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Evil in the Sands of Time: Theology and Identity Politics among the Zoroastrian Parsis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2010

T. M. Luhrmann
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T the great texts of the great traditions are in some sense unchanging, but as Milton Singet pointed out, the anthropologist's task is to “find fot these ideas a local habitation and leain how they operate in the lives of ordinary people” (1972, 39). What I wish to present here are the changing meanings of texts that are thought to form the core of the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism and the story of how their interpretations have altered as the South Asian community of Parsi Zoroastrian interpreters has changed. Much about this story echoes the experience of other South Asian communities: as the Btitish rose to dominance and their missionaries strove to teach Parsis that theirs was an inferior, weaker faith, Parsis began to represent their religion as similar to that of the Protestant Christians, even while steadfastly refusing (for the most part) to convett.

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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , August 2002 , pp. 861 - 889
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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2002

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