Corporeality, Aryanism, Race: The Theatre and Social Reform of the Parsis of Western India

Abstract

© 2015 Reproduced with the kind permission of the management of the. Recent scholarship has problematised the impact-response theory that ideas such as Aryanism, eugenics and militarism were merely imported from a European context into a South Asian one. This paper delineates a longer trajectory of the relationship between corporeal language and communal identity through a focus on the Parsi community of western India. As early as 1853, reformist Parsis enacted modes of ancient Kaya¯ni¯ virility in the gymnasium and theatre to redefine notions of communal identity that drew simultaneously from Enlightenment precepts and a mythic Aryan heritage discovered by Orientalists. Subsequently, the confluence of a loss of numerical, financial and political strength, and the popularisation of the ideas of Darwin and Mendel, prompted a shift in ethnic and semantic thinking, whereby the language of corporeality was co-opted by the orthodox faction to justify the bifurcation of religion and race. Consequently, Parsis, in the midst of a rising Hindu nationalist movement, called not only for the revival of Persian epic theatre, a Parsi militia, the exclusion of half-castes from the community and the castration of mentally defective community members, but also for a renewal of ties to Iran and a separate state of Parsistan.