The Parsis in Bombay
When I was in Bombay a few months ago, I asked every Parsi I met a single question: what about Zoroastrianism has made, and continues to make, the Parsis such a successful community? One of the most illuminating responses I received was this: “None of the rituals, texts, or commentaries are essential. When you reduce Zoroastrianism to the core, it is nothing more than Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds.” But how does this tell us anything about Parsi achievement? The photographer Sooni Taraporevala offers us a clue in her book Parsis: A Photographic Journey:
Zarathustra’s religion was radically different to anything mankind had ever dreamt of thus far. Instead of a religion based on fear, on propitiating and appeasing several Gods, Zarathustra’s religion put a free, thinking, rational mind on centre stage… According to Zarathustra, salvation for the individual depends on the sum of his/her thoughts, words, and deeds, and there can be no intervention by any divine being to alter this.
Therefore, Zoroastrianism places the burden of choice on the individual, and the individual alone. With choices comes responsibility, for if we alone make our choices, we alone are responsible for their consequences. (Check out R. C. Zaehner‘s articles here and here for more on Zoroastrianism and free will.) This way of thinking necessarily leads to rationality and to active engagement with the rest of the world. Rationality is the only means by which Zarathustra would have us make our choices: in the brilliantly simple Zoroastrian moral order, where Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good Deeds are all that matter, what other means do we have? And in a world where the burden of choice is ours alone, how could we not engage with the rest of the world through right action? To withdraw inward would be to turn aside from the burden of choice, abnegating the responsibility that burden confers on us. In a strong echo of Max Weber’s thesis of the Protestant Ethic, T. M. Luhrmann goes so far as to claim that “Zoroastrianism was equated by many…with an ethical system alone: God exists, but He is worshiped through the doing of good deeds.”
So the Zoroastrians did not withdraw inward, and instead contributed to the world far out of proportion to their numbers. They founded an empire that surpassed anything the world had known before, not just in landmass and administrative efficiency but also in religious tolerance. Some centuries after that empire fell, they founded another, one whose cultural contributions reached as far afield as Japan, where their aesthetics influenced the design of the masks used in Noh drama. (See this post for a “history” of pre-Islamic Iran in four lines.) And when that empire fell, fleeing religious persecution, some Zoroastrians came to India.
The story of how the Zoroastrian refugees landed at Sanjan in Gujarat is well-known, but my favorite version, from Boman Desai‘s The Memory of Elephants, is below:
A month after their arrival, the rajah was finally meeting the Iranis officially… He raised his hand: the Iranis were brought to the center of the assembly and invited to tell their story. The seniormost of the dasturs, the priests, each of whom wore a white turban and robe, had been elected spokesman. Jadhav Rana sympathized with the Iranis, but was uncomfortable with their warlike appearance. “This is a sad story,” he said, when the dastur was finished. “What you wish — a place to stay where you may worship freely, where you may cultivate the soil so that you are not burdensome to others — is fine and honorable, but it is not that simple. Let me show you how it is.
He clapped his hands twice and a jug of milk, filled to the brim, was brought out. “Sanjan is like this jar of milk,” he said. “There is no room for more.”
The old dastur brought a coin out of his robe. “Your Highness,” he said, holding up the coin. “If I may be so bold.”
Jadhav Rana frowned, puzzled, but nodded giving his permission.
The dastur slipped the coin carefully into the jug without spilling a drop. “Your Highness, we Iranis will be as the coin is in the milk. You will not even know that we are here.”
The crowd applauded the dastur, but Jadhav Rana didn’t smile. “This is well,” he said, “but a coin is tribute, and the hospitality which can be bought with a coin is not the hospitality of Sanjan. How will you repay our hospitality?”
The dastur dropped a pinch of sugar into the milk, taking care once more not to spill a drop. “Your Highness,” he said, “as the sugar sweetens the milk so shall we endeavor to sweeten your lives with our industry.”
Members of the crowd jumped as they cheered…
Jadhav Rana, and the teachings of Zarathustra, demanded nothing less than active engagement with their new world from the very first Parsis.
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While reading about the Parsis, one of the patterns that quickly emerged was not just the community’s accomplishment across diverse fields, but also its supportiveness and interconnectedness. When Homi Jehangir Bhabha wanted to set up an institute devoted to fundamental research in theoretical physics, he could rely on the financial support of a trust founded by a fellow Parsi, his uncle Sir Dorabji Tata, and the moral support of his uncle’s second cousin, J. R. D. Tata. Somewhat ironically, Bhabha, who later became the father of India’s nuclear bomb, could claim as his second cousin Rattanbai Petit, the wife of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Jinnah’s only grandson, Nusli Wadia, could claim direct descent from nearly every leading Parsi industrialist of the nineteenth century, from Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy to Sir Dinshaw Petit to Naoroji Nusserwanji Wadia, his great-grandfather. N. N. Wadia’s own grandfather, Ardeshir Cursetji Wadia, was the first Indian Fellow of the Royal Society (an honor Homi Bhabha was to earn almost exactly a century later) and the first Parsi to visit the United States. Ardeshir Wadia’s great-grandfather and the first Master Builder of the Bombay dockyards, Lowji Nusserwanji Wadia, brought with him from Surat Parsis like Kavasji Kamaji, who founded the Cama family, known equally for entrepreneurship and scholarship. It was one of these Camas, Merwanji Mancherji Cama, who gave the lawyer-turned-inventor Ardeshir Godrej his startup capital.
Another pattern that emerges is how this network allowed the Parsis to become one of the most dynamic communities in the world. The Wadias offer just one example: Lowji Wadia began as a shipbuilder, which gave his family a direct view of the booming trade across the Indian Ocean. Seizing the opportunity, his grandsons Pestonji Bomanji Wadia and Hormusji Bomanji Wadia decided to enter trade themselves. But this trade needed financing, so Pestonji’s adopted son Dadabhai Pestonji Wadia became the preeminent banker of his time, at one point owning 37.5% of the capital in the Bank of Western India. Then as cotton became enormously profitable, aided in part by shortages during the American Civil War, N. N. Wadia founded Bombay Dyeing – following Cowasji Davar and his former employer, Sir Dinshaw Petit, in his entry into the cotton industry. Nusli Wadia too has shown his ability to adapt: while the Wadia Group still owns Bombay Dyeing, the majority of its profits now come from Britannia Industries, one of India’s largest biscuit manufacturers. And at every stage, we see Parsi entrepreneurs relying on the most advanced technology of their time: Ardeshir Wadia studying the most modern shipbuilding techniques in the United Kingdom and bringing gas lighting to Bombay; J. N. Tata traveling to Europe and the United States to study the latest methods of steel production, eventually bringing the American engineer Charles Page Perin back with him to Jamshedpur; Ardeshir Godrej and his brother Pirojsha inventing the world’s first springless lock, and as a more recent example, Tata Motors under Ratan Tata developing the “one-lakh car”, the Tata Nano.
To trace these networks of mutual support and innovation, I began to create a family tree that would link together all the Parsis about whom I had read so much. While I began with the Wadias, slowly I began to add other families: the Tatas, the Camas, the Jejeebhoys, the Petits, and so many more. I relied mostly on old books about Parsis, many of which are now in the public domain, as well as numerous scholarly articles. (Interestingly, one of the most valuable repositories was the Digital Library of India at the Indian Institute of Science, founded with the financial support of none other than J. N. Tata.) The tree now spans 13 generations and nearly 200 individuals, including many of the most famous Parsi businessmen.
But it is nowhere near complete. My goal is to include every Parsi I can in this project. So if you have any information that would be useful — corrections to this tree, your own trees, interesting documents, contacts of people who would have the information I need — please contact me. The more people this project includes, the better we will be able to see how the Parsis continue to actively engage with the world, following the teachings of Zarathustra and “sweetening lives with their industry” as they promised Jadhav Rana they would.
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Technical notes: To create the family tree, I created two CSV files. The first contains node data, with one line per individual, while the second contains edge data, with one line per family (father, mother, children). I then wrote a quick Python script to process these files into a DOT file. The result is a bit messy, both because of limitations in DOT and because the tree is so closely interconnected. If you have a better solution, please let me know. Finally, some of the spellings are inconsistent (e.g. Jamsetji vs Jamsetjee vs Jamshedji) — this is intentional. Rather than choose one spelling for every person’s name, I chose the spelling that I saw most frequently for that person.
Stimulated Annealing 