The Parsis

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In the cabinet of the Royal Library at Copenhagen lies a manuscript cataloged K1: a copy of the Vendidad, the Avestan book of purity law, in the sacred tongue with its Pahlavi gloss running beneath. A colophon dates its completion to 1323 in the town of Cambay, on the coast of Gujarat, from an older exemplar now lost. It is the oldest surviving Avestan manuscript in the world — and it was written not in Iran, the homeland of the religion, but in India, in the hand of an Indian priest, four centuries after his ancestors had fled the Iranian plateau by sea. The survival of the old religion of fire ran, by that date, through Gujarat. The people who carried it there are the Parsis: the name means, simply, “the Persians.”

Genealogy: the sea-road from Iran

The Parsis are the Zoroastrians of India, the descendants of those who, after the Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century, chose exile over conversion. The faith they kept was the worship of Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, revealed to the prophet Zarathushtra and transmitted in the Avesta — a religion that had been, for more than a thousand years, the imperial creed of the Iranian kings, from the rock-cut tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam to the Sasanian court. When that empire fell, its religion did not vanish, but it contracted. Some Zoroastrians stayed and endured under Islam as a tolerated, diminishing minority. Others, over generations, moved east — first within Iran, toward Khorasan and the desert margins of Pars, then across the water.

The community’s own memory of how it reached India is preserved in a single text, the Qissa-i Sanjan, the “Story of Sanjan,” composed in Persian verse in 1599 by a priest named Bahman Kaikobad. By the time he wrote, the events he described were already centuries in the past, recovered through oral tradition rather than from any contemporary record; the Qissa is a foundation epic, not a chronicle, and scholars read it as such. Its narrative begins in Greater Khorasan. A band of the faithful, harried in their homeland, make their way to the coast, take ship, and land first on the island of Diu, off the Kathiawar peninsula, where they remain nineteen years. From Diu they sail on, weather a storm at sea — vowing, if delivered, to build a fire-temple in thanksgiving — and come ashore in Gujarat.

There they sought asylum from the local Hindu ruler, whom the Qissa names Jadi Rana. The ruler, the poem says, was wary of the armed strangers and set conditions before he would grant them land: that they explain their religion, that they lay down their weapons, that they adopt the local language and the dress of the country’s women, and that their wedding processions go by night. The refugees agreed. And out of this scene grew the parable by which the community has remembered itself ever since. In the most familiar telling, the ruler sends the newcomers a vessel of milk filled to the brim — the land, he means, is already full, with no room for more. The Zoroastrian leader stirs in sugar, or a ring, without spilling a drop, and sends it back: we will sweeten what is already here, dissolve into it, and overflow nothing. The image is precise about the bargain the Parsis struck — to enrich the land without displacing it, to remain wholly themselves while taking on its surface, its tongue, and its clothes. It is also, read closely, a covenant about endogamy: to dissolve into the milk is to mix invisibly, to add sweetness while keeping no separate substance of one’s own that could be seen, and later tradition treated the conditions Jadi Rana imposed as binding obligations rather than as the price of a single afternoon’s welcome.

The dating of the landing is genuinely uncertain. The Qissa itself, read literally, points to the early tenth century; the figure 936 is often cited from it. Specialists who have weighed the textual and archaeological evidence have argued for an earlier arrival, in the eighth century, with years such as 716 and 765 also defended in the literature. What is not in doubt is the destination and its consequence: Gujarat, and the founding at Sanjan of the first Atash Bahram, the highest grade of consecrated fire, kindled — tradition holds — from sacred implements carried out of Iran. That fire is the thread on which the whole subsequent history hangs.

The sacred fire and the keeping of the elements

In Zoroastrian practice, fire is not worshipped, but it is the visible sign and instrument of asha — truth, the right order of things — and the focus of every act of worship. The highest of the consecrated fires, the Atash Bahram (“Victorious Fire”), is established through an elaborate, year-long rite in which sixteen different fires, drawn from sources that include lightning and the hearths of many trades, are purified and at last combined; once enthroned, such a fire is tended without interruption by priests, fed and kept and never allowed to die. The fire founded at Sanjan came to be called the Iranshah — the “King of Iran” — as though the sovereignty that had been lost on the plateau now resided in the flame itself, a kingship in exile that the community served.

The wandering of that fire traces the history of the Parsis across Gujarat more faithfully than any chronicle. It burned at Sanjan for some six and a half centuries. When a Muslim army overran Sanjan late in the fourteenth century, the priests carried the fire into the Bahrot caves in the hills and kept it there for twelve years, then moved it to the forest of Bansda, and afterward to Navsari, which became for three hundred years the principal seat of the Parsi priesthood. After further moves — to Surat, back to Navsari, to Valsad — the fire reached the small coastal town of Udvada on 28 October 1742, where it burns still. To Udvada the faithful come on pilgrimage; the Iranshah is the oldest continuously burning fire of the Indian Zoroastrians, and the town’s single reason for being. A handful of Atash Bahrams exist in India — several in Mumbai, others at Surat, Navsari, and Udvada — but the Udvada fire holds a primacy of seniority that the others do not.

A Parsi Tower of Silence (dakhma) on Malabar Hill, Bombay, in the 1880s. The dead were laid on the open summit, screened from the city by a ring of garden. — Unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The same logic of purity that surrounds the fire governs the Parsi treatment of the dead, and it is here that the community’s practice is most distinctive and, in modern times, most strained. A corpse, in the Zoroastrian frame, is the seat of Nasu, the corpse-pollution, the most concentrated working of decay and the lie; it must not be permitted to defile the good creations — fire, water, or the earth. Burning the dead would pollute fire; burying them would pollute earth; casting them in water would pollute water. The traditional solution is exposure. The body is carried to a dakhma, a stone tower open to the sky — the English called it, in the colonial period, a “tower of silence” — and laid on its summit, where the sun and the carrion birds reduce it swiftly to bone, and the rains carry what remains away through a central well, the elements left undefiled. The notice of Iranian funerary exposure reaches back to Herodotus, who recorded in the fifth century BCE that the Persians did not bury a man until his body had been torn by bird or dog. On Malabar Hill in Bombay the towers stood within a wooded garden, the Doongerwadi, hidden from the growing city around them.

Priesthood, calendar, and the boundary of the community

The Parsi priesthood is hereditary, passing in the male line within priestly families; a layman is a behdin, “one of the good religion.” Initiation into the faith, for the children of the community, comes through the navjote, the investiture with the sacred shirt (sudreh) and the cord (kushti) that a Zoroastrian thereafter ties and unties in prayer at the watches of the day. The ritual texts are recited in Avestan, a language no longer understood by those who chant it — a sacred tongue preserved, like the fire, by unbroken transmission rather than by comprehension.

Across the long centuries in India, the gravest internal rupture was not over doctrine but over the calendar. The Zoroastrian year of 365 days, lacking the intercalated days that keep a calendar aligned with the seasons, had drifted; over a millennium of separation, the Indian Parsis and the surviving Iranian Zoroastrians fell a full month apart in their reckoning of festivals. In the eighteenth century an Iranian visitor brought the discrepancy to light, and the community split between those who adopted the Iranian count — the Kadmis, “ancients” — and those who kept the inherited Indian one — the Shahenshahis, “imperials.” A third, reformed reckoning, the Fasli, was proposed later. The quarrel was bitter, dividing families and fire-temples; that a question of which day to keep a feast could fracture a community so deeply is a measure of how much, for an exiled people, the calendar carried — it was the shared clock by which a scattered minority knew itself to be one.

The hardest boundary the Parsis drew was around descent. The community is endogamous, and by the strict reckoning of the Indian orthodox center a Parsi is the child of two Parsi parents, or at least of a Parsi father; conversion has not traditionally been accepted, nor, in the orthodox view, the children of Parsi women married outside the community. This was, for many centuries, the very mechanism of survival: a small foreign minority kept its religion intact precisely by refusing to blur at its edges, honoring — as the Qissa told it — the ancient promise to remain unmixed. The same rule that preserved the community would, in time, imperil it.

Reception: the Parsis of Bombay

The transformation of the Parsis from a quiet provincial minority of Gujarat into one of the most influential small communities in the world came with the rise of British Bombay. The city passed to the English Crown in 1661, and the Parsis, with no caste prohibition against crossing the sea and no religious bar to dealing with foreigners, moved into the opening commercial world with extraordinary speed. They became shipbuilders, brokers, merchants, and middlemen between the European traders and the Indian interior.

A Parsi fire temple (agiary) at Calcutta. Beyond Bombay, Parsi merchants founded fire-temples wherever their trade carried them. — Abhijitdas1289, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The names became, in time, the names of modern India. In 1735 a master shipwright named Lowji Nusserwanji took the surname Wadia — “of the trade” — on receiving Company land to build a shipyard; the Wadia yards built warships for the Royal Navy, one of which, launched in 1817, is still afloat as a museum vessel. Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy (1783–1859) built a great fortune in the cotton and opium trade with China, became the first Indian to be made a baronet, and endowed a hospital and an art school in Bombay that still bear his name; his philanthropy set a pattern that the community would follow for generations. Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata (1839–1904) founded what would become India’s iron and steel industry, its early hydroelectric power, and the Indian Institute of Science; the conglomerate that bears the family name remains the largest private industrial house in the country. The scale of Parsi philanthropy — hospitals, schools, libraries, housing, the funding of public works — ran far beyond what the community’s numbers could have predicted.

That same generation gave India some of the founders of its national movement. Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917) — scholar, cotton merchant, and reformer — sat three times as president of the Indian National Congress and, in 1892, won a seat in the British House of Commons for the Liberals at Finsbury Central, the first Indian to enter Parliament. His “drain of wealth” thesis, the argument that British rule was systematically transferring India’s resources to Britain, became one of the most powerful economic indictments of empire and a foundation of Indian nationalist economics. From a community of a few tens of thousands came a disproportionate share of India’s industrialists, its lawyers and judges, its physicians, its reformers, and its early nationalists — a prominence so far out of scale with its size that observers have struggled to account for it.

The Parsis also turned their wealth and connections back toward the homeland they had left. In the nineteenth century a Bombay-funded society dispatched an emissary, Maneckji Limji Hataria, to Iran to aid the remnant Zoroastrian community still surviving in the desert cities of the plateau; through his efforts and British diplomatic pressure, the jizya poll-tax levied on Iranian Zoroastrians was at last abolished in 1882. The exiles, grown prosperous in India, had become the patrons of those who had stayed — a reversal of the original flight, the children of the refugees now reaching back across the water to the homeland their ancestors had abandoned, with money and influence where their forebears had had only a fire and a manuscript.

Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917), Parsi scholar and reformer, the first Indian member of the British House of Commons. — From Sorabji Jehangir, Representative Men of India (1889), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The community that achieved all this is now, by the plainest measure, shrinking. The census of India recorded 57,264 Parsis in 2011, down from 69,601 a decade earlier — a fall of nearly a fifth in ten years, continuing a decline that has run for generations. The arithmetic is unforgiving: deaths far outrun births, marriages come late or not at all, and the strict rules of descent that once preserved the community now narrow the pool from which it can renew itself. The questions this has forced open — whether to accept converts, whether to admit the children of Parsi women who marry out — are debated with real urgency, and the answers divide the more permissive diaspora communities of North America and Iran from the orthodox center in India.

The threat reached even the towers of silence. From the early 1990s the vulture populations of the Indian subcontinent collapsed — the worst-hit species fell to a fraction of a percent of their former numbers — poisoned, it was established, by a veterinary drug, diclofenac, that had entered the carcasses on which they fed. Without the birds, the ancient mechanism of exposure no longer worked as it had. The Bombay community responded with solar reflectors to hasten the desiccation of the dead, with support for vulture-breeding programs, and, among some families, with a turn to cremation or burial — each option contested, none uncontested, the oldest of the community’s practices now bound up with an ecological accident no one foresaw.

A people defined by what it carried out of a vanished empire, the Parsis kept a fire alight across a thousand years and two homelands, and built, on the strength of that continuity, a place in the modern world altogether larger than themselves. The same flame still burns at Udvada, tended hour by hour, the sovereignty of a lost Iran lodged now in a small Gujarati town by the sea.

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