Place · Parsi funerary landscape · India
Towers of Silence & Parsi Mumbai
The Parsi community's dakhmas (towers of silence) on Malabar Hill, Mumbai, used for sky-burial exposure of the dead to vultures — the traditional Zoroastrian funerary practice preserved in Mumbai from the 17th-century Parsi arrival from Gujarat. Parsi philanthropy — Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, Jamsetji Tata, Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Dinshaw Wacha, Ardeshir Godrej — built much of colonial Bombay's civic fabric: the J.J. Hospital (1843), Elphinstone College, Victoria Terminus funding, Bombay University, the Taj Mahal Hotel (1903), and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (1945). The Malabar Hill dakhmas are now threatened by a near-total collapse of the vulture population (diclofenac poisoning from the 1990s), forcing the community to reconsider funerary practice.
- Function
- Landscape & environmental change
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 18.960, 72.806 (approximate)
Connections (7)
- Shared site withMagen David Synagogue, Kolkata
Parsi and Baghdadi Jewish merchant families built much of the civic fabric of colonial Bombay and Calcutta — the Sassoons, the Ezras, the Tatas, the Jeejeebhoys — with fortunes made in opium, cotton, jute and shipping, and spent on hospitals, schools, libraries and synagogues. Both were small communities that arrived as refugees or traders, prospered under British commercial law, and left buildings out of all proportion to their numbers.
- Life routeDadabhai Naoroji
Naoroji came out of the same small Bombay Parsi world as the Wadias and the Tatas — a community of perhaps a hundred thousand that supplied a disproportionate share of the city's merchants, its first modern industrialists and its early nationalist politicians. He read the trade figures that world lived by and turned them into the argument that British rule was extracting India's wealth by design rather than by accident.
- Companion in the same setVictorian Gothic & Art Deco, Mumbai
Bombay's Victorian Gothic ensemble was substantially Parsi-financed — Cowasji Jehangir, the Petits, the Readymoneys, the Sassoons alongside them — which is why so many of the city's hospitals, libraries, schools and drinking fountains carry Parsi names on their foundation stones. A community of about a hundred thousand built much of the civic fabric of a city of millions.
- Companion in the same setParadesi Synagogue, Kochi
The Baghdadi Jews and the Parsis were the two small trading communities that built disproportionately in colonial Bombay, and their institutions stand side by side: Sassoon docks, library and hospital beside Wadia, Petit and Jehangir foundations. Both were middlemen communities without a landed base, and both put their money into buildings with their names on them.
- Patronage networkChhatrapati Shivaji Terminus
Parsi money built much of the fabric this city is now known for — Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy's hospital and school of art, the Petit and Wadia endowments, the dockyards, and the railway shares that paid for the network the terminus stands at the head of. The dakhmas on Malabar Hill are where that community's own dead go, in the middle of the city its philanthropy built.
- Site withinMumbai
Towers of Silence & Parsi Mumbai lies within Mumbai — the two sites sit about 4 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Towers of Silence & Parsi Mumbai is one of the specific sites that give Mumbai its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
- Present atZoroastrianism
The Towers of Silence at Malabar Hill and the surrounding Parsi institutions are the modern home of Zoroastrianism in India.
On these journeys
- Zoroastrian / Parsi India
- Cities through time — many civilisations, one place
- Parsi Bombay — dockyard, mill and mission
Sources
Parsi community records
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