Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian
Subject: Parsees on road to extinction 
From: udcrusd@meaddata.com (Sylvia D'Cruz)
Date: 18 Aug 92 18:37:35 +1000
Keywords: Parsees

Organization: Mead Data Central, Dayton OH
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 18:30:28 GMT
Distribution: soc.culture.indian

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                         Copyright 1992 Southam Inc.
                                 Calgary Herald

                    August  11, 1992, Tuesday, FINAL EDITION

Unique people on road to extinction

DEREK BROWN, THE GUARDIAN

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   Parsees are easily the most materially successful of India's scores of
linguistic, religious and ethnic communities.

   They have flourished for generations in trade, manufacture, the professions
and politics. They are the most literate, and perhaps the most progressive, too.
And they are dying out.

   There never were many of these gifted, admired and remarkable people. In
1961, after more than 1,200 years in India, Parsees contributed 100,072 names to
the national census. In 1971, there were 91,226; in 1981, 71,630. Religious
definitions were dropped in last year's census, but the latest estimate of the
Parsee population is just 58,000.

   Within this shrinking community, and among their ancestors, are some of the
most remarkable people in India and its history. Men like Jamshetji Wadia,
founder of the  Bombay  shipbuilding industry, began business empires which
flourish to this day.

   Renowned for honesty as well as enterprise, they mixed their acumen with
philanthropy, building hospitals, schools and colleges.  Bombay's  more
respected hospital today is known universally and simply as the JJ, in
respectful memory of Sir Jamshetji Jeejeebhoy, first Parsee baronet, who lived
in princely splendor and was a river of charity in the first half of the 19th
century.

   Then there were Dadabhoy Naorowji, the first Indian member of the British
House of Commons (Conservative, Central Finsbury) in the 1890s, and Shapurji
Saklatvala (Communist, Battersea) in the 1920s.

   Today, the great business houses of Wadia and Godrej are among the leading
enterprises of India. The greatest of them all, the house of Tata, was headed
until a few years ago by perhaps the most respected man in the sub-continent,
Jehangir 'J.R.D.' Tata, now 88.

   The very names of the Parsees testify to their success. In the early 19th
century they largely abandoned their system of patronyms and adopted western
surnames to accommodate the new British masters. Many took the names of their
trades or manufactures, calling themselves Engineer, Contractor, Boatwala,
Tobaccowala, Africawala, Readymoney and so on. There are, in the  Bombay  phone
book, several families of Sodawaterwalas and, according to a gently
self-deprecating Parsee joke, there once was a gentleman in a small
manufacturing business called Sodawaterbottleopenerwala.

   And yet for all their wealth of achievement - and achievement of wealth - the
Parsees are slowly fading from the tapestry of Indian life.

   One reason is the strict injunction against conversion to the Zoroastrian
faith, imported by the first Parsees who had fled Persia to escape persecution
by the invading Arabs. According to community legend, those ancient immigrants
were received kindly by a Hindu ruler in present-day Gujerat state. He granted
land and permitted freedom of worship. In return, the Parsees promised never
to proselytise for the world's oldest monotheistic religion. In modern times the
ban on conversion has weakened, but Parsees have acquired a distinct ethnic
identity as well as a separate faith.

   "You may become a Zoroastrian by conversion, but you can never become a
Parsee," said Jehangir Patel, editor and publisher of the community's monthly
magazine, Parseeana.

   Another cause of the accelerating decline is emigration. A steady stream of
Parsees has flowed to Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. In all
these places, as in India, they are prospering, and even increasing.

   But unlike in India, the emigrant Parsees tend not to be bound by the strict
- some might say suicidal - community laws on marriage.

   Time was when any Parsee who married outside the community was automatically
regarded as an outcast, along with his or her children. For most of this
century, though, the children of Parsee husbands and non-Parsee wives have been
admitted to the faith and the community.

   Mixed-marriage children of Parsee-born wives, however, are not.

   This blatant discrimination is often blamed for the inexorable decline of a
community which mixes a liberal view of mixed marriages with strict rules on
admission of the resulting children.

   But there is yet another, much more obvious cause: Parsees are strangely
reluctant to get married and, when they do, to have children.

   A scholarly survey of last year found that among more than 7,000 adult
Parsees, there were 44.8 per cent unmarried males and 37.9 per cent unmarried
females.

   Even when they do marry, Parsees have small families. Their average of 1.6
children is well under the replacement rate.

   Bachi Karkaria, a senior Times of India journalist who has written
extensively about her people's plight, talks of the paradox of a community which
is dying not because it is primitive but because it is too sophisticated.

   "The rest of India seems to have no difficulty procreating on the pavement,
or in tiny rooms a few feet square. But we Parsees all want to have homes of our
own, and that is working against the regeneration of the community," she said.

   Karkaria is also impatient - like many Parsee women - with the notorious
reluctance of the men to marry. She attributes this in part to a fear of
mothers, or mothers-in-law. "I can't offer any other reason why they take so
long. Women don't have this problem, but they are forced to marry outside the
community.

   "They can't wait forever for Parsee men to get their act together," she said.

   In such a rich and enlightened community - less than two per cent of all
Parsees are illiterate - it may seem odd that so many men have difficulty
funding a marriage. But that ignores the huge cost of housing in  Bombay,  where
the Parsees are overwhelmingly concentrated, and the considerable disparity of
wealth within the community.

   "The bulk of our people are middle class, but there is poverty, too,"
Jehangir Patel said. "Poverty, in our community, doesn't mean that people are
deprived of food and clothing.

   "There is not the abject poverty you see elsewhere in India, but by middle-
class standards they are still poor, and that deters them from marrying."

   For Parsees in true need, there are charitable hospitals and trust funds
galore. That is one reason, according to some, why modern generations have been
less inclined to build new business empires, and why the elders of the community
are anxious not to relax the strict marriage rules. More Parsees would mean
spreading the trust money more thinly.

   In October there will be an elaborate election for the seven members of the
Parsee Panchayat (council), which runs the community's secular affairs. There is
little excitement among Parsees about the poll for a deeply conservative body.

   More controversial is a movement which has lately sprung up among Parsee
spouses in mixed marriages who are campaigning for the right of all children in
such marriages to be admitted to the faith, and by implication to become
Parsees.

   In religious terms, that means three things: the ceremonial adoption of the
sacred thread; admission to the agiaries or sacred fire temples which are
strictly closed to non-Paris; and the right to be interred in the Towers of
Silence.

   To many outsiders, these last hold a compulsive, rather morbid, interest.
Parsees hold earth and fire, like the other elements, to be sacred.

   Rather than pollute the earth by burial or fire by cremation, they place
their dead on a grill within an enclosure (called a tower) and leave them to be
consumed by vultures. It is an ecologically impeccable practice and of deep
emotional significance.

   Two years ago, there was profound shock in the community when a woman who had
married a non-Parsee died in an accident and was denied interment in a tower.

   In the face of a barrage of criticism, the priests (most of whom are now
part- time, the calling having little attraction for young sons of hereditary
clergy) agreed that a unused tower should be made available for such cases.

   The campaign for reform continues, but even among the enlightened there is a
wistful awareness that Parsees may be courting a different sort of extinction if
they relax the rules.

   Bachi Karkaria, for example, talks of the community elders as "fuddy-duddies"
and bemoans the bias against women in the marriage rules. But she also talks of
the risk of "mental and physical degradation" of the community, should it admit
all children of mixed marriages.

   "Parsees are by nature non-controversial," she said. Even though they are
articulate and feisty within their own groups, when it comes to the real crunch,
they draw back."

   (Brown is a writer with The Guardian.)