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Traversing Diacritical Space: Negotiating and Narrating Parsi Nationness

Colorado College, Colorado Springs, USA

The Parsis have been typecast as India's most Anglicized community and as colonial collaborators. Anglicization was, however, a perfomative identity that manifested itself differently in public and in private space. Viewed through the lens of Homi Bhabha's theories of hybridity, and read through fiction by Parsi authors, the Anglicization of the Parsis can be seen not as uncomplicated mimicry, but as negotiation of national and cultural identity and space in terms of historical and geographical contingency. To see Parsi ambivalences as an unequivocal Anglicization is to presuppose a univalent and totalizing national identity from which one group or another strays, rather than to recognize the negotiated and contingent nature of what Bhabha terms "nationness". It is to posit a departure from an originary culture rather than to recognize the temporal and transitional nature of culture itself.

Key Words: Parsi • Zoroastrian • national narrative • hybridity • Bapsi Sidhwa • Thrity Umrigar • Rohinton Mistry

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