THE GOOD PARSI - THE POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIZATION OF A COLONIAL ELITE

The article examines a small, middle-class Bombay community (the Parsi s) who functioned as an extremely successful and highly Westernized el ite during the British Raj. During that time they identified closely w ith the British and with the traits of progressiveness, rationality an d, in particular, masculinity, which the colonial authorities tended t o ascribe to themselves as a contrast to the traditional, irrational, effeminate 'natives'. Now, in independent India, Parsis experience the ir community as having declined from a state of former glory, and they criticize their young men for being effeminate 'Mama's boys'. The art icle describes this process of metaphor inversion as 'symbolic entailm ent'.