Registration via Google Forms required; register on https://tinyurl.com/BLHS25July2026

The Bombay Local History Society invites you to a series of talks exploring Bombay-Iran connections. The second talk in the series, organised in association with the Iran League, is by novelist and food writer, Pronoti Datta.
Eat Like a Persian
Saturday, 25 July 2026 at 5 pm.
Venue: Iran League, Navsari Building 2nd floor,
Dadabhai Naoroji Rd, Mumbai 400001.

The movement of Persians between Bombay and Iran has a thousand-year history. The first wave of Persian Zoroastrians, called the Parsis, prospered in Bombay and became one of its most prominent communities. The second wave of Persian Zoroastrian migration, which began in the mid-nineteenth century, led to the formation of the Irani community. The city’s early Irani Zoroastrian migrants worked hard to assimilate into the culture of Parsis by learning to speak Gujarati and eating Parsi food. From the 1890s, the Iranis began to open corner tea-shops that eventually metamorphosed into the emblematic Irani cafés of the city. The cuisine they served was mostly Parsi. However at home, they ate foods indigenous to the country they had left behind. Their table had more in common with that of Iranian Muslims, who were also a visible presence in the city of Bombay.
Pronoti Datta is a writer and communications specialist living in Bombay. She is the author
of two books: In the Beginning there was Bombay Duck: A Food History of Mumbai (2025)
and the novel Half-Blood (2022). She has worked with leading publications and her writing
has appeared in The New Statesman, Roads & Kingdoms, Mint Lounge, Hindustan Times,
The Hindu and Vogue.