Can the great decline of the Parsis be stemmed?

Extinction is perhaps now guaranteed, whether via closed doors or open

It is Parsi new year today (August 15), Navroz. India’s Iranis, our fellow Zoroastrians who arrived a millennium later, celebrate theirs on March 21, the vernal equinox. At 57,264 in the 2011 Census, we could just about have filled Mumbai’s DY Patil stadium. After the ongoing count, we could do so even while lying down. Our numbers have been falling by nearly 18% in every all-India tally. The projection for 2101 is 9,599, relegating the community to a “tribe”.

If preserving faith and distinctive culture is the argument, any skew should in fact favour the intermarried Parsi woman since the mother remains the more significant “upbringer” even in the new, supposedly equity-favouring parenting paradigms (HT Archive)

Parsi population has showed negative growth since 1971; but even as early as 1882, the annual increase had shrank to well under 1%. Our compromised gene pool is both the cause and result of inbreeding — and it has had an alarming impact on fertility. The Union government’s 2013 ‘Jiyo Parsi’ project aimed at stemming the decline of India’s Parsi population, mainly by financing assisted reproduction. Well intentioned as that was, the initiative helped add just 550 babies in 10 years, and it is not a surprise that it had to be expanded and updated (for instance, with a new portal for beneficiaries).

Being Parsi is inseparable from being Zoroastrian, ethnic identity underpinned by the Navjote ceremony which inducts every Parsi-born child into the religious identity. But who can be considered “Parsi” when only the one with the “right” parent is entitled to this vital “passport”?

Blame the 1908, yes 1908!, Beaman-Davar ruling of the Bombay High Court which held that “non-Parsis” could “not be legally converted to enjoy the benefits of Parsi religious trusts, funds, and fire temples”. Fair enough. But then the judges cemented patrilineal descent requirements for community membership, by confining the definition of “Parsi” to only those who had a Parsi father. The patriarchal stranglehold continues, with the steadfast rejection of later enlightenments on gender equality — all this in a community whose women are arguably more liberated compared to most of their Indian peers.

Girls are brainwashed into marrying only a Parsi. Choosing a parjaat has become tantamount to driving this exceptional race to extinction. Women submit (or remain single), not for high-minded community reasons, but because disobeying extracts a huge personal, emotional price with much rancour within families and the community. Not just her children, arbitrary strictures would have turned her too into an outsider if she dared disobey. Debarred from community spaces, she would not have been able to attend even the traditional last rites of her parents. All this despite being wed under the safeguards of the Special Marriages Act.

Rationally, the “outcaste” children of a Parsi-born woman and parjaat man are as much Parsi-Zoroastrian in spirit as the “kosher” ones with only a Parsi father, if not more so.

If preserving faith and distinctive culture is the argument, any skew should in fact favour the intermarried Parsi woman since the mother remains the more significant player in terms of bringing up the children even in the new, supposedly equity-favouring parenting paradigms. Allowed in, her children could boost the falling numbers, and be more “truly” Zoroastrian than those who are Zoroastrian in letter but not much else.

But the so-called traditionalists still talk of male “seed” vis-à-vis “mere female soil”, as if the two can be mutually exclusive. Outrageously, surrogacy, suggested by some as the “only” solution, was to be allowed only with Parsi sperm. In these quarters, “progressive” is actually a hiss-word.

Much of the “dilution” paranoia centres on the huge community assets, but the long drawn-out legal battles have been for more humane access. Goolrukh Gupta’s is for intermarried Parsi women’s rights to enter fire temples and towers of silence. Prochy Numi Mehta’s is for the rights of the children of her intermarried daughter, notably in the sporting activities where this whole family has excelled. Piquantly, her husband is a trustee of the city’s Parsi Punchayat, but the properties it handles remain governed by old, exclusivist trust deeds. In 2021, Sanaya Dalal and her Sindhi husband, Rishi Kishnani, (who’s half-Parsi, but from the “wrong” half) challenged the 1908 judgment in the Supreme Court because their son was barred from playing with his “full” Parsi friends in Mumbai’s Dadar Parsi colony club.

Sadly, as the Sabarimala case made amply clear, however constitutionally untenable, rectifying judgments are no match for religion’s traditional stranglehold. Lawmakers don’t even want to enter that turbulent Charybdis. However, intermarriage per se is Catch-22, adding viable numbers but diluting identity. Extinction is perhaps now guaranteed, whether via closed doors or open.

Migration significantly depleted India’s Parsi population. Can it now boost survival? Today almost an equal number of Parsis resides abroad. But, even though orthodoxy immigrated alongside, by the latest confirmed year, 2011, in North America, 59.4% had intermarried — significantly up from 43% in 2001.

Iranian Zoroastrians, with no sub- continental history, self-identify simply as ‘Jarrthostis’ and often exert a moderating influence on diaspora associations — all of which, btw, have only a Z in their acronym, no P.

There’s an argument that globally, Parsis, may cease to exist but Zoroastrianism will flourish. This is unthinkable in India, where our very identity began. ‘Persepolis’ may mean ‘city of Persi’, the Zoroastrian tribe from Pars, in southwest Persia. The tomb of Darius the Great in Naqsh-i-Rustam, necropolis of the Achaemenid dynasty (550-330 BC), may declare, “Parsa parsahya puthra ariya ariyachitra” (Parsi, the son of a Parsi, an Aryan, son of an Aryan). But, the universally understood, formal term refers only to the “ethno-religious community” descended from those intrepid refuge-seekers who, some 12 centuries ago, fled their ancient homeland to safeguard our 3,000-year-old Zoroastrian faith.

Bachi Karkaria is a senior journalist. The views expressed are personal