Sarica Robyn Balsari-Palsule
(UCL) -
2020-21 Students
sarica.balsari-palsule.20@ucl.ac.uk
Visual Worlds: Images, Time and the Parsi Community
My research presents a window into the intricate contemporary visual worlds of the Parsi community and explores how identity and social relations are mediated and constructed through images. The Parsis (Indian Zoroastrians) in Bombay are a small ethnic minority of émigrés from Persia who have experienced a dramatic decline in population due to low nuptiality, strict endogamy and high emigration.
Parsis have historically engaged intensely with the visual. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, my research situates this visual tradition in relation to the contemporary production, circulation and consumption of imagery within the Parsi community, especially amongst the millennial generation. It seeks to unpack the question: what constitutes contemporary “Parsiness”, and how is it enacted and defined in visual terms?
Against a backdrop of uncertainty, Parsi millennials engage with humorous and subversive online images that act as a performative space through which their prospective identities can emerge. Based on these images, as well as ethnographic research on wedding photography, family photographs and the long-standing tradition of Parsi natak (theatre), this study proposes that there is a wide spectrum of images that circulates within the community and is generationally determined. These generational differences within the community reveal photography’s different temporalities: pastness and futurity. While framed portraits in the home conjure stereotypes of Parsis preferring to dwell in the past, the complex temporalities activated by images online, namely memes, prompts novel ways of inhabiting time and fashioning identity. Accordingly, this study suggests that Parsi millennial identity itself is in a continuous process of becoming, with images providing a space for unfolding possibilities. This research contributes to literature in visual anthropology on images and time by presenting a perspective on how identities can be visually reimagined in a context of decline, survival and revival.