New Scholar Program: Dastur Dr. Dhalla Collection: A Case Study on Zoroastrian Community Libraries

Dastur Dr. Dhalla Collection: A Case Study on Zoroastrian Community Libraries aims to historicize Zoroastrians, an ethno-religious minority in South Asia, particularly within print culture and their role in community libraries. Much has been written about Indian Zoroastrians and their role in printing presses, in forming Gujarati type-sets, and in preserving their community libraries in India. This talk adds to the story of Zoroastrian community libraries on the other side of the border in Karachi, Pakistan, which holds the Young Men’s Zoroastrian Association and part of the Dastur Dr. Dhalla collections in one of the largest Parsi settlements of Pakistan, the Dinshaw Avari Colony. Utilizing the Dr. Dastur Dhalla collection in the YMZA library as a case study, I argue that the role of Zoroastrian community libraries is a core instrument in deploying a unified image of the community and continues to promote a reformist vision of Zoroastrianism. This talk will detail specific items from the collection such Genealogical Trees of the Nine Families of the Athornan Section of Udwada (1925), the library’s accession, distribution, and readership history to demonstrate the cross-border interactions, further revealing the on-going education on Zoroastrianism between postcolonial nations in the subcontinent as well as the United States. In addition, the goal is to introduce the audience to Zoroastrians and Parsis, and their historical impact within the spheres of bibliography and public-facing engagement in their communities.

Sharmeen Mehri is Ph.D. candidate and an international student from Karachi, Pakistan. She holds a Master of Arts degree in English Literature, Language, and Theory from the City University of New York, Hunter College. Sharmeen was an Archival Creators fellow for the South Asian American Digital Archive in 2021-2022 for which she collected oral histories and created an online museum exhibit on migration stories of South Asian Zoroastrians to the United States entitled, Memories We Carry. For 2023-2025, Sharmeen will be a Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School.