The End Closes In on Endangered Diverse Cultures : Threat to Parsis Linked to Strict Zoroastrianism

They helped build nations and mega-corporations. They enriched the world’s arts and culture. What India’s dwindling Parsi community cannot do, it seems, is save itself from extinction.

While many small ethnic groups in South Asia find themselves in jeopardy from proselytizing Muslims, Christians and Buddhists, the threat to the Parsis comes from within their own restrictive religion.

But the prospect of ethnic annihilation has Parsis debating whether they should soften their strict rules against conversion into their ancient religion, Zoroastrianism. They also are wrangling over the ban on offspring of mixed marriages participating in the secretive faith.

Every year, the Parsis record 1,000 deaths--and only 400 births. Just 76,000 remain. By 2021, when India is projected to have 1 billion people, there probably will be only 30,000 Parsis left.

“We’ve contributed to national life far out of proportion to our small numbers. India will be poorer if the community disappears,” says Ervard Ramiyar Karanjia, principal of the world’s largest Zoroastrian seminary.

Conductor Zubin Mehta is a Parsi. So was the late singing star Freddie Mercury from the rock band Queen. Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi married one. The Tata family, which founded Air India and built a car company into India’s largest conglomerate, also is Parsi.

“At one time, we ran this city,” says Roxanne Irani, shaking her head as she stared at the bustling Bombay traffic from her balcony. “Now there are barely enough of us left to put together two football teams.”

Irani, 63, lives with 15 other women in a dilapidated institution for Parsi widows in Bombay, India’s financial capital. Most of them have no living relatives and are the last dying branch of their family trees.

The Parsis drifted to India 12 centuries ago to escape religious persecution by Arab Muslims who had invaded their homeland, the province of Fars in what is now Iran.

The community’s numbers have been shrinking since 1941, a victim of the attempt to retain the group’s distinctiveness with inward-looking exclusionary practices.

Zoroastrians worship fire as a symbol of God, whom they call Ahura Mazda, as proclaimed by the prophet Zoroaster.

“We believe in the virtues of truth, purity, simplicity, good thoughts, good words and good deeds,” says Karanjia, whose family members have been priests for 21 generations.

Karanjia’s seminary, tucked away in a tree-lined street in central Bombay, draws fewer recruits every year. It has 27 students this year.

About 70% of the world’s Parsis live in Bombay, where there are more Zoroastrians over 60 than there are under 16.

“If they make a movie about us, they’ll call it ‘Four Funerals and a Wedding,’ ” says Roxanne Driver, a Parsi journalist.

Some Parsis argue that saving the community should override long-held practices of forbidding conversion and discouraging marriage outside the community.

“Only the children of Parsi fathers are accepted into the community,” says Smita Crishna, founder of the Assn. of Intermarried Zoroastrians.

The association is trying to persuade the community to allow the children of mixed marriages to take part in Parsi rituals.

Conservatives oppose this, even with the community dwindling.

“It’s like killing the patient to cure the disease. These children threaten the ethnic survival of the community,” says Noshir Dadrawala, founder of a conservative Parsi group known as The Faithful.