Journey
Zoroastrian / Parsi India
The Qissa-i Sanjan, written some six centuries after the event, has Zoroastrian refugees from Iran land in Gujarat and ask a local king for refuge. He sends a full bowl of milk; they return it with sugar stirred in. Whatever happened, a fire they say they brought has been kept burning ever since.
Stops (7)
- Sanjan · Sanjan — the landing
Where the Qissa-i Sanjan places the arrival, by tradition in the eighth century, and where the Iranshah fire was first consecrated. The community's conditions of settlement, as the text has them, were to explain their religion, adopt the local language, dress as Gujaratis, give up arms and marry after sunset — terms the Parsis have kept.
- Sanjan Sthambh · The Sanjan Sthambh — a monument to a story
A pillar raised in 1920 on the coast to mark the landing, more than a thousand years after the date it commemorates and six centuries after the only text that describes it. It is a community putting a monument on a founding story it knows it cannot document, which is not a rare thing but is rarely so explicit.
- Udvada Atash Behram · Udvada — the Iranshah fire
The Ātash Behrām the community says has burned continuously since Sanjan, moved and hidden repeatedly through the fourteenth century when Sultanate raids reached the coast, kept in caves at Bahrot for twelve years, and finally installed at Udvada in 1742. Non-Zoroastrians are not admitted to the room it burns in.
- Navsari · Navsari — the priests
The priestly capital, where the Bhagarsath anjuman has held authority over ritual practice since the thirteenth century and where the Iranshah rested for nearly three hundred years. Jamsetji Tata, Dadabhai Naoroji and the Wadia shipbuilders all came from Navsari families, which is a remarkable output for one small Gujarat town.
- Wadiaji Atash Behram, Mumbai · Wadiaji Ātash Behrām — Bombay, 1830
One of only nine Ātash Behrāms in the world, consecrated by the shipbuilding Wadia family. The Wadias built warships for the East India Company at Bombay dockyard, including HMS Trincomalee which is still afloat at Hartlepool — teak-built ships from a Parsi yard that outlasted the British oak ones.
- Towers of Silence & Parsi Mumbai · The Towers of Silence, and Parsi Bombay
Dokhmas on Malabar Hill where the dead are exposed rather than buried or burned, because earth and fire must not be defiled. The practice is now in difficulty: diclofenac given to cattle collapsed India's vulture population by over ninety per cent in the 1990s, and the community has been arguing about solar concentrators and burial ever since.
- The Avesta · the Rigveda's nearest relative
The Zoroastrian scriptures, and the closest thing in any language to the Rigveda: the Gāthās and the Vedic hymns share grammar, metre and vocabulary so nearly that passages convert almost word for word — daēva against deva, ahura against asura, haoma against soma, with the terms for god and demon having changed sides between them. What is remarkable is where it survived. Parsi priests in Gujarat copied and recited it after the tradition contracted in Iran, and the European reconstruction of Avestan grammar was done largely from Indian manuscripts.