calls its ‘pseudo-modernism’, the regime's superficial attempts to promote modern infrastructure, social reform, and economic development.Footnote ⁸⁰ Iran League members were particularly carried away by the shah's infrastructural projects. Masani and Dinshah Irani marvelled at the new highways which crossed the vast open spaces of the Iranian countryside, roads which, Irani believed, ‘can well compare with the finest I have seen in France and Switzerland’.Footnote ⁸¹ The Quarterly regularly carried glossy photographs of new projects, such as bridges and ports, as well as those of well-dressed Tehranis, in suits and dresses, strolling down the wide European-style boulevards of the capital city.Footnote ⁸² But the journal reserved special praise for the shah's crowning achievement, the Trans-Iranian Railway, extensively covering its construction and completion. Articles and photographs documented the railway's steady progress through formidable mountain passes and over desert wastelands. It was no matter that, as modern scholars have noted, the railway's burdensome cost outweighed any economic benefit—Parsis expressed enormous pride at its completion.Footnote ⁸³ Once inaugurated in 1938, the League cabled a note of congratulation to the shah through Kaikhosrow Shahrokh: ‘Parsis pray Ahuramazda to revive glorious ancient Iran through this grand railway’.Footnote ⁸⁴

Pahlavi nationalism also fed a distinct sense of Parsi self-importance. The community's economic success during the British Raj, coupled with Orientalist scholarship that glorified pre-Islamic Iran, had already resulted in several celebratory accounts of Parsi history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁸⁵ In the pages of the Quarterly, some Parsi writers charted distinctly new territory. Positioning themselves as authorities on Iranian authenticity—Ardeshirji Reporter claimed that Parsis were the only ‘true representatives of ancient Persia’—they hectored Pahlavi authorities to speed up the process of language purification and offered their services for cleansing Persian of Arabic loan words.Footnote ⁸⁶ This bordered on the absurd: few Parsis had a deep and sustained knowledge of modern Persian by the 1930s. Mimicking Reza Shah's appropriation of Achaemenian and Sasanian heritage, some Iran League members began referring to ancient Iranians as Parsis, blurring together millennia of history. Quarterly readers thus learned that Darius had ‘carried the Parsi banner into the remotest lands’ and that ‘independent Parsi ruling houses’ had flourished in Anatolia over two millennia ago.Footnote ⁸⁷ In one editorial, the journal urged the Pahlavi state to recruit Parsis for bureaucratic posts. Instead of citing as examples the numerous Parsis who held government positions in modern Bombay and Gujarat, the Quarterly extolled ‘Parsi administrative talent’ from the time of Khosro Parviz in the sixth and seventh centuries as well as the Romans’ supposed reliance on ‘Parsi civil and military talent’.Footnote ⁸⁸

Everywhere that Parsis looked, they began to discover ancient Iranian origins. By the late 1930s, in clear contradistinction to earlier activities promoted by G. K. Nariman and Dinshah Irani, the Iran League supported writers who attempted to appropriate aspects of Muslim Iranian culture. One Parsi author claimed that great poets such as Omar Khayyam, Hafez, Daqiqi, Sa'adi, and, of course, Firdausi were all secretly Zoroastrians.Footnote ⁸⁹ Zarathushtra became the ‘First Sufi’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Efforts to promote understanding between Muslims and Zoroastrians faded from the League's list of priorities.

The Quarterly steadily became a forum for pseudo-history. Sohrab Bulsara, who edited the journal in the mid-1930s, made some of the most absurd claims. He argued that many of the great Arab Muslim military achievements had actually been carried out by Persians. Persians propelled the Moorish conquest of Spain. Centuries later, their descendants—somehow still Persian—carried the Spanish imperial banner to the New World and they ‘thus founded the state of Chile in South America, and made it the best and the most humanely governed of the states of all Latin America’. Bulsara believed that ancient Iranians were responsible for both the phonetic and Devanagari alphabets, and that there were ancient Iranian origins for the first description of the atom, the discovery of the law of gravity, algebra, constitutional monarchy as well as standard Western attire such as the shirt, coat, felt hat, boots, and socks.Footnote ⁹¹ Other Quarterly contributors gave Bulsara stiff competition, claiming ancient Iranian influence at work in everything from kabala to the novel Don Quixote.Footnote ⁹² In this sense, Parsi writing about Pahlavi Iran bore notable similarity to those of ideologues developing other nationalisms in the 1930s: Kemalist Turkey relied on pseudo-scientific theories that celebrated Turkish as the world's original language and Dravidian nationalists in southern India fixated upon pseudo-historic scholarship concerning the lost continent of Lemuria, where Tamils supposedly became the progenitors of human civilization.Footnote ⁹³ By spinning yarns of pseudo-history about Iran, furthermore, Parsis shared much in common with other Indians in and around Bombay. It was around the same time, after all, that Hindu ideologues were making similarly tall claims about ancient Indian civilization, part of the emerging project of Hindu nationalism.Footnote ⁹⁴

In fact, Parsi fervour about the Pahlavi state, as well as attempts to insert Parsis into the Pahlavi nationalist project and its historical narrative, had much to do with India. It is no mistake that the Iran League took such a dramatically pro-Iranian nationalist turn from the mid-1930s onwards. At precisely the same time, many Parsis, who had long been ambivalent towards Indian nationalist politics, began to display far more strident opposition towards the Indian National Congress. This was, it must be noted, not the case for all Parsis. There was a vocally pro-nationalist element which, in a similar manner to earlier protests raised against Saif Azad, criticized the Iran League's infatuation with what was, after all, a foreign country. At a special Zoroastrian religious ceremony held for Ibrahim Poure-Davoud in 1934, Dhunjishah B. Cooper, then serving as Bombay's minister for local self-government, upbraided fellow Parsis who claimed that they ‘love not India less but Persia more’. ‘And yet love India you must,’ he reminded them.Footnote ⁹⁵

Throughout the early 1930s, the Quarterly was still advocating some form of constructive engagement with Indian nationalist politics: it suggested, for example, that Parsis spearhead a ‘Grand League of the Smaller Minorities in India’ to militate against dominance by Hindus and Muslims.Footnote ⁹⁶ But such proposals soon gave way to gloomy observation of Congress affairs. League leaders worried that Parsis were being marginalized in the Congress, a development that boded ill for the community's future prospects in an independent India. In 1937, they reacted with palpable anger when the Congress passed over a leading Parsi nationalist, K. F. Nariman, in favour of the Maharashtrian B. G. Kher for the post of Bombay chief minister, part of a brief power-sharing arrangement that Indian nationalists reached with British colonial authorities upon the institution of the 1935 Government of India Act.Footnote ⁹⁷ Kher's elevation, they claimed, was the result of ‘a clique working for Hindu supremacy’ and had ‘given a warning note to all minorities to be more watchful’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Members took further umbrage at the policies of Kher's Congress ministry, such as tenancy reforms, which hit Parsi landowners, and prohibition, which devastated the sizeable Parsi interest in the liquor industry.Footnote ⁹⁹ Earlier worries about the Congress's ‘communistic’ policies now seemed to be validated.

The pages of the Quarterly were filled with indignation and rage. Writers claimed that the Congress had taken on a distinctly anti-Parsi bias, becoming a communal, overtly pro-Hindu body instead. ‘The Congress government is intending to crush the Parsi community under the weight of their silly or hostile measures’, the journal thundered in 1939.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This development was all the more egregious, Iran League writers claimed, because Parsis had contributed so much towards the early growth of the Congress and Indian nationalism. They nostalgically alluded to an earlier era when Parsis had filled the Congress's front ranks. But something had gone terribly wrong, and now Parsis keenly felt a loss of power and influence. ‘The community has been completely hustled out of national leadership in which they held honoured positions before and taught the rest of the Indians the ways of independent thinking and doing,’ the Quarterly noted, with a mix of bitterness and condescension. ‘This is attributed to the jealousy of present Congress leaders who have carefully picked and thrown out of their active ranks all Parsi leading members.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ The Iran League's hostile attitudes towards Indian nationalism marked a disruptive break from its earlier declarations of Parsi patriotism.

Amid such apparent gloom and despondency, praise for Reza Shah's Iran served an important purpose: it provided an outlet for Parsi frustrations about the political trajectory of India. And it convinced some Parsis that the likes of Saif Azad were right, after all—that the community should seriously consider repatriation to their ancient motherland. This was not a new idea. As early as 1905, Parsis had begun fantasizing about mass emigration to Iranian lands.Footnote ¹⁰² But Iran League leaders gave the idea new force by contrasting contemporary Indian affairs with a supposedly enlightened and reinvigorated Iran. Dinshah Irani urged community members to take up an informal invitation by Reza Shah to settle in the country. ‘In the history of the Parsi community today we are face to face with a crisis,’ he stated. ‘Both because of the economic crisis in the world and the political situation in our country, the ground on which the edifice of our prosperity rested, seems to be giving way.’ By settling in Iran, Parsis could ensure that that they would not ‘have all our eggs in one basket’—namely, India.Footnote ¹⁰³

The Iran League skilfully recruited Iranian exponents of Pahlavi nationalism to augment Parsi interest in ‘repatriation’. Drawing upon its links with the pioneers of the Iranian film industry, it invited the Tehran-based director Ovanes Ohanians to address a Bombay Parsi audience in 1938. Ohanians utilized vivid imagery while holding out the prospect of Parsi migration. ‘The members of the Iran League work like the birds who left their nest when the enemy entered; and now they rush again to build that much-loved nest,’ he declared. ‘And this nest of yours is Iran.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In a similar fashion, Iranian contributors to the Quarterly alluded to the traditional Parsi account of migration in order to argue that now, under Reza Shah, the community could finally end its ‘exile’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Quarterly editors, meanwhile, highlighted the handful of Parsis who had settled in Iran, and it lavished praise on one League member, who, along with his daughter, apparently became a naturalized Iranian citizen.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Pahlavi nationalism thus became a way to deflect Indian nationalism. Around the same time, a third form of nationalism briefly entered the scene—national socialism. Amid the Pahlavi state's strategic deployment of Zoroastrian imagery and symbolism, some in the Iran League seriously believed that Iranians were on the cusp of returning to their ancient creed. They conflated this supposed development with Aryanist thought flourishing in faraway Europe. Thus, in 1939, one Quarterly writer, Sohrab N. Batliwalla, marvelled, ‘One need hardly add that with the continued growth of nationalism, it is not unlikely that in the near future, Iran may raise the cry of “Back to the Avesta”, like the present-day Germans wanting to go back to Aryanism.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Jehangir C. Tavadia, a Parsi lecturer in ancient Iranian languages at the University of Hamburg, was in the best position to inform his community members about developments in Nazi Germany. Although Tavadia hardly appeared to be a Nazi sympathizer, he nevertheless transmitted Nazi perspectives on Zoroastrianism through Quarterly articles with titles like ‘The Best Form of Aryanism is Zoroastrianism’. These articles summarized the thought of infamous Nazi racial ideologues such as Hans Günther and Alfred Rosenberg.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Elsewhere, the Quarterly carried pieces on the Mazdaznan sect, an American and European quasi-Zoroastrian movement with Aryan racial overtones, which seemed to confirm Iran League members’ hopes that Zoroastrianism was experiencing a worldwide revival.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

It was at this moment that Saif Azad reappeared—in a third avatar. His Parsi-funded newspaper, Irān-e Bāstān, had lurched towards Nazi propaganda in late 1933, a development that apparently caused some Parsi donors such as Dinshah Irani to baulk and cut off their contributions.Footnote ¹¹⁰ But in 1937, Saif Azad was back in Bombay, where he began a new broadsheet, Salār-e Hind. Like the later editions of Irān-e Bāstān, Salār-e Hind—which was published in Persian, Gujarati, and English—was avowedly pro-Nazi, complete with inflammatory racial content and material that is likely to have been supplied by the local German consul.Footnote ¹¹¹ It caused panic among Bombay's Jewish community: a local Jewish newspaper stated that ‘this paper for the first time lights the torch of Anti-Semitism in this country’.Footnote ¹¹² Incredibly, a number of Parsis continued to fraternize and support this Iranian Nazi sympathizer, a man who now openly styled himself as a ‘National Socialist Aryan’. Saif Azad claimed that ‘several Parsi friends’ had been the ones who invited him to return to Bombay in the first place, in order to continue his work promoting Parsi interests in Iran. Other Parsis, including Hormusji Adenwala and Peshotanji Marker, paid him a whopping Rs 16,000 to cover his expenses in the city.Footnote ¹¹³ The Iran League had well and truly come a long way from its earlier efforts to promote enlightened cross-cultural tolerance and understanding.