page_title: Parsis
section_title: Age of opportunity
hierarchical_section_title: Parsis / History / Age of opportunity
caption_attribution_description: English: Parsees of Bombay a wood engraving, 1878 The inscription under the original engraving is "Persians in Bombay" Drawing by Emile Antoine Bayard (1837-1891) taken from "Travels in southern provinces of India, 1862-1864", by Alfred Grandidier (1836-1921), from "Il Giro del mondo (World Tour), Journal of geography, travel and costumes", Volume XVIII, Issue 24, 11 December 1873.
context_page_description: Parsis or Parsees are an ethnoreligious group who migrated to the Indian subcontinent from Persia during the Muslim conquest of Persia of CE 636–651; one of two such groups. Zoroastrianism is the ethnic religion of the Parsi people. According to the Qissa-i Sanjan, Parsis migrated from the Sasanian Empire to Gujarat, where they were given refuge, between the 8th and 10th century CE to avoid persecution following the Muslim conquest of Persia.
  At the time of the Muslim conquest of Persia, the dominant religion of the region was Zoroastrianism. Iranians such as Babak Khorramdin rebelled against Muslim conquerors for almost 200 years. During this time many Iranians chose to preserve their religious identity by fleeing from Persia to India.
  The word پارسیان, pronounced "Parsian", i.e., "Parsi" in the Persian language, literally means Persian. Note that Farsi is an Arabization of the word Parsi, which is used as an endonym of Persian, and the Persian language is spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and some other regions of the former Persian Empire.
context_section_description: Following the commercial treaty in the early 17th century between Mughal emperor Jahangir and James I of England, the East India Company obtained the exclusive rights to reside and build factories in Surat and other areas. Many Parsis, who until then had been living in farming communities throughout Gujarat, moved to the English-run settlements to take the new jobs offered. In 1668 the English East India Company leased the Seven Islands of Bombay from Charles II of England. The company found the deep harbour on the east coast of the islands to be ideal for setting up their first port in the sub-continent, and in 1687 they transferred their headquarters from Surat to the fledgling settlement. The Parsis followed and soon began to occupy posts of trust in connection with government and public works.
  Where literacy had previously been the exclusive domain of the priesthood, in the era of the British Raj the British schools in India provided the new Parsi youth with the means not only to learn to read and write but also to be educated in the greater sense of the term and become familiar with the quirks of the British establishment. These capabilities were enormously useful to Parsis since they allowed them to "represent themselves as being like the British," which they did "more diligently and effectively than perhaps any other South Asian community". While the British saw the other Indians "as passive, ignorant, irrational, outwardly submissive but inwardly guileful", the Parsis were seen to have the traits that the colonial authorities tended to ascribe to themselves. Johan Albrecht de Mandelslo (1638) saw them as "diligent", "conscientious", and "skillful" in their mercantile pursuits. Similar observations would be made by James Mackintosh, Recorder of Bombay from 1804 to 1811, who noted that "the Parsees are a small remnant of one of the mightiest nations of the ancient world, who, flying from persecution into India, were for many ages lost in obscurity and poverty, till at length they met a just government under which they speedily rose to be one of the most popular mercantile bodies in Asia".
  One of these was an enterprising agent named Rustom Maneck. In 1702, Maneck, who had probably already amassed a fortune under the Dutch and Portuguese, was appointed the first broker to the East India Company (acquiring the name "Seth" in the process), and in the following years "he and his Parsi associates widened the occupational and financial horizons of the larger Parsi community". Thus, by the mid-18th century, the brokerage houses of the Bombay Presidency were almost all in Parsi hands. As James Forbes, the Collector of Broach (now Bharuch), would note in his Oriental Memoirs (1770): "many of the principal merchants and owners of ships at Bombay and Surat are Parsees."  "Active, robust, prudent and persevering, they now form a very valuable part of the Company's subjects on the western shores of Hindustan where they are highly esteemed".In the 18th century, Parsis with their skills in ship building and trade greatly benefited with trade between India and China.The trade was mainly in timber, silk, cotton and opium. For example Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy acquired most of his wealth through trade in cotton and opium Gradually certain families "acquired wealth and prominence (Sorabji, Modi, Cama, Wadia, Jeejeebhoy, Readymoney, Dadyseth, Petit, Patel, Mehta, Allbless, Tata, etc.), many of which would be noted for their participation in the public life of the city, and for their various educational, industrial, and charitable enterprises.").
  Through his largesse, Maneck helped establish the infrastructure that was necessary for the Parsis to set themselves up in Bombay and in doing so "established Bombay as the primary centre of Parsi habitation and work in the 1720s". Following the political and economic isolation of Surat in the 1720s and 1730s that resulted from troubles between the (remnant) Mughal authorities and the increasingly dominant Marathas, a number of Parsi families from Surat migrated to the new city. While in 1700 "fewer
caption: "Parsis of Bombay" a wood engraving, ca. 1878
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