Call Him Javid: Limning a National Trope

Abstract

This chapter marks the beginning of the search for Fedallah’s proleptic narrative. From the account of contemporary Parsi life in Mumbai in Mistry’s Family Matters to limning a national trope in early twentieth-century Tehran in Fassih’s The Story of Javid, Melville’s Parsee finds in Yezad and Javid his Zoroastrian brethren. Despite the categorical nationalization of non-Euro-American literatures in discourses of World Literature, this study of Javid’s hardships in 1920s Tehran, punctuated with Yezad’s marginality in modern-day Mumbai, enables the minor Parsee character to expand the geography of Moby-Dick beyond the limits of American literary history. Of course, the comparative examination of Fedallah’s ethnic counterparts is pathbreaking but insufficient since the ideological origins of the characters in question register sites of violence against specifically female characters.