Community
who belongs, how you join, how it is organized
The mobeds.
Priesthood is hereditary through the male line of priestly families, so no layman can become one however qualified — which in a shrinking population is an arithmetic problem. Training is years of memorising Avestan. The number of practising priests in India is in the low hundreds and falling, and fire temples have closed for want of one.
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The keepers of the fire.
A faith that once ruled empires now numbers perhaps 120,000 — and its fiercest internal debate is whether opening the doors would save it or dissolve it.
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Parsis and Iranis.
The same religion in two communities with different histories. The Parsis left Iran for Gujarat over a millennium ago and became Gujarati-speaking; the Iranis came in the nineteenth century fleeing persecution, speak the Dari dialect of Yazd and Kerman, and kept a different calendar. In Iran itself Zoroastrians are a constitutionally recognised minority with a reserved parliamentary seat.
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Who holds the property.
The Bombay Parsi Punchayet is the custodian of the fire temples, the Towers of Silence and a very large stock of subsidised housing in one of the most expensive cities on earth. Its elections are fiercely fought, and control of housing allocation has been an instrument in the argument about who counts as a Parsi.
⚖ contested within
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Who counts.
Indian orthodoxy holds that conversion is barred — citing the terms on which the refugees were admitted at Sanjan — and that a woman who marries a non-Zoroastrian is out, along with her children, while a man in the same position is not. Iranian and North American bodies disagree and accept converts. Indian courts have been asked to rule on it more than once.
⚖ contested within
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The numbers.
About 114,000 Parsis in India in 1941; about 57,000 in 2011. The fertility rate is around one child per couple, roughly a third marry outside the community and roughly a third never marry at all. The Indian government funds a fertility programme called Jiyo Parsi, whose advertising the community has itself found objectionable.
⚖ contested within
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The vultures are gone.
India lost well over ninety-five percent of its vultures from the early 1990s, poisoned by diclofenac given to cattle. Without them the towers do not work. Solar concentrators were installed at Doongerwadi and fail in the monsoon; a prayer hall opened at the Worli crematorium in 2015 for families choosing cremation, and some priests refuse to officiate there.
⚖ contested within
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Outside India and Iran.
Roughly a quarter of the world's Zoroastrians now live elsewhere — Toronto, Chicago, London, Sydney, the Gulf. The centres built there serve as temple, hall and community club at once, and the North American associations have generally admitted converts and the children of mixed marriages, which the Bombay institutions do not recognise. The religion is quietly becoming two.
held by most
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