Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how young Parsis challenge reductive narratives of decline through playful online visual practices. I propose that the images transform crisis into a generative space for cultural renewal, and offer creative re-imaginings of continuity, identity, and belonging.

Paper long abstract:

The Parsis in India, a minority community that fled Persia between the seventh and eighth centuries to escape the Arab Conquest, have faced a dramatic population decline due to low nuptiality, strict endogamy, and high emigration. Often described in media and academic discourse as a community on the brink of “extinction” or “disappearance,” these narratives are echoed in Tanya Luhrmann’s The Good Parsi, which frames the community as shaped by a “discourse of decay” and an “aching sense of loss.” Such representations have reinforced reductive tropes of decline that many within the community critique and resist.

This paper considers how young Parsis critically subvert these narratives of decline through visual practices. By creating and sharing playful, dynamic images online, such as memes, I propose that members of the community reimagine crisis as a space of possibility, transforming perceived decline into a generative site for cultural renewal. These web-based “ludic” practices offer creative reinterpretations of identity and heritage, challenging traditional characterisations of the community as mired in loss. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, I further reflect on the knotty and complex ethical obligations of conducting research amidst scepticism of the anthropologist in the field. Situating the Parsi experience within broader anthropological debates on decline and regeneration, this paper highlights how crisis can be reoriented toward creative re-imaginings of continuity, belonging, and identity.