Place · Parsi landing site · India
Sanjan
The Portuguese-era town in Valsad district, Gujarat, where the Qissa-i Sanjan — the 16th-century Parsi chronicle by Bahman Kaikobad Sanjana — places the Parsi arrival in India around 721 CE after their flight from Umayyad Iran. The chronicle recounts the Zoroastrians negotiating refuge with the local Hindu king Jadi Rana through the famous milk-and-sugar parable. Sanjan held the Iranshah atash behram from 721 until the 1297 Khilji invasion when it was moved to the Bahrot caves for safety. The Sanjan Column memorial, raised 1920 by the Parsi Zoroastrian community, marks the arrival point. Archaeological excavations at Sanjan have confirmed Zoroastrian burial customs on the site.
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 20.200, 72.850
Connections (3)
- Monument relocationUdvada Atash Behram
The Iranshah fire was consecrated at Sanjan, and when Sultanate raids reached the coast in the fourteenth century the priests carried it into the Bahrot caves and kept it burning there for twelve years, then at Bansda, then at Navsari for nearly three centuries, and finally to Udvada in 1742. A fire that cannot be allowed to go out has been carried the length of a coastline to keep that condition.
- Companion in the same setSanjan Sthambh
The Sanjan Sthambh was raised on the Gujarat coast in 1920 to mark the Parsi landing, more than a thousand years after the date it commemorates and six centuries after the Qissa-i Sanjan, the only text that describes the event, was written. It is a community putting a monument on a founding story it knows it cannot document, and saying so on the pillar itself, which is rarer than the practice of doing it.
- Sacred transplantThe Avesta
Sanjan is where the Qissa-i Sanjan puts the landing: Zoroastrian refugees from Iran coming ashore in Gujarat and asking a local king for refuge, and being given it on conditions. Whatever the account's date and accuracy, the outcome is not in doubt — the community established itself, kept its scripture and its fire, and was never expelled or forced to convert in a thousand years, which is the same pattern the Jewish arrivals in India followed.
On these journeys
Sources
Qissa-i Sanjan
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