Jiyo Parsi and the how the Parsi community has contributed to India massively
- In Current Affairs
- 05:18 AM, Jan 29, 2020
- Satish Bendigiri
During the recent violent outbreak and vandalism in the name of anti CAA and NRC protest across India, you hardly find a Parsi pelting a stone or setting ablaze a vehicle or running around as an anti-social element destroying public properties in the name of ‘ Leke Rahenge Azadi’. It is not because they are minorities and less in numbers as the 2014 census count the number of Parsis in India somewhere around 69000. It is because they are essentially a peace-loving, non-violent people, they have been known to produce luminaries in almost all walks of life. This tiny community has contributed to Indian economy and industry immensely.
The great war fought between India and its traditional enemy Pakistan, in 1971 saw India emerge as a winner on all the fronts, was led by General SMFJ Maneckshaw who would later become Field Marshal of the Indian Defence Forces. Born in Navsari, a small town of Gujarat, Jamsetji Tata and his family were a part of a minority group who fled Iran due to the persecution and settled in India. He became India’s pioneer industrialist who founded Tata group, India’s biggest conglomerate. Nehru often called him one-man planning commission. Pallonji Mistry founded Shapoorji Pallonji group in 1865 and has 60000 employees as of today.
Fali S Nariman was additional solicitor general of India who was awarded Padma Vibhushan. Nobody can forget the contribution of Homi Bhabha who started India’s nuclear program. 1965 Indo-Pak war saw AB Tarapore charge on the enemy in Sialkot sector heading Poona Horse Regiment which destroyed 65 enemy tanks, even though his own tank was hit several times. Fali Major was Chief of Air staff, with 7765 hours of flying experience has commanded several dangerous operations in Siachen, the world’s highest battlefield. Vice Admiral Rustom Gandhy is the only officer who has commanded ships in all naval wars that India fought.
Nani Palkhiwala, an eminent barrister and final authority on tax laws, was regarded as the fierce speaker. Sarosh Homi Kapadia served as the thirty-eighth Chief Justice of India. Soli Sorabji was Attorney General of India, was a strong promoter of human rights. Ardeshir Godrej, an industrialist became household name for his range of products. Keki Byramjee Grant, a cardiologist, and recipient of Padma Bhushan award, founded Ruby Hall Clinic, a nationally accredited hospital in Pune.
We have Meher Pudumjee daughter of Anu Aga managing Thermax, a renowned multinational name in the boiler manufacturing industry. Serum Institute of India provides polio doses to the children of all the communities in India is run by Cyrus Poonawalla. Indian cricket had Polly Umrigar whose records were broken only after the arrival of Sunil Gavaskar. Nari Contractor, Farokh Engineer and Diana Eduljee were also Indian cricket luminaries. The common factor among all these personalities is they all are Parsis, the tiniest community of India.
Parsi (the Zoroastrian migrant who settled in India after the first great Diaspora) has become a bye-word for charity and philanthropy, for such, is the track record of this small race. Zorastrian faith preaches piety, tolerance, charity, and universal brotherhood. This piety is nothing but the purification of inner-self by invoking good words, good thoughts and good deeds. This purification enables the individual to live in harmony with his/her inner self and with civil society at large. The same idea of piety is seen very much as praising the Almighty just as the chanting theory in the Hare Krishna Movement and the Nama Smaran which persons like Panduranga Shastri Athavale has propagated as a way of mental and the social emancipation of human consciousness. A similarly euphoric view in Zoroastrian metaphysics and universal love is propagated in the Holy Gathas (Yasna 50.4) thus:
With Truth moving my heart
With Best Thought inspiring my mind
With all the might of spiritual force within me,
I venerate Thee, O Mazda,
With songs of Thy praise.
And at last when I shall stand
At Thy Gate, I shall hear the echo
Of my prayers from Thy Abode of Songs.
It is not different from the Baul way of praising God through song and the legendary Anthony Firingee (the great wandering poet) who did the same with Goddess Kali. So much was the strength of Zoroastrian faith in self-sufficiency that it is on record that they have NEVER claimed minority status under the Indian Constitution. In fact, when India was granted independence, the leaders of this tiny community went to the first President of India, Dr. Rajendra Prasad with only one request of not according minority status to them in spite of their population accounting for mere 1, 00,000. Such was their resolve and such was their strength of conviction in democracy and secularism.
Zarathustra (or Zoroaster, meaning wise man) or the Laughing Prophet as he was called lived in Iran about 650 BC circa. He preached tolerance of other faiths and promoted the intellectual quest for truth while saying that the human mind was too infinitesimal to understand the enormity in which we could observe His manifestation through the five basic elements: water, fire, air, earth, and sun. His followers who worshipped fire are known as Zoroastrians and to escape conversion at the hands of Islamic invaders, they had to escape, which they did with their holy fire to India. The first Diaspora which landed in Gujarat were known as Parsis.
Later wave of the second Diaspora which came to India few centuries later were called Iranis. The Parsi temples contain the five elements of nature: air, water, earth, and fire. The adepts face the sun when they pray. The asylum was granted to them in India on specific conditions namely: (i) they will owe allegiance to India (or Hindustan) totally (ii) They will not spread their faith or convert persons to it (iii) They will adopt all Hindu rituals except during the navjore or thread ceremony and at death. In fact, lot of their chants during the Parsi marriage ceremony are taken from Sanskrit.
The religion has a high level of metaphysics whose real sense and the claim has been quite hard to understand. It could not have co-existed with Islam, which is rather baser in its ideology. They are often misunderstood as fire-worshippers but the fact is they are not. As they see God being represented through the five basic elements, fire, water, earth, air, and the sun. Therefore Zoroastrianism is an ongoing prayer that begins (in one form) at birth and ends (in another form) at death. Communication with the Great Immensity is an ongoing dialogue that can be seen through the quality of human action.
The great scholar-saints Dastoor Mehrji Rana and Dastoor Nariyosang Dhawal were blessed with spiritual wisdom and powers, as was Dastoor Sorabji Kukadaru many centuries later. All of them preached the emancipation of man from blind belief by personal example and raised the level of human consciousness by asking the man to start questioning himself before turning to question society. They preached tolerance, respect for the man and above all proclaimed that service to man as service to God.
It is one of the oldest religions in the world, but many of their texts are lost in antiquity. What has survived the ravages of Islam can be divided into chisti (philosophy) and din (ritual). The former is substantive in nature while the latter is procedural. Hence, din changes with time, situation and place. The former consists of the Gathas while the latter consists of the Vandidad. The former speaks of an aspiration to attain "purity of the mind and the body", whereas, the latter explains how this purity can be obtained i.e. through good thoughts, good words and good deeds (Humata, Kukhta, and Huvarastha). What has survived is the latter, which ought to have been, but is not changing with the times. Once again metaphysics has been given the slip and ritual has taken its place. However, there is no clear cut definition of what is good and the distinction between the good of one and the good of another is seldom if ever, made. But if the concept of an ongoing dialogue with the Great Immensity is accepted then the goodness of thought, word and deed is in itself a powerful prayer.
One socio-cultural trait born out of the inbreeding of genes within a small population sample over centuries makes the Zoroastrians take extreme positions (Ratan Tata Vs Cyrus Mistry) and the eccentricity that comes along with genius can be ascribed to the inbreeding of genes. On the other extreme, we can find, inward-looking ultra-conservative Zoroastrians who are comfortably cocooned in their own consciousness. They live in the past believing it to be glorious and are not willing to accept that objective social reality has since changed a great deal. There are those who have transcended religion like Rumy and Khorshed Bhavnagri who takes the standard spiritualist position and advocate that there are guides and masters in the astral world, which he calls the Twilight Zone, who is attached to the individual on the physical (earthly) plane act as spiritual mentors. (The Laws of the Spirit World – Jaico Publication).
Conversion into the faith is not permitted due to the promise given by the original migrants to the Hindu King Jadav Rana who had given them shelter from Islam. Due to a variety of sociological reasons, over a period of time the number of Parsis has steadily depleted and two strands of thought have emerged. The first is the liberal view and the second is the conservative view. Today there are fewer than 60,000 followers of this minuscule minority faith. The insecure priests found that this depleted clan size was likely to affect their income and so became more conservative than necessary, taking out an edict in 2003 against those who married outside the clan. Unfortunately, they did not have the power to enforce that edict and so a few weeks later had to make concessions only for males marrying outside the clan thus betraying their chauvinistic nature. This conservatism has brought with it a new brand of zealots who want to go back to tradition and custom in all walks of life. There are those who argue that numbers do not matter and it is a small well-knit band of zealots that is enough to sustain faith. Others argue that with the passage of time rigid and archaic customs must give way to modernity. The conservative Zoroastrians will today swear that "conversion to the faith" is not permitted by their religion.
The position (mistakenly held by some) that only the first stock was converted by Zoroaster is untenable since history tells us that after the defeat of Yasdazad Sheheriar some people remained in Iran while many fled. Then in the 2nd or 3rd Century AD came another Zoroastrian king who is conveniently forgotten. He was Ardeshar Babekaan. He had a warrior dastoor (Zoroastrian priest) named Tonsar who converted people at sword point to Zoroastrianism. Accepting this historical fact would destroy the halo built by the clergy and so very few are even allowed to know of this fact, since the texts like the Jamaspi (like the Dead Sea Scrolls) are not popularised and remain very much an intellectual mystery.
Hence what are meted out are convenient half-truths. And, throughout the history of mankind decisions based on half-truths have gone wrong since the decision-maker has unwittingly got hold of the wrong half. The fact is there is a very high level of philosophy in every religion, which is forgotten, and the ritual of that religion, over a period of time, unfortunately, takes over. The clergy finds it easy to explain ritual than metaphysics and opt for the easy route. This ritual also guarantees the status quo to the clergy and so is adopted as if it is a basic philosophy. But the clergy often forgets that ritual actualizes the philosophy and must change with time and age of every culture. When it does not change, then stability becomes indolence.
The prayers are written in a script and a language lost in antiquity and the followers are keen to adopt Western notions of modernity. What results is a remarkably quaint situation with the some Zoroastrian Dastoors interpreting religion as it should have been centuries ago and trying to make their "flock" practice it the same way even today. Because some of the rituals are archaic and their validity is lost in history, people do not always understand what they are praying. Hence the ritual is rendered virtually meaningless in this day and age. Should ritual and dogma be allowed to make an otherwise rich cultural heritage get lost in history like the dinosaurs? Can the Parsi custom and tradition not change with the times and the sociological compunctions? Can the Parsi clergy and Dastoors do something about it? Because we want the numbers of Parsis to increase and multiply.
Government of India launched the Jiyo Parsi scheme in 2013 to increase the number of Parsis. Till October 2019 the number of children born under this scheme is 214. From 2013 till 2019 only couple of hundred children were born. The death rate far outnumbers the birth rate in this community. The Parsi population is depleting in an alarming number which it is feared, may suffer from extinction in the near future. The question, therefore, needs to be publicly raised and effectively answered, as soon as possible, if this dinosaur syndrome is not to affect this entire community which has contributed so much to make India economically strong and industrially sound. Modi Government which has brought the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 paves the way for Parsis, among others, from neighboring countries i.e. Afghanistan, Pakistan and, Bangladesh, to become citizens of India and settle here, is a welcome initiative on the part of BJP led Government.
References:
1. Bickerman, E. J.. Chronology of the Ancient World. Thames & Hudson, 1968, p. 24.
2. Boyce, Mary. A History of Zoroastrianism, Volume 2. E. J. Brill, 1982,
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