Zoroastrians in Britain.

• Author: Malandra, W.W.
• Position: Review

By JOHN R. HINNELLS. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. xiv + 336. $70.

In a series of publications dating back to 1978 Professor Hinnells has studied various aspects of the history of Zoroastrianism and Zoroastrians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special attention devoted to the Parsis. The present work is based on the Ratanbai Katrak Lectures delivered at Oxford University in 1985, which dealt particularly with Zoroastrian diaspora communities. It is to be followed by a second volume on diaspora communities outside Britain. The work is also one of two major studies of Zoroastrians to appear in 1996, the other being T. M. Luhrmann, The Good Parsi, the Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996). Unlike Luhrmann, Hinnells writes in a straightforward style refreshingly free of fashionable jargon.

The great majority of Western scholars of Zoroastrianism have concentrated on the ancient forms of the religion and when dealing with the Parsis and, more recently, Iranian Zoroastrians it is more with an eye to understanding archaic traditions than with following the evolution of a small but dynamic religion about to enter the twenty-first century. Following on the path indicated by Professor Mary Boyce, Hinnells has produced an extremely thorough study of the history of Zoroastrians in Britain that looks to the future rather than the distant past. His methodologies are those of both the historian and the sociologist. That is, the historical portions of the book are based on a great variety of evidence, including letters, journals, records of Parsi organizations, government documents, etc., while the discussion of contemporary Zoroastrian life in Britain and speculations about the future are based for the greatest part on direct observation, personal interviews and...