Courts framed Parsi migration as white people moving to a brown place

Evidence

In racial prerequisite cases spanning from 1909 to 1939, nearly every applicant for naturalization from Hindustan identified himself as Parsee, Caucasian, or Aryan and proffered Iran as both the historic cradle of white civilization and indigenous point of origin for his ancestral migration. … Ultimately, the judge ruled that the emigration of Parsi people from Iran to India was the movement of a white people to a brown place and that Parsis successfully maintained whiteness despite their millennium of residence in a non-white locale. In the Balsara ruling, the court went as far as to specifically equate Parsi migration to the British colonial presence in South Asia, suggesting that the contemporary presence of the unquestionably white British in the subcontinent in 1909 was simply a modern version of a much earlier white Persian presence in India. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 69

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The Balsara equation of Parsi migration with British colonialism — ‘white people to a brown place’ — is a dense compression of how whiteness was legally portable across space and time, worth sitting with.
• SHARE: Someone working on racialization or South Asian history would enjoy the specific Balsara ruling that equated Parsees with British colonizers.

Related

• The same Parsi fact justified opposite rulings on Iranian whiteness (similarity 0.82)