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Journalism of Courage
Nestled in a quiet corner of Mumbai’s bustling Fort district is a neo-Gothic building that once served as a maternity ward for destitute Parsis. The Parsi Lying-in Hospital, where Feroze Gandhi was born, is now largely vacant, its peeling paint and unkept vegetation emblematic of decades of decay.
The only occupants are a small and dedicated team that runs Parsiana, a fortnightly magazine that reports on the Parsi community. By October, they too will depart, consigning the space and the publication to history.
Jehangir Patel, a Yale alumnus, has overseen Parsiana since 1973, when he acquired it from a relative for just one rupee.
In an interview with indianexpress.com, he recalls the first edition of Parsiana published under his tenure. Its cover story focused on the rising rate of Parsi divorces. “We tried to frame divorce as liberation from unhappy circumstances, rather than a stigma,” he says, “but the backlash from the community was immense.” Later, he would publish interfaith matrimonial announcements, further raising the ire of Bombay’s small but significant Parsi population.
In many ways, Parsiana’s closure draws parallels to the plight of the Parsi community — aging and leaving behind a legacy that few youth care to take forward.
The Parsis were once the “model moderns” of India, says historian Simin Patel, daughter of Jehangir. They arrived from Iran a thousand years ago, clutching their prophet Zoroaster’s fire, and offered a parable to explain themselves. A Rajput king showed them a vessel of milk, filled to the brim, to signal that there was no room for strangers. The Parsis’ priest dropped in a spoonful of sugar. Parisis, he demonstrated, would provide sweetness without displacement.
For centuries, they kept to themselves. No conversions. No intermarriage. Outsiders were not allowed to enter their fire temples or burial grounds. In Iran, these rules softened. In India, they hardened.
The Parsis originally settled in Gujarat but when the British acquired the swampy islands of Bombay in 1662, they soon arrived as carpenters and shipbuilders. Bombay’s first Parsis were poor Gujaratis willing to take risks in a place swarming with mosquitoes and devoid of infrastructure. A man named Wadia built ships for the East India Company, turning his descendants into tycoons. The opium trade made them rich and philanthropy made them loved. By the mid-1800s, Parsis were a small but influential part of Bombay’s population, dominating the city’s trade, cotton mills, banks, and schools.
They spoke English. They built the stock exchange and Regal Cinema. They funded hospitals, libraries, and colleges. They dressed in a way that even Mahatma Gandhi thought worth copying. They seemed, as anthropologist Tanya Lurhmann put it in The Good Parsi (1996), “almost English.”
Parsi culture is hard to pin down, but it lives most vividly in its colonies, customs, and style.
The Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP), one of the city’s biggest landlords, controls over 5,000 flats across Mumbai. Their clusters, called baugs, often bear the donor family’s name. Built in the early twentieth century for the poor and middle class, they remain enclaves of order. Families pass leases down through generations with many descendants now firmly upper-middle-class.
Cusrow Baug on Colaba Causeway is the grandest, with hundreds of flats circling a fire temple, its gates flanked by Persian bulls. The Dadar Parsi Colony was born of plague in the 1890s, when Mancherji Edulji Joshi persuaded the British to set aside land for a model neighbourhood. Granted a 999-year lease, he even chose the flowers for the streets.
Peshaan Khajotia grew up in Cusrow Baug, as did four generations before him. He looks and sounds the archetypal bawa (a colloquial term used to refer to Parsi men), but his decade-long relationship with a woman – “Parsi only from her mother’s side” – left him wrestling with the faith’s strict boundaries. Now, preparing to be the first in his family to leave, he calls baug life “a bubble.” Insular but privileged with families occupying a 1,600-square-foot flat for around Rs 10,000 a month.
That shelter breeds intergenerational ties. “You can have a 35-year-old hanging out with 60- and 20-year-olds,” Khajotia says, recalling his grandmother’s “thriving social life.” Now in her eighties, she still gathers nightly in the Cusrow Baug courtyard with the same friends she’s known since childhood.
Parsi homes carry this continuity. Even cramped flats brim with heirlooms — Chinese vases, mahogany chests and Victorian furniture. On Malabar Hill, airy apartments still hold rosewood screens and portraits of Zarathustra, haloed in gold.
Meals, too, are distinctive. Lunch starts with soup, ends with custard or ice cream, and in between comes fried fish or dhansak (lentils with meat,) alongside vegetables, chips, and cutlets. Not Indian, not English but entirely Parsi.
So too are the clubs. Parsis are fixtures at Willingdon, CCI, and Bombay Gymkhana, though the Ripon Club, founded in 1884 by Pherozeshah Mehta, remains their own. Once a nationalist hub, it endures as a favourite lunch spot at the heart of the city, open only to Parsi men.
Identity is anchored in tradition. At the navjote initiation, children don a sacred shirt and cord meant to be worn for life. One initiate admitted the only dreaded part was sipping consecrated bull urine, a tradition rooted in an ancient Iranian belief that the elixir cleansed one’s body.
Parsis are also known for their manner. Pragmatic, cheerful, “a little like hobbits,” as Lurhmann put it. Encapsulating that sentiment, in A Fine Balance (1995), Parsi author Rohinton Mistry wrote, “if you fill your face with laughing, there will be no room for crying.”
Hirji Jehangir comes from an illustrious family whose legacy is littered across the city. Jehangir Art Gallery, Kurla Mills, Mumbai University, Elphinstone College, and the Bombay Stock Exchange are just a sliver of his ancestors’ contributions to Bombay. Yet Hirji is modest to a fault. “I’m just a descendant,” the aspiring law student says, “I’m nobody.”
Hirji recalls realising his identity at school, saying, “my first idea of being a Parsi came from my friends. There is so much affection towards us that you start to see yourself the way they do.”
In Istanbul (2003), Orhan Pamuk describes the dualistic nature of growing up in Turkey’s most famed city. There’s pride but also melancholy, a feeling Pamuk calls huzun, meaning a collective nostalgia.
Art curator Niyash Mistry embodies this sentiment. Having lived in India, Germany, Turkey, America, Dubai, and now Canada, he says, “ we grew up hearing how great the Parsis were, but for those born in the eighties and nineties, the question became: if they were so great, what does that make me?”
He describes Parsis as “living in old homes, with intergenerational memories and objects” and struggles with the caricature of the “quirky, odd” Parsi. “When there’s a performative aspect to it, you grapple with the sense of—who am I, really?”
From a peak of 1,14,000 in the 1940s, the Parsi population has steadily declined, shrinking by about 10 per cent every decade. The 2011 census recorded just 57,000 across India, most clustered in the city. A 2011 study in Demographic Research warned that, unless marriage and fertility patterns change, Mumbai’s Parsis could dwindle to under 20,000 by 2051.
This alarm is not new. As far back as 1975, The New York Times described the community as “melancholy… its numbers declining, younger members leaving India, and ritual the object of controversy.” That diagnosis still resonates. Roughly a third of Parsis never marry. Those who do often wait until their thirties or forties and have just one child, if any. Migration drains more still, says Jehangir.
Over the decades, leaders have experimented with ways to slow the fall. The BPP offers subsidised housing, cash allowances and incentives for couples with more than one child.
In 2013, the Indian government launched the Jiyo Parsi scheme, offering free fertility treatments to struggling couples. The then minority affairs minister, Najma Heptulla, described it as a civilisational duty.
“This is a small step to pay our debt to the Parsi community for their contribution to the country. We cannot afford to lose this community.”
Despite such efforts, decline remains the subject that dominates Parsi debates, many of them carried in the pages of Parsiana. As photographer Sooni Taraporevala wrote, “it is a fact that obsesses us—whether we fear our demise or deny it… it is an issue we never tire of, that we debate and fight over endlessly with passion.”
The evidence of decline is visible in daily life. Restaurants and clubs often resemble senior citizens’ gatherings and Parsi-owned businesses struggle to find successors. “Most of the photographs are of older people; you hardly see youngsters,” says Jehangir. “At talks, lectures, functions, it’s always an older crowd. The young people aren’t involved.”
So why, exactly, is the community shrinking? Some stress personal choice. Marriage, Jehnagir explains, “has become almost optional. A man doesn’t have to marry. A woman doesn’t have to have children.” What once looked like rebellion now feels like freedom.”
Generational distance matters too. A century ago, two-thirds of marriages were arranged. By the mid-20th century, it was half. Choice brought freedom but also the freedom to delay or decline. And when couples do marry, they often stop at one child.
While older Parsis lament these demographics trends, younger ones often celebrate them. “Marriage is a choice, not an imposition,” says Hirji. “The modern Parsis are in step with the world.”
When the issue of dwindling marriage rates amongst Parsis are discussed, geography is often cited. “More than half of Bombay Parsis don’t live in colonies,” Viraf Mehta, the youngest chairman in the history of the BPP, says. “Those colonies created a built-in dating pool. Outside them, your circle shrinks. The chance of meeting a partner is less.”
Gender adds another wrinkle. Parsi women have excelled as lawyers, restaurateurs, and entrepreneurs, often outpacing men. “On a purely individual level, the boys haven’t kept up,” Mehta says. “I tell them: you need to buck up.”
This demographic reality feeds into broader cultural anxieties. Some, like Khojeste Mistree, link it to values. He gave up a lucrative career as a chartered accountant to study Zoroastrianism, convinced that the faith’s emphasis on “good living”, meaning rest, food, laughter, and joy, was misunderstood as liberalism.
“Good living does not mean one is liberal,” he insists. “We can enjoy life by marrying within the fold, by bringing up children with a value system that comes from our religion.”
Mistree rejects the idea that Parsis are on the brink of extinction. “Globally, our numbers are about the same as they have been for 20 years,” he argues, “though I’m not talking about ‘new’ Zoroastrians who come in by the back door.” Historian Dinyar Patel is less convinced, stating that refusing to acknowledge the decline is “ostrich-like – people not willing to confront the obvious.”
Others point to interfaith marriage as the key fault line. Once, a fraction of Parsis wed outside the community. Today, it is closer to half, growing each year. That shift unsettles traditionalists who see it not only as demographic loss but as cultural dilution.
Even rituals of death reflect the community’s fragility.
In the 1970s, from the rooftops of Malabar Hill, seeing vultures encircle the Towers of Silence was a familiar sight. However, since the prevalence of diclofenac, a popular pain-killing drug, vultures no longer roam the Parsis’ most famous burial ground.
Mehta has proposed constructing an aviary to revive the practice. “Donors are ready,” he says, “but if diclofenac is in a cadaver, the vultures die in a day.”
The anxieties extend beyond ritual. Many worry that Parsis no longer display the philanthropy that once defined them. “Parsis looked after their own,” recalls Jehangir Patel. “They had colonies, hospitals, schools. Without that, many would never have survived. Today, when people ask what institutions we’ve got, the answers are fewer than before.”
Firoza Mistree, a historian and cofounder of the Framji Dadabhoy Alpaiwalla Museum, adds to that sentiment, stating that, “charity was our identity. In the last fifty years, that spirit has eroded. The younger generation doesn’t know the religion or the roots. The glue that held us together is gone.”
Technology compounds the problem. “When I was growing up, we read,” Khojeste says. “Today, no one reads, so no one understands what it means to be Parsi on a spiritual level. For a community as small as ours, that ignorance is magnified.”
And then there is culture itself. “The very Western lifestyle we adopted now undermines us,” Khojeste argues.
Simin Patel, who has chronicled Bombay’s changing face, posits a poignant reminder of Bombay’s material loss. “When we talk about a dwindling community, we forget the landscape that goes with it – with redevelopment, the institutions, the houses the Parsis built are being torn down. Their disappearance is part of our disappearance.”
What emerges from all these perspectives is not a single cause but a convergence of small, rational choices: a preference for independence, privacy, education, and modern lifestyles. None is inherently destructive. Together, they form a pattern.
Yet perhaps the most significant factor, many argue, is the Parsi red line on conversion.
When the first Zoroastrians arrived on India’s western coast more than a thousand years ago, they made a promise to their Hindu hosts that they would never seek converts. Over time, what began as a pragmatic assurance hardened into doctrine. Tribalism kept the group intact – a community within a community. For centuries, it worked brilliantly. In the twenty-first century, it feels like slow suicide.
As to why Parsis don’t accept converts, Khojeste puts the fear plainly. “Do you realise that if we opened our doors to conversion, there’d be a terrible backlash? Today, no one guards our fire temples. Tomorrow, if we allowed converts, there would be trouble at the gates.”
For him, survival has always meant insularity. The Parsis fled Iran, he reminds me, to preserve their faith, not to dilute it. Maintaining purity is not just a necessity but a practice that keeps Parsi culture distinct and alive.
The inherent instinct to draw boundaries became law at the dawn of the 20th century, in what is now remembered as the Tata case.
Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata married a French woman, Suzanne Brière. She converted, underwent a navjote initiation, and Tata argued that she was entitled to full rights: access to fire temples, burial in the Towers of Silence, and everything else a ‘pure’ Parsi could avail of. The community balked.
In 1908, Judge Dinshaw Davar of the Bombay High Court delivered a Solomonic compromise. Yes, Zoroastrianism allowed conversion. But a Parsi was not simply a Zoroastrian; a Parsi was a descendant of the original Persian émigrés. Mrs Tata could join the faith, but she could not become Parsi. Her children, however, could.
The distinction seems arcane, but it set the pattern that holds to this day: Parsi identity flows through the father. A man may marry outside his community, and his children remain Parsi. A woman who does the same risks ostracism, sometimes even exclusion from her parents’ funerals.
The rules are enforced not just by custom, but by economics. In Mumbai, Parsi colonies offer subsidised housing in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets. Leaders fear that admitting ‘outsiders’ would invite opportunists who want the perks without the heritage. “We are caretakers of what our ancestors gave us,” Mehta explains. “These properties were meant for Parsis. We can’t open the gates as we are bound by tradition and law.”
The younger generation is less convinced. “People used to warn that if we opened housing to everyone, converts from Brazil or Central Asia would flood Bombay,” historian Dinyar Patel recalls. “It was absurd then, and it’s absurd now.”
For Mistry, the problem is that debates over marriage and conversion dominate the discourse, alienating youth who might otherwise find meaning in their heritage. “There’s an intuitive relatability in Zoroastrian ideas,” he says. “But when everything is about who you can marry, or whether you’re legitimate, it becomes suffocating.”
Hirji takes the long view. The Parsis, he says, are not outsiders clinging to Iran, but a group that has adopted Indian sensibilities over time. They speak Gujarati, eat dhansak, wear sarees and sudrehs in equal measure. “We forget how Indian we are,” he says. “Our rituals, our food, our language are all shaped here. Change is the only constant.”
If the story of the Parsis is one of numbers in decline, it is also one of extraordinary resilience. The community has responded with a mosaic of efforts — practical, cultural, religious, and social — that aim less at reversing demographic trends than at preserving identity, memory, and continuity.
One set of initiatives targets the most basic challenge: births.
The BPP, for instance, provides Rs 5,000 a month for a family’s second child until the age of 18. The idea, as Mehta puts it, is simple: “We are here to help. We need Parsis to help us grow our numbers and take our community forward, and we, in turn, will do everything we can to make it easier.”
Housing has been another focus. For decades, the complaint was that young Parsis delayed marriage because they could not secure affordable flats. “No houses, no spouses,” Dinyar Patel quips. Thousands of new apartments were eventually built in Mumbai, yet the effect on marriage rates was limited.
Beyond demographics, there are efforts to keep Parsi culture visible in the wider world. Restaurants like SodaBottleOpenerWala in India and Dishoom in London have built thriving brands around Parsi cuisine, offering a kind of commercial simulacrum of the old Irani cafés.
The Framji Dadabhoy Alpaiwalla Museum, founded in 1952, has been recently renovated to showcase the long arc of Zoroastrian history, from Achaemenian and Sasanian Iran to the arrival of Parsis in India. Visitors are offered guided tours and even a walk-in replica of a Bombay fire temple, a way to demystify rituals usually closed to outsiders.
“When you share a culture, you also enhance it,” Firoza Mistree, co-founder of the museum, explains. “It makes it important for other people to preserve it as well.”
Simin Patel is attempting to digitise the entire catalogue of Parsiana from the 1960s onward, making it available to researchers, journalists, and the curious public. For her, it’s about keeping her father’s legacy alive while preserving a magazine that served as both a chronicler and an archive for the Parsi community.
“He always kept the subscription price too low, even when subscribers told him to raise it, because he wanted everyone to have access,” she says. By digitising the publication, she hopes to continue providing that access.
Education for the youth is also central.
The Holiday Programme for Youth, running since the 1980s, gathers 15- and 16-year-olds from across the world for a month in Mumbai. The mix is deliberate, with lectures on Zoroastrianism alongside talks by doctors, lawyers, artists, and entrepreneurs. The goal is not catechism but confidence. To give teenagers entering college both a grounding in their faith and exposure to the successes of their community.
“These are impressionable years,” explains Mehta. “They’re beginning to shape their belief systems, so we bring them role models from every field.”
At the heart of cultural survival, however, are the small rituals of community life: festivals, sports meets, dramatic competitions, medical camps, and even neighbourhood quizzes.
Even abroad, community life acts as glue. In Canada or the UK, Parsis from Bombay and Karachi maintain bonds over food, memories of clubs, or seasonal prayers. “It’s not necessarily about religious rituals,” Niyash Mistry explains. “It’s more the sense of identity, the familiarity of talking about life at home.”
Yet decline continues. “It still will not reverse the rate,” Mehta concedes. Apps and socials may create encounters, but they cannot overcome the larger trends.
And so the community turns back to its mirror. For nearly half a century, Parsiana was that mirror: unflinching, sometimes unkind, but always honest. It reminded Parsis of who they were and what they might yet become.
Its closure feels, as one reader told Hirji, “like a family member had passed away.” For Parsis who believe in Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good Deeds, the question now is whether those values can survive without the people and institutions that once gave them voice.
