The National Award-winning filmmaker and photographer turns her family’s nearly 200-year-old home in Mhow, and the people who lived in it, into a book that is part photo-book and part novel.
Parsi Khabar is delighted to share news from a good friend of this site. Photographer and National Award-winning documentary filmmaker Divya Cowasji has released her first book, There Are No Love Letters Here. It is part photo-book, part novel, and pre-orders are now open worldwide.
Readers may remember the project from our feature earlier this year, Love Letters: Divya Cowasji. That piece described how, after losing her grand-aunt Dinoo, her grandmother Minnie and, in her words, “practically the entire senior generation of my family” in quick succession in 2018, Divya worked with her grandfather Phiroze Illava to rebuild the family’s story through photographs. That work has now become a book, published by the Marseille-based Chose Commune.
How to order
- In India: divyacowasji.com/book
- Rest of the world: chosecommune.com/book/there-are-no-love-letters-here
About the book
An ode, an inheritance, a fantasy.
Within the walls of her nearly 200-year-old ancestral home, Divya Cowasji turns to her family’s past to preserve the stories carried over generations. Part bedtime story, part collective memoir, There Are No Love Letters Here is an effort to memorialise a family history that inevitably splinters with the passage of time.
Inheriting an abundance of archives (the family album, oral histories and treasured objects left behind by those who have since passed), Cowasji begins to piece together the narratives they continue to hold. Soon realising the limited capacity of historical record, she turns to reimagination. Performing the characters embodied by her grandparents, grandaunts, and other relatives, Cowasji creates a porous dialogue between the past and present.
As both narrator and subject of the Cowasji-Illava family history, the author works through wit and humour to parse through the grief of losing many loved ones in the span of one year. Using her own body as an archive, often wearing clothes and accessories of those that came before her, she transforms her inheritance into a site of living history. Placed alongside writing that is both anecdotal and irreverent towards definitive accounts of the past, the photographs expand to celebrate the fragmented nature of memory.
While deeply rooted in one family’s Parsi-Indian experience, There Are No Love Letters Here reflects on broader themes of loss, the weight of ancestry, and the fallacy of a singular historical truth. A fine balance between documentary and fiction, the publication is an intergenerational dialogue of an artist with her spirited lineage. It is ultimately an inquiry into belonging: how do we carry those that came before us within ourselves?
A Parsi story from small-town India
Most writing about Parsi life is set in Mumbai. Divya’s book is set in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh, where her family came to set up distilleries and power houses. She has said that working on the project showed her that this is “the lesser-known history of a majority of Parsis who settled in the smaller towns of India.” Many families across the diaspora will see their own grandparents in these pages.
Some details are very personal and still widely shared. When excerpts were shown at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, Divya photographed herself with her grandmother’s many handbags, each one holding a single comb and handkerchief. Three Parsi women came up to her and said they had found exactly the same thing in their own mothers’ and grandmothers’ closets.
About Divya Cowasji
Divya is a photographer and documentary filmmaker who lives in Mhow. Parsi audiences may know her first through Qissa-e Parsi: The Parsi Story (2014), which she co-directed with Shilpi Gulati. The film was produced by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT) with the Ministry of External Affairs. It won the National Film Award for Best Anthropological/Ethnographic Film and was an official selection in the Indian Panorama at the International Film Festival of India. With humour and warmth, the film looks at Parsi history, the Zoroastrian faith, and the community’s relationship with India and with Mumbai. It is available to watch on YouTube.
She also made The Show Must Go On, about veteran actors of Parsi theatre returning to the stage.
In 2015, an Inlaks Shivdasani Scholarship took her to the International Center of Photography in New York, where she studied alternative and analogue photographic processes. Since then her focus has moved from film to still photography. Her work deals with oral history, archives, home and family, identity, memory and the body, often through performative self-portraiture, the approach that runs through There Are No Love Letters Here. She has talked about this practice at the NCPA in Mumbai and was a featured speaker at the 2025 Indian Photo Festival in Hyderabad. More of her work is on her website and Instagram.
Congratulations, Divya. We hope readers around the world will order a copy, and perhaps go and look through their own family albums and handbags afterwards.