The Parsi experience: Ethnicity and cultural Heritage in Rohinton Mistry's novels

Author : Jayaswathi G

Abstract :This paper examines the sophisticated delineation of Parsis’ cultural heritage in the novels of Rohinton Mistry and locates the latter’s fiction as a significant literary repository of rites, orality and the communal memory across generations. Whereas most scholarship tends to analyze Mistry’s fiction in the context of postcolonial, diasporic, and ethnic identity studies, this study re-centers its critical gaze on the lived cultural practices and ritualistic continuities among the Parsi characters in his stories. Close readings of representative texts including Such a Long Journey, Family Matters and Tales from FirozshaBaag also reveal the entrenchment of religious practices, foodstyles, funerary rituals, commitments to purity, else attempts to sustain the mother tongue in domestic dwelling. Located within the theoretical methodologies of cultural memory studies and heritage theory, this paper contends that Mistry’s fiction does not only depict marginality; it is a space of cultural preservation in opposition to contemporary erosion. The Parsi experience, reflected in Mistry’s narrative, is not only symbolic of decline, but is also a process which is being intimately sustained through the micro-politics of everyday acts of storytelling and minor opposition to cultural atrophy. This reading highlights literature’s potential as both mirror and receptacle of intangible cultural heritage, suggesting new avenues for Minority interpretation outside the limitations of postcolonial identity politics. The study contributes to the ongoing discussion of heritage literature by repositioning Mistry’s work as the story of an at-risk community as a narrative ethnography

Keywords :Parsi community, Cultural heritage, Intangible heritage, Cultural memory, Urbanisation and modernity, Minority literature, Diaspora and tradition, Ethnographic fiction

Conference Name :International Conference on English Literature and Linguistics (ICELL-25)

Conference Place Nagpur, India

Conference Date 6th Sep 2025