The potential impact of intermarriage on the population decline of the Parsis of Mumbai, India

Abstract The Parsis, a community of Iranian descent, are an important ethno-religious minority group in India. Over the past few decades this group has shown a sharp numerical decline. The Parsis in India are endogamous and children of women married outside the community are traditionally not accepted within the fold. This paper appraises the potential impact of female intermarriage in Parsi population decline in Mumbai. Population projections were made under various assumptions of fertility and inter-marriage scenarios. Results show that, given current fertility, acceptance of children of intermarried women would have a negligible impact on stemming the population decline, which is driven chiefly by extremely low fertility. 1. Introduction India is a country of tremendous religious and cultural diversity. Almost every religion of the world is represented in India and the country has given birth to four important world religions, namely Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. While the overwhelming majority of India is Hindu (80.5% of the population), the country also has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world (13.4%). Other religious groups classified as minorities include Christians (2.3%), Sikhs (1.9%), Buddhists (0.8%), Jains (0.4%), and others (0.6%). Prominent among the latter are Parsis (69,601 in number), Baha'is (11,324), and Jews (4,650) (Registrar General of India 2001). The Parsis migrated from Iran to India sometime between the 8th and 10th centuries, with the dates of 716CE or 936CE commonly attributed to the arrival of the first migrants in coastal Gujarat, based on analysis of the traditional Parsi account of migration (Boyce 1979). As Hinnells has stated, while this may not be historically accurate, these oral legends, written down in the text Kisseh-e- Sanjan or The Tale of Sanjan dating from AD 1600, reflect common beliefs about how a "bold few journeyed ... eastwards" (Hinnells 1981). While, according to this account, religious persecution drove this group of Zoroastrians to India, other scholars have argued that trade, not persecution, was the primary impetus for this migration (Wink 1990). Susan Stiles Maneck observes that both factors, economic and the desire to establish a Zoroastrian community in an area free from Islamic dominance, "worked hand in hand" in the migration to Gujarat (Maneck 1997). The Parsis are followers of the Bronze Age prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster) of Iran, who is believed to have preached a message of the one true god, Ahura Mazda. This is detailed in the Gathas (or Songs of Wisdom), known as the core of the Avesta, the sacred Zoroastrian text (Boyce 1992). Zoroastrianism was the predominant religion of Iran until the fall of the Sasanian empire in the mid-7th century, after which Iran steadily Islamised (Boyce 1992). By the 19th century only a few impoverished Zoroastrians survived in the interior regions (Boyce 1992). In contrast, the Zoroastrians in India, who became known as the Parsis, became a prosperous and well-respected community of merchants in western India, increasingly focused in Bombay (Palsetia 2001). The Parsis currently amount to about 70,000 people in India, mostly concentrated in the city of Mumbai (47,000).4 They account for less than 0.4% of the population of the city of Mumbai, and approximately 0.007% of the Indian population (Registrar General of India 2001). This small number belies the extraordinary influence of this ethno-religious group on the economic, social, and political development of modern India, particularly of the city of Mumbai (Kulke 1974). Pioneers in fields as diverse as medicine, law, industry, and politics, the Parsis today face a unique demographic challenge rather distinct from the still rapid population growth observed in India as a whole. While the population in the country grew by close to 185% between 1951 and 2001, the Parsi population experienced a negative growth of 37. …