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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the production and circulation of photographs within the Parsi community in Mumbai, noting the ways in which contemporary images act as a space where Parsi millennials can carve out new identities and anticipate potential futures.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper focuses on the photographic representation of the Indian Zoroastrian (Parsi) community in Mumbai. The Parsis, a minority community who fled Persia between the seventh and eighth century due to Islamic persecution, maintain a unique position in Indian society. Despite its relative socioeconomic eminence, the community has experienced a dramatic decline in population due to low nuptiality, strict endogamy and high emigration. Against this backdrop of crisis, this paper explores possibilities of the reimagination of Parsi identity in the twenty-first century through contemporary photographs that contest traditional tropes of decline and loss. Exploring the production and circulation of photographs within the community, the paper highlights the ways in which traditional markers of Parsi identity are refashioned and negotiated by today’s millennial generation through playful and subversive images on social media. The paper suggests that unlike conventional Parsi imagery that evokes the past, contemporary Parsi photographs point to the future, thereby reinventing Parsi identity in the discourse of decline, survival and revival. Amidst growing fears of epistemic erasure, the preservation of cultural memories, then, assumes new forms and materiality amongst Parsi millennials, with images providing the opportunity to negotiate visual representation and collective memory. This paper incorporates a transcultural and materially mediated approach, specifically exploring how contemporary photographs disseminate the past, present and future across time and space.