Pious Citizens: Reforming Zoroastrianism in India and Iran (review)

When presenting the first Hossein Ziai Memorial Lecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, in February 2012, Ringer described her book in terms of a “historiography of modernity.” This phrase neatly summarizes the broad methodology of her text, which focuses primarily on the Zoroastrians of India (known as Parsis), whose reformulation of the religion in response to nineteenth-century European concepts of modernity and civilization had a profound impact on their co-religionists in Iran. In tracing the re-conception of the Zoroastrian religion during a limited historical period within its two homeland settings, Ringer sets up a model for a wider, transcultural, mapping of paths to religious reform and of the sociopolitical dimensions of debate concerning “true religion” and religious “truth.”

Ringer demonstrates how Western definitions of modernity establish a dichotomous structure for discourse relating to religious reform. Reformers use the designations modern, progressive, intellectual, scientific, and civilized in their bid to legitimize their radical realignment of religion, and refer to tradition as backward, entrenched, irrational, or even superstitious. This power to define, Ringer notes (referring to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the intellectual field), is central to the production of knowledge and truth (11).¹ The dueling claims to “authenticity” or religious “truth” by reformists and traditionalists are based on both the interpretation of theology and the identification of the locus of interpretive authority.

The narrative of the book traces the evolution of understandings of “true” religion within the Zoroastrian setting in India and then Iran, echoing the religion’s transition with regard to its late modern articulations. The story begins with the rise of the Parsi merchant class under the British and ends slightly more than a century later with the re-imagining of Zoroastrianism as part of the rhetoric of Iranian nationalism.

With minimal restrictions in terms of caste or custom, urban Parsis engaged closely with Europeans, enhancing their status through business contacts and embracing Western-style education, dress, and practices of social integration, notably the introduction of women into the public arena. As Parsi lay leadership grew, so it began to comment decisively on religious issues as well as matters of social and political reform. Internal Parsi debate about the markers of religious truth was prompted by ideological attacks from Protestant proselytizers, particularly the Scottish missionary John Wilson, who castigated Zoroastrianism and its prophet as false and misguided. In response, both reformist and traditional Zoroastrians used the Western analytical tools of historicism and linguistics alongside European translations of Zoroastrian texts to generate respective reconstructions of the “original” teaching of Zarathushtra, which promoted its historical primacy, and its moral and intellectual progressiveness, over Christianity.

Reformist Zoroastrianism emphasized individualism and internalized piety and ethics but disparaged rituals. This approach was countered by self-defined orthodox Zoroastrians, whose own imagining of modernity led to their re-evaluation of some traditional aspects, specifically the education of priests. Orthodox laity and priests continued to affirm the value of ritual performed in its original language as cosmically efficacious in both the spiritual and material realms, but, ironically, access to Western religious scholarship led several of the next generation of priests to reformist positions. The most significant of these reformists was Dastur Dhalla, who became high priest in Karachi (126–134). This pattern was later repeated in Iran, spurred by the arrival of Parsi reformers. The Parsi re-imagining of the past appealed to Iranian Zoroastrians and also to Iranian nationalists, for whom Zoroastrianism was viewed as an authentic placeholder of Iranian culture and therefore integral to the reconstruction of Iranian society at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The book under review is as much about the social, political, and economic history of Zoroastrians in India and Iran as it is a history of religious reform. Its narrative has less to do with the complexities of theology than with the challenges to a minority community concerning its construction of Self and Other. Ringer’s specific study of the Zoroastrian responses provides a...