The Persian Revival: The Imperialism of the Copy in Iranian and Parsi Architecture Available to Purchase

In The Persian Revival, Talinn Grigor excavates the roots and development of a revivalist movement prominent in West and South Asia in the past two centuries. Across a brief prologue, three relatively long chapters, and an epilogue, she skillfully argues that the Persian Revival was a set of mid-nineteenth- to early twentieth-century imperial strategies through which the aristocracy in Qajar Iran and Parsi communities and individual reformists in western India used architectural façades to assert political power and cultural identity. Qajar elites adorned their private residences, while Parsis—a primarily Zoroastrian minority community and cultural group in western India—built public temples, utilizing these buildings as ideological and propagandistic tools. Their façades, serving as premodern billboards, showcased a grandiose image of Iran’s ancient civilization (103). By surveying an extensive group of understudied architectural drawings by nineteenth-century European travelers, agents, and scholars, Grigor intriguingly argues that the Parsi revival architecture and its...