Charity is structured around the shared meal rather than the individual gift. The gahambar requires the whole community to eat together six times a year with everyone contributing according to means, and the obligation falls on attendance as much as on giving. The historical development of this in India is disproportionate to any reasonable expectation. Parsi charitable trusts, funded largely by nineteenth-century Bombay trading fortunes, built and endowed hospitals, dispensaries, schools, colleges, orphanages, libraries and large subsidised housing colonies — much of it open to all communities, not only to Parsis. Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, Jamsetji Tata, the Wadias and the Petits are the names attached to a very substantial share of Bombay's nineteenth and twentieth-century civic infrastructure. A community that has never exceeded roughly 130,000 people worldwide left an institutional footprint on Indian public life out of all proportion to its size, and the internal explanation given for this is the gahambar principle extended.