300 offends Parsis, Iranians

The Hollywood film, 300, directed by Frank Miller, has angered Parsi Zoroastrians as well as Iranians who share a pre-Islamic heritage. Released in India on March 16, it tells the story of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC in which 300 soldiers from the Greek city state of Sparta emerged victorious on being pitted against a large invading army of Persians led by King Xerxes. In the film, the ancient Zoroastrian monarch has been depicted as a joker, resulting in outrage in the community.

In a letter to the chairman of Warner Brothers Motion Pictures, Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP) chairman Minoo Shroff has lodged a strong protest,asking for the withdrawal of the film from theaters in Bombay and elsewhere in India "in order to assuage the hurt feelings of the largest conglomeration of Parsis on earth.” He has described it as a "most derogatory, denigatory and degrading presentation of an episode from the ancient Iranian era of King Xerxes the Great...” which shows "the Iranians of yore, our ancestors, in a very poor light, depicting them as savages and barbarians.”

However, Berjis Desai, in his column "Parsi Tari Arsi” (The Bombay Samachar, April 1, 2007) finds "something comical about our Temporary Six protesting against the film.” In the letter they "claim to be the apex body of the Parsis in the world. WZO (World Zoroastrian Organisation), please make note!” He feels "It is one thing to protest but another thing to show intolerance by demanding that the film be withdrawn from all theaters... We just cannot believe that a liberal soul like Minoo Shroff, who has fought all his life on behalf of the Forum of Free Enterprise, for civil liberties, could demand that an unpalatable movie should not be screened at all.”

Desai writes that he honestly believes that the BPP chairman has signed the letter "without reading it. We do not blame him for the poor gentle soul is so harassed these days reading affidavits of interveners in the election petition, who are increasing day and night, with different agendas and motives... quite a few have a single agenda as to how to delay matters.”

The Iranian consulate has enlisted local support for a ban on the film reports Mumbai Mirror of March 20, 2007. Iran’s consul general for India Moham­mad Shokrani said, "The Iranians were depicted as savages and uncivilized…It is a clear distortion of Iranian history, as well as the world’s history and the producers of the movie have attempted to reverse the historical realities.” Some Parsis are shocked that Hollywood continues to make films that ignore cultural sensitivities. Farhad Ostavari, partner in an Irani restaurant in Bombay told Mumbai Mirror: "Darius, the last Ache­me­nian emperor, was also supposed to be its greatest. But the movie has depicted him and other Persians as wimps.”

Religious scholar Adi Doctor told The Times of India (TOI) of March 18, 2007, that kings like Xerxes were "generous and tolerant to a fault… Today’s filmmakers work as per their whims and fancies. They not only distort history, but also project benevolent historical characters as savages and barbarians.”

US-based Maneck Bhujwala, in a rebuttal to a review of the movie was quoted in TOI as saying, "Is it our (the US) current political antagonism towards Iran that encouraged the movie director to misrepresent Persians as monsters and bad guys or was it total ignorance of history? The standing ruins of Persepolis, the palace of Persian King Darius the Great clearly shows elegant looking carvings of King Xerxes I and Persian soldiers that are nothing like the punk rock looking characters in the movie. And the director is quoted in the news as saying that he and his studio staff discussed calling the ‘bad guys’ Zoroastrians instead of Persians in light of the political sensitivities. This is even worse, and most offensive to all Zoroastrians who follow the oldest monotheistic religion founded by Iranian Prophet Zarathush­tra.”

The timing of the film’s release, just before Jamshedi Navroz, the Persian New Year, may have dampened holiday spirits but it offered common cause between the people in Iran and their estranged government. As per a TOI report dated March 19, 2007, Azadeh Moaveni wrote in Time magazine that the movie is being seen as a US government-funded project to prepare Americans for the war against Iran. "The movie generated so much agitation in Tehran (that it) is one of the rare things that most people agree upon in the country,” Moaveni wrote, after seeing people shaking with fury while discussing the film as she stood in a line to buy the dry fruits and nuts traditional to the start of the Persian New Year.