Science, Secular Mythology, and the Professionalization of the Parsi Theatre

Abstract

‘Science, Secular Mythology, and the Professionalization of the Parsi Theatre’ explain how the Parsi theatre professionalized. While the drama functioned during the period of social reform as a didactic, disciplinary, tool for the moral improvement of Parsi society, from the late 1860s onwards Parsi spectacular plays collapsed the distance between science and magic, a technologically advanced modern Europe and the despotic oriental past, and the underlying political motivations that undergirded these distinctions. Through a seemingly innocent alteration in a spiritual economy of representation—from the reformist disenchantment of religious customs to the re-enchantment of science and technology—the theatre began to craft a subversive moral economy illegible to colonial administrators and reformist elites. This self-determined, antidisciplinary, fantasy world where myths were no longer signs of barbarity and backwardness, facilitated the development of an autonomous, modern subjectivity in the theatre and a revivalist nationalism whose conceptual core was a spiritual conjugality.