Parsis

Firmly  intertwining  the  personal  with  political  history ,  this  brilliant
novel’s strength  lies  in Keki Nusserwanji Daruwalla’s trademark wit
and  underscored  humour ,  effortlessly  flowing  prose,  and  a
trenchant  grasp  of  the  historic  events  that  are  accorded  an
unconventional  treatment.  It’s  not  a  mere  family  saga,  says
KALYANEE RAJAN

“Of Affaires d'amour and Princely intrigues”, in The Sunday Pioneer Newspaper, 19th June 2016. RNI No. 53466/91, Regd. No. DL ©- 05/1219/2015-2017. Vol. 26, Issue 169. Print.

The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage is the first comprehensive study of the Parsi theatre, colonial South and Southeast Asia’s most influential cultural phenomenon and the precursor of the Indian cinema industry. By providing extensive, unpublished information on its first actors, audiences, production methods, and plays, this book traces how the theatre—which was one of the first in the Indian subcontinent to adopt European stagecraft—transformed into a pan-Asian entertainment industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nicholson sheds light on the motivations that led to the development of the popular, commercial theatre movement in Asia through three areas of investigation: the vernacular public sphere, the emergence of competing visions of nationhood, and the narratological function that women served within a continually shifting socio-political order. The book will be of interest to scholars across several disciplines, including cultural history, gender studies, Victorian studies, the sociology of religion, colonialism, and theatre.

Rohinton Mistry, an Indian Parsi writer who settled in Canada some four decades ago, is a product of postcolonial times. Beginning with Tales from Ferozsha Baag, a collection of short stories, Mistry has written till date three major novels, viz., Such a Long Journey, A Fine Balance and Family Matters besides a novella Scream. In all these fictional works, the community of Indian Parsis is mainly in focus.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Parsis reestablished ties with Zoroastrians in Iran that had languished due to decades-long internal unrest in Iran. In 1854 reformists in India established the Society for the Amelioration of Conditions in Iran and sent a representative to Iran- Maneckji Hataria. Hataria was charged with eliminating the onerous non-Muslim tax owed by the Zoroastrians ( the jaziyeh). Hataria also organized the Iranian Zoroastrian community, and funded a variety of community projects. He also brought Parsi reformist ideas to Iran, and attempted to reshape Iranian religious practice and belief along Parsi lines. This article explores the effects of Parsi reformist ideas on Iran, and Hataria's own writings concerning Zoroastrianism and its relationship to Iranian national identity.

Early nationalist thought in nineteenth-century Iran emphasised the lost glories of the Zoroastrian pre-Islamic past, which it held for a utopian society of refinement, progress, and power destroyed by the advent of Islam. This article aims to show the prominence of this archaistic movement in the early phase of Iranian nationalism by highlighting the impact of an Indian Parsi traveller named Manekji Limji Hataria on nationalist intellectuals. Because of his religious background as a Zoroastrian, Manekji came to be perceived as an emissary of Iran's Golden Age. Fully aware of the potential influence this perception granted him, Manekji endeavoured to disseminate neo-Zoroastrian, pre-Islamic-centred, and frankly anti-Arab/anti-Islamic readings of history among intellectuals, and thus succeeded in having a disproportionate influence on the nationalist definition of Iranian history and identity.

the story of Behram / Warharan / Verethragna Yazata / Mushkil Gusha / Mushkil Aasan told in Dama language.
Telling or reading this story is used to overcome all difficulties for those who tell or hear it.
It will now make Daman Diwan language spoken worldwide.
There are tools helpful to read Daman, and the story in English can be found by searching the web with the proper names included in the story.

This dissertation explores the ways in which the ethnic identity of South Asia's Parsis was forged through litigation in the British colonial courts. The Parsis were Zoroastrians who fled to India after the seventh-century conquest of Persia by Arab Muslims. Under British rule, they became an elite of intermediary traders and professionals. Around 1900, a series of lawsuits erupted on the admission of ethnic outsiders into the Parsi community through intermarriage, conversion, and adoption. This dissertation is a study of the most extensive of these cases, the Privy Council appeal of Saklat v Bella (1914-25). The case erupted when an Indian orphan named Bella was adopted by Parsis in Rangoon, initiated into the Zoroastrian religion, and taken into the Rangoon fire temple, a space arguably desecrated by the presence of ethnic outsiders. Through an examination of case papers and judges' notebooks from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (London) and the Bombay High Court (Mumbai), the dissertation explores competing visions of Parsi identity that were promoted by reformist and orthodox Parsis as litigants, witnesses, lawyers, judges, and journalists. Bella's case highlights two sorts of displacement. First, a patrilineal definition of Parsi identity was overtaken in this period by a more exclusive, eugenics-based racial model. As anxieties over communal extinction peaked with the advent of the census, orthodox Parsis clung to the notion of Persian racial purity, excluding Indian, Burmese, and European outsiders with renewed tenacity. Second, the colonial legal system's reconfiguration of Parsi religious institutions as trusts unravelled the authority of Zoroastrian priests as arbiters of religious doctrine. On a larger scale, Saklat v Bella illustrates how a "centripetal jurisprudence" contributed to the creation of a unitary "legal India" and an empire of common law. It is also a story about legal pluralism and the rise of a non-European legal profession in the colonial context. Parsis rose to prominence as lawyers and judges in this period, and used their legal influence to carve out a space for Zoroastrian legal identity.

The ninth exhibition in the Indian Portrait series focuses on the introduction of Parsi portraiture in India and an insight on their art, culture and education etc. Paintings, photographs, CDVs, cabinet card albums, engravings, lithographs, prints & collectibles etc. are the different mediums that helped to preserve history. It contains over 170 portraits and was exhibited in December 2018.

The paper analyses the request of an Indian Parsi, living and working in the Republic of China, to the British consul in Peking to register his Chinese wife and their three children as British subjects in 1937. To a first marriage, that had been conducted according to the Chinese tradition in 1919, a second marriage followed in 1934. This was celebrated after the conversion of the couple to Catholicism. Of the three children, two sons had been born before the Catholic wedding, while the youngest one, a daughter, was born in 1935. The marriage of an Indian Parsi and a Chinese woman who later converted to Catholicism and married again is certainly an extremely rare event (if not a single one). The archival documents allow a better understanding of various aspects related to the issue of extraterritoriality of British subjects in the Republic of China, as well as the relationship of British institutions and English Common Law with the traditions of religious communities – and in this specific case, the Parsi Zoroastrian community – of the British Raj.

Th e present article surveys some relevant developments of conceptualizations of hell in the Ṛ g-Veda, the Avestan corpus and the Middle Persian (Pahlavi) literature of the Zoroastrians, where hell is more extensively discussed. Th e article concludes by looking at the belief in heaven and hell among the world-wide Zoroastrian diaspora communities, urban laity in Mumbai, and professional priests in Westen India.

Disgusted with ISIS, some Kurds turned away from Islam following the fall of Mosul in 2014. Many became atheists, while others sought comfort in Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism, according to converts, was the “original” religion of the Kurds before they embraced Islam. In 2015, two Zoroastrian centers opened in Sulaimani, both of which are recognized by the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq. Notably, neither has tried to recreate Zoroastrianism the way it is currently and has been historically practiced in Iran and South Asia. Instead, they have created their own versions of Zoroastrianism, which is nationalist, postmodern, and liberal. Kurdish Zoroastrians argue that the reason Kurds are “backward” is Islam. They seek to rectify the present situation through a Kurdish “authenticated” and “original” form of Zoroastrianism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at these two centers, the present article examines this new religious movement in Sulaimani, an important city in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. It analyses the rise and distinctiveness of Kurdish Zoroastrianism looking at how Zoroastrian Kurds articulate their views on Islam, women’s rights, human rights, and Kurdish independence.

Between 17 and 20 November 1921, Bombay was convulsed by the Prince of Wales Riots, which coincided with the arrival of the future King Edward VIII in the city. The riots constituted an extremely important moment in the Non-Cooperation Movement, the political transformation of Bombay and the development of M.K. Gandhi’s political thought. Additionally, the riots upturned familiar notions of communalism: angry at repeated violations of a hartal Gandhi declared for the day of the Prince’s arrival, Muslim and Hindu supporters of the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat movements joined together to attack supposedly loyalist minorities, especially Parsis. Herein lay the riots’ broader significance. During the Non-Cooperation Movement, Gandhi had been keen to recruit the active support of the Parsi community. He was well aware of their financial and political clout and their leadership roles in liberal nationalist circles. Most Parsis, however, expressed strong reservations about Gandhi’s tactics, believing that a mass political movement under the banner of ‘Hindu–Muslim unity’ would be injurious to smaller minority communities. The riots, therefore, confirmed Parsis’ worst fears about Gandhi’s politics and their majoritarian implications. Gandhi, for his part, worked tirelessly to repair his relationships with the Parsis and reassure them of the Congress’ commitments towards minority rights. He reconsidered how smaller communities fit into India’s communal dynamics. By December 1921, Gandhi even unfurled a new slogan that was used towards the end of the Non-Cooperation Movement: ‘Hindu–Muslim–Sikh–Parsi–Christian–Jew unity’.

This article focuses on how the Bombay Scottish missionary-Orientalists John
Wilson (1804–1875), John Stevenson (1798–1858), and John Murray Mitchell
(1815–1904) understood the concept of religion, Christianity, and the structure,
similarity and dissimilarity of “India’s religions.” It examines the foundational
assumptions and methods through which they and other Bombay-based missionaries
denominated some phenomena as religions and as “genuine” expressions of
the religions and used non-Christian religions as instruments to convert Bombay’s
population to Christianity. Such a religiously heterogeneous locale as Bombay
enables one to elucidate: (1) the formation of a taxonomy of world religions
that, with some modifications, remains regnant to this day; and (2) the ways in
which the presuppositions and structural features of the religion concept, Christianity,
and the interpretation of Roman Catholicism as both a false Christianity
and a distinct non-Christian religion helped to fashion particular formations of
language, texts, and practices into isomorphic species of the religion/dharma
genus: Roman Catholic dharma, Jewish dharma, Muslim dharma, Hindu
dharma, Buddha dharma, Jain dharma, and Parsi dharma. An examination of
the Bombay Scottish missionaries’ writing on the religions and their interaction
with Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Parsis, and Adivasis
reveals patterns and presuppositions of religious understanding to a greater
degree than if one were to study how an individual religion alone was imagined.

Rohinton Mistry’s representation of the Parsi race in the contemporary Indian context reflects his postcolonial leanings. The issue of identity is central to his fiction as he feels that the Parsi race has experienced dislocation and exile over a long period in history and is faced with the ugly prospect of total effacement due to their declining numbers. At the same time, Mistry does not believe in some of their taboos like refraining from inter-race matrimonial alliances. This deals a death-blow to the purist view of identity. Besides, his sympathies lie not with the elite but with the underdog even in his own community as in other communities portrayed by him in his fiction. However, when he tries to build bridges between the Parsis and other communities, he banks upon socio-economic matrix rather than the linkages of cultural  history. All this is done in a language liberally sprinkled with words from Indian languages with a befitting postcolonial confidence.

Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917) is today best known as an economic
thinker and an early leader in the Indian nationalist movement.
Between the 1860s and 1890s, however, he was also recognized
as a scholar of Zoroastrianism, sharing his ideas on Parsi religious
reform and ‘authentic’ Zoroastrian belief and practice. Aside from
corresponding with some of the leading European Orientalists of
his day, Naoroji authored papers on Parsi religious belief and
religious reform that were widely distributed and cited in Europe
and North America. Over time, he began to function as an
interlocutor between European Orientalists and the Parsis in India,
disseminating European scholarship amongst his co-religionists
while also facilitating scholars’ patronage of the wealthy Parsi
community. Naoroji’s correspondence with the Oxford philologist
Lawrence H. Mills, in particular, demonstrates this dynamic at
work. These activities point to the oftentimes complex and
collaborative relationships that existed between non-Europeans
and European Orientalists, illustrating the degree to which
European scholars could be dependent on the intellectual,
financial, and logistical assistance of their objects of study.

This chapter in the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism provides an overview of key areas of law affecting Zoroastrians in South Asia (particularly India and Pakistan), Iran, the UK, US, Canada and Australia from the nineteenth century until the present. Its focus is on Parsi personal law (inheritance and marriage) and the law of trusts in India.

Eighteen binary polymorphisms and 16 multiallelic, short-tandem-repeat (STR) loci from the nonrecombining portion of the human Y chromosome were typed in 718 male subjects belonging to 12 ethnic groups of Pakistan. These identified 11 stable haplogroups and 503 combination binary marker/STR haplotypes. Haplogroup frequencies were generally similar to those in neighboring geographical areas, and the Pakistani populations speaking a language isolate (the Burushos), a Dravidian language (the Brahui), or a Sino-Tibetan language (the Balti) resembled the Indo-European-speaking majority. Nevertheless, median-joining networks of haplotypes revealed considerable substructuring of Y variation within Pakistan, with many populations showing distinct clusters of haplotypes. These patterns can be accounted for by a common pool of Y lineages, with substantial isolation between populations and drift in the smaller ones. Few comparative genetic or historical data are available for most populations, but the results can be compared with oral traditions about origins. The Y data support the well-established origin of the Parsis in Iran, the suggested descent of the Hazaras from Genghis Khan's army, and the origin of the Negroid Makrani in Africa, but do not support traditions of Tibetan, Syrian, Greek, or Jewish origins for other populations.

This Festschrift is a collection of articles dedicated to one of the most distinguished scholars of Iranian Studies and a most prolific teacher of Zoroastrian and Kurdish literatures and religions, Philip G. Kreyenbroek. The volume consists of thirteen contributions, brings together some of the best-known experts in their fields to reflect the love and admiration of his students, colleagues and friends and are representative of some of his wide-ranging scholarly interests, including Zoroastrian literature and rituals as well as Iranian philology and mythology.

After the Parsis‘ exodus in 7th Century A.D from Persia in the wake of the Muslim onslaught, they adjusted well in India. However time brought a sea change. My paper through a study of the novels and short stories of Rohinton Mistry depicts how a revered minority from the British colonial times not only fell to the politics of post-Independence India but also a great rift occurred in their own philosophy of life and thinking. Mistry, belonging to the "New Diaspora", has an ambivalent take on migration. My paper acutely travels through the liminality of the hybrid existence of the Parsis. It reflects the Parsi acculturation in the Indian Society and away, which could never do away with their alienation. This resulted in their yearning for a permanence in their roots. My paper critically studies the ambivalent attitude of the Parsi diaspora in the problematic narrative of Mistry.

The judgment notebook of Bombay High Court judge F. C. O. Beaman offers new insights into Petit v Jijibhai (1908), also known as the Parsi Panchayat case. The case is generally taken to stand for the rejection of juddin admission (i.e. the admission of ethnic outsiders) into the Parsi Zoroastrian community. However, Beaman's notebook reveals that the two judges in the case (D. D. Davar and Beaman) were initially in favor of permitting limited conversion; that the position of Davar and the leading expert witness, J. J. Modi, turned against juddin admission in the final month of proceedings; and that ultimately Beaman yielded reluctantly to their view. The article provides a full account of the judicial dynamics at play, historicizing judicial texts that have acquired pre-eminent status--both famously and infamously--in the Parsi community over the past century.

Present paper is an attempt to understand the Parsi Diaspora and Parsi Ethnic Literature. It explores the various dimensions and condition pertaining Parsi-Zoroastrian diaspora and the anxieties of their community as reflected in their ethnic literature.

The South Asian populations have a mosaic of ancestries likely due to the interactions of long-term populations of the landmass and those of East and West Eurasia. Apart from prehistoric dispersals, there are some known population movements to India. In this study, we focussed on the migration of Jewish and Parsi populations on temporal and spatial scales. The existence of Jewish and Parsi communities in India are recorded since ancient times. However, due to the lack of high-resolution genetic data, their origin and affiliation with other Indian and non-Indian populations remains shrouded in legends. Earlier genetic studies on populations of Indian Jews have found evidence for a minor shared ancestry of Indian Jews with Middle Eastern (Jews) populations, whereas for Parsis, the Iranian link was proposed. Recently, in our high-resolution study, we were able to quantify the admixture dynamics of these groups, which has suggested a male-biased admixture. Here, we added the newly available ancient samples and revisited the interplay of genes and cultures. Thus, in this study we reconstructed a broad genetic profile of Indian Jews and Parsis to paint a fine-grained picture of these ethnic groups.