As the Indian Zoroastrian scholar, public figure, and philanthropist Dinshah Irani wrote in his popular Persian-language introduction to Zoroastrianism, the 1927 Peyk-e Mazdāyasnan quoted above, for centuries the Indian community, known as Parsis, looked to Iran for religious guidance and instruction. Among other sources, this dependence is evidenced in the revāyāt texts, epistles containing doctrinal and other questions sent from the Indian community to their Iranian coreligionists. These letters aimed to bring Indian religious practice in line with Iranian Zoroastrian orthodoxy.Footnote ²

Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though, a radical realignment took place in the relationship between the Zoroastrian communities of India and Iran. Precipitated by technological advances in communications, travel, and industry, as well as the rise of new political formations and new ideologies, the supremacy of the center over the diaspora was reversed.

In part, Afshin Marashi's Exile and the Nation: The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran is a new history of this historic realignment. The book's innovation, and one of its main contributions to the field, is how it puts different disciplines and traditions of Iranian studies in mutually illuminating conversation. In particular, Marashi juxtaposes the study of Zoroastrianism as a religious and intellectual tradition, and especially the Parsi stream thereof, with research on colonial and postcolonial Iranian modernities.

Marashi begins his study in the mid-nineteenth century, by which point “the bulk of the Parsi community's prosperous industrial and merchant class had settled in Bombay, and the city came to serve as the nodal point for a Parsi global trading network” (p. 11). With their newfound political clout and prosperity, the Indian community sought to improve the conditions of Iranian Zoroastrians; Parsis established schools and charitable foundations in Iran, sent permanent representatives, and appealed to the ruling powers on behalf of the Iranian community.

The first chapter of Exile and the Nation deals most directly with this inter-Zoroastrian issue. The chapter's focus is the figure of Arbab Kaykhosrow Shahrokh (1874–1940). Born into rural poverty in Kerman, Shahrokh was an Iranian Zoroastrian who came to serve as the community's representative in the Iranian parliament for three decades beginning in 1909, among many other public roles. The critical turning point in Shahrokh's career was the patronage and education he received from the Parsi community. Shahrokh was sent to study in a Bombay school whose mission was, as Marashi writes, “to produce a new Parsi intelligentsia committed to fostering a liberal, reformed, and modernist understanding of the faith” (p. 31). This steeping in liberal ideals of tolerance and equality, Marashi argues, inspired Shahrokh to challenge the discriminatory social restrictions imposed on Zoroastrians by the Muslim-majority society and to give birth to an Iranian nation more modern and enlightened during the Constitutional Revolution and thereafter.

Marashi opens the first chapter with Shahrokh's death in 1940, describing the paradoxically minor coverage in the Iranian press of the passing of such an influential figure. The explanation, we learn, may well lie in the fact that Shahrokh's son, Shah-Bahram, served in Nazi Germany's Ministry of Propaganda as the principal spokesman for the Persian-language broadcasts of Radio Berlin. Under the shadow of Reza Shah's increasingly dictatorial reign, many believed that Shahrokh was assassinated as punishment for his son's unwelcome politics.

The narrative framing of this chapter as a murder plot deserves our attention for a number of reasons. First of all, it encapsulates an overarching theme: The father suffers the sins of the son—a reversal of the biblical injunction unto the seventh generation. This ethical dictum, here expressed most starkly and violently, is, in a sense, Marashi's guiding principle throughout the book. Each of the book's five chapters takes a different perspective on the porous boundary between liberalism and illiberalism. The Parsi attempt to ground the creation of a more tolerant, open, and modern Iranian nation in the shared ethnic and cultural heritage of Zoroastrians and Muslims alike necessarily also produced its opposite. Marashi embraces and welcomes this paradox, reveling in the “myriads of conflicted, ambivalent, and often contradictory responses stemming from the same experience of newfound transoceanic contact” between Parsis and Iranians (p. 11). Exile and the Nation incorporates the best insights of deconstructionism and postcolonialism without being beholden to their jargon and style.

Questions of style are just as central to Exile and the Nation as questions of argument. Marashi has chosen a biographical approach to his subject, and each chapter refracts the Parsi-Iranian encounter through the prism of a single, exemplary life. Following the discussion of Shahrokh are chapters devoted to the Parsi intellectual, philanthropist, and community leader Dinshah Irani (1881–1938; chapter 2); the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), whose official visit to Iran in 1932 came about through Parsi intervention (chapter 3); Ebrahim Pourdavoud (1886–1968), the Iranian Muslim scholar and translator of classical Zoroastrian literature into Persian (chapter 4); and Saif Azad (1884–1971), the Third-Worldist, revolutionary, and agitator against British colonialism (chapter 5). In Marashi's skillful and novelistic retellings, these biographies reveal the extent to which Parsis influenced the development of Iranian nationalism and the Iranian nation as interlocutors, teachers, impresarios, and financial backers. At the same time, we learn how that influence intersected (again, contradictorily) with Romanticism and racism, colonialism and revolution, liberalism and authoritarianism. One of the most important lessons of Exile and the Nation is that the Parsi moment in modern Iranian history was anything but marginal or parochial.

My own field is Zoroastrian literature in Middle Persian: the Pahlavi “ninth-century books,” in Harold Bailey's famous coinage, written or redacted in the first centuries after the Islamic conquest of Iran in 650. There is much in Marashi's book that was particularly instructive for me and helped to bridge the gap between “classical” Zoroastrianism and the Parsi religion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My own limited (and, it must be said, very naive) experience living and learning from the Parsi community in Bombay left me primarily perplexed. Indian Zoroastrianism seemed almost unrelated to the religion described in the Bundahišn, the Denkard, and other Middle Persian works. This was, of course, unfair and no more sensical than judging a twenty-first-century Manhattan Jew by the standards of the Mishnah—though my impression is that I was not alone in having this particular prejudice. In any case, Marashi's discussion of Irani's Zoroastrian writings was especially illuminating. Irani's Persian-language books, aimed at the popular audience of Muslim Iranians, reimagined the religion of Zoroaster as an ethical and mystical doctrine in terminology borrowed from classical Persian Sufism and other sources.

I would have wished for Exile and the Nation to devote more space to literary questions. How did reading Pahlavi literature impact these or other thinkers’ later ideas and writings? Did the content and theology of the Zoroastrian canon, which was in fact still taking shape in the writings of Parsis and Orientalists alike during the period, make a difference, or were the law-bound and theological Pahlavi books precisely what Marashi's heroes paradoxically rejected? Nonetheless, the work succeeds in reconceptualizing Iranian modernity, and Iranian nationalism especially, in light of the Parsi-Iranian encounter. Through the stories of the book's five protagonists, Exile and the Nation shows how Parsis played pivotal roles in the development of the ideologies that defined twentieth-century Iran. At the same time, Marashi's book expertly weaves together disparate subfields within Iranian studies—namely, classical Zoroastrianism, colonialism, and Sufism—that are rarely in conversation. As such, scholars in the field will doubtlessly find Exile and the Nation enlightening and instructive.