The Good Parsi : The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society/T.M. Luhrmann. 1996, 317 p., $33.
Contents: Preface. Prologue: fateful embraces. 1. The current community. 2. In the beginning. 3. The power and the glory. 4. We are not what we were. 5. Uncomfortable realities. 6. On postcolonial identity. 7. Anthropological repositionings. Notes. Bibliography. Acknowledgments. Index.
"During the Raj, one group stands out as having prospered because of British rule: the Parsis. Driven out of Persia into India a thousand years ago, the Zoroastrian people adopted the manners and aspirations of the British colonizers. Their Anglophilia ranged from cricket to Oxford to tea. The British fulsomely praised the Parsis and rewarded them with high-level financial, mercantile, and bureaucratic posts. The Parsis dominated Bombay, for more than a century, until Indian independence ushered in their decline. Tanya Luhrmann vividly portrays their crisis of confidence and perpetual soul-searching.
"The Parsi story is filled with the pathos of their long-delayed recognition of the emptiness of the promise that Parsis might one day be Englishmen. Luhrmann sensitively examines the paradoxical nature of their self-criticism (the Parsis had identified themselves with the 'strong', 'virile' colonizers but now speak of themselves as effeminate, emasculated, 'weak', all epithets once used by the British of Indians) to create an image of a fragile and beleaguered identity, fraught with contradictions, that looks uneasily toward the future.
"This story highlights the dilemmas of all who danced the colonial tango. Luhrmann's analysis looks at a whole range of communal and individual identity crises and what could be called 'identity politics' of this century. In a candid last chapter the author confronts another elite in crisis: an anthropology in flux, uncertain of its own authority and its relation to the colonizers." (jacket)
[Tanya M. Luhrmann is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego, and author of Persuasions of the Witch's Craft (Harvard).]