The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society

by T.M. Luhrmann

During the Raj, one group stands out as having prospered and thrived because of British the Parsis. Driven out of Persia into India a thousand years ago, the Zoroastrian people adopted the manners, dress, and aspirations of their British colonizers, and their Anglophilic activities ranged from cricket to Oxford to tea. The British were fulsome in their praise of the Parsis and rewarded them with high-level financial, mercantile, and bureaucratic posts. The Parsis dominated Bombay for more than a century. But Indian independence ushered in their decline. Tanya Luhrmann vividly portrays a crisis of confidence, of self-criticism, and perpetual agonizing.

This story highlights the dilemmas and paradoxes of all who danced the colonial tango. Luhrmann's analysis brings startling insights into 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 an anthropology in flux, uncertain of its own authority and its relation to the colonizers.

Genres: History

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is currently the Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

Tanya Marie Luhrmann (born 1959) is an American psychological anthropologist best known for her studies of modern-day witches, charismatic Christians, and psychiatrists. She received her AB summa cum laude in Folklore and Mythology from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1981, working with Stanley Tambiah. She then studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, working with Jack Goody and Ernest Gellner. In 1986 she received her PhD for work on modern-day witches in England, later published as Persuasions of the Witch's Craft (1989). In this book, she described the ways in which magic and other esoteric techniques both serve emotional needs and come to seem reasonable through the experience of practice.

Her second research project looked at the situation of contemporary Parsis, a Zoroastrian community in India. The Parsi community enjoyed a privileged position under the British Raj; although by many standards, Parsis have continued to do quite well economically in post-colonial India, they have become politically marginal in comparison to their previous position, and many Parsis speak pessimistically about the future of their community. Luhrmann's book The Good Parsi (1996) explored the contradictions inherent in the social psychology of a post-colonial elite.

Her third book, and the most widely acclaimed, explored the contradictions and tensions between two models of psychiatry, the psychodynamic (psychoanalytic) and the biomedical, through the ethnographic study of the training of American psychiatry residents during the health care transition of the early 1990s. Of Two Minds (2000) received several awards, including the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology (2001).

Her fourth book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (March 2012), examines the growing movement of evangelical and charismatic Christianity, and specifically how practitioners come to experience God as someone with whom they can communicate on a daily basis through prayer and visualization.

Other projects she is working on include a NIMH-funded study of how life on the streets (chronically or periodically homeless) contributes to the experience and morbidity of schizophrenia.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Parsis chose to be like the British and so adopted the common British understanding of the Indian world. They did not anticipate that when they lost the British, they would condemn themselves for being themselves the pathetic natives they had learned to see and despise with British eyes. They live now with an identification which had been emotionally gripping and, once lost, has plunged them into the emotional despondency of moral failure..." p. 17

[Chloe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview of the Parsis in Bombay -. Chronicles their history and their contributions to the creation of the city of Bombay - a formidable participation and generosity to create this city. I loved this book

[M]

fantastic. she's my hero.