In two temples, 7000 miles apart, the youngest members of a dying faith are preparing for their formal initiation into Zoroastrianism. In both, the smells of sandalwood and smoke are the same, as are the prayers and the white skullcaps the boys wear. Both sets of children seem largely oblivious to the role they play in the battle over the future of their faith. But there the similarities largely end. One group is made up of the children of Zoroastrian mothers and fathers, the others are the sons and daughters of mixed marriages: Zoroastrian and Hindus, Jews, Muslims and Christians. These two communities, one outside New York City, the other in Bombay, India, have radically different philosophies about how to keep their faith alive.

As Zoroastrianism, which many consider to be the world’s first monotheistic faith approaches a crossroads, those living abroad are learning to adapt in hopes of keeping the faith alive, while their counterparts in India cling to their traditions. The result may be what one expert calls a “cleavage,” with the Indian Parsi community dwindling and possibly even disappearing altogether as the Zoroastrians abroad loosen their interpretation of old traditions and grow increasingly open to outsiders in the community.

Parsis are the Indian descendents of Persian Zoroastrians and today, there are fewer than 100,000 of them worldwide. The most recent Indian census data counted just under 70,000 in India, where the community is not only dwindling, but threatening to die out altogether. According to one demographic study, the number of Parsis will fall to under 21,000 by 2021. It is important to note the difference between the faith and the ethnicity—Zoroastrianism is the religion, Parsis are the ethnic group, descended from Persia, who practice the religion.

While the picture may seem bleak, there are signs of a Zoroastrian revival outside of India. Recently, communities in Iran, Tajikistan, and South America have begun rediscovering their roots in Zoroastrianism, and are beginning to convert back to the faith. And in the United States and Canada, communities of Parsis and Zoroastrians are opening up their temples to the children of inter-marriages, and non-Zoroastrian spouses, both of which have been historically shunned by the Indian community. But despite their dwindling numbers, the Parsi community in India, the descendents of the original Zoroastrians who fled persecution in Iran for refuge in India, refuse to recognize these new converts and refuse entry to their fire temples to all non-Parsis, including the children of mixed marriages whose fathers are non-Zoroastrian.

Lovji Cama, a Parsi who teaches Sunday classes at the Zoroastrian Association of Greater New York’s temple, at 106 Pomona Road in Suffern, N.Y., thinks that the issue is rooted in the definition of who is Zoroastrian. “The problem in India is that people think of ethnicity and religion as the same,” he says. “It’s a mind-set, they can’t conceive how someone not of Iranian descent could be Zoroastrian. They would say that they are not concerned about quantity, they are interested in quality. But the quality of zero is zero.”

“It seems almost like there might be a revival of Zoroastrians in the world. India wouldn’t like it at all, but it’s unstoppable.”

Ervad Parvez M. Bajan, head priest at the Mevawala Fire Temple in Bombay, thinks that the race and the religion are inexorably linked. “If one mixes religions and race, they are diluted,” he says. “If we open the floodgate, there will be a flood. Even Hitler said every race has to preserve its own identity.” Bajan simply doesn’t see any need for conversion. “We respect all religions. Why should there be any conversion?”

Dr. Kaikhosrov D. Irani, a professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York who at 84 is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on Zoroastrianism, believes that the traditionalist Parsi stance actually contradicts the teachings of the faith, which emphasizes the value of individual choice. “It is your choice!” he says. “Anyone can come and make the choice. It’s not the business of anybody else to say no, you can’t make that choice.

“They think this is a tribe,” Irani says of the orthodox Parsis, “In this insistence (that there be no conversion), they are being non-Zoroastrians. Parsis are an ethnic group. Zoroastrianism is a religion of choice. And the two cannot be identical. It’s a matter that strains ones intelligence very slightly.”
“Partly, it’s the psychological self-image of the Parsis. It’s a very strong self-image to protect. It’s a very small community in a large continent.”

The new communities abroad have begun building temples of their own, where believers can come and pray to fire, which the Zoroastrians believe to be the physical embodiment of truth and light, all that their God stands for.

On one recent Sunday at the Pomona temple, the priest, Pervez Patel, stacked nine blocks of sandalwood in perpendicular pairs on the tall copper pedestal in the temple’s prayer room. He lit the stack on fire and slowly the room grew foggy with smoke, the pungent smell wafting into the hallways in thick clouds. Twelve male and female Zoroastrians, converts and native Parsis alike, removed their shoes and stepped into the perimeter of the prayer room. The men wore round topis, skullcaps, the women wrapped scarves around their heads, and all clasped hands.

“Oh light divine,” they chanted in the ancient language Avesta. “May the mighty flame be, in the heart and hearth, ever glowing, deep, ever constant and steady, ever bright and clear, and ever unquenchable, ever waxing, never waning.”

Then Patel said the words, “Dushmata,” bad thoughts, and rang the bell mounted on the ceiling three times. “Duzukhta,” bad words, three more rings. Finally, “Duzvarshta,” bad deeds, with three final chimes. Bad thoughts, bad words and bad deeds are the opposite of the sacred Zoroastrian credo, “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” And with each triple ringing of the bell, Patel banished them.
In Bombay, the chants and prayers sound the same. Young priests-in-training demonstrate the rituals surrounding the lighting of the fire. They don white tunics and drawstring pants, and wear thin white veils over their mouths to protect the fire from their saliva.

Although Cama represents the Orthodox view of the future of his faith, there are many Parsis in Bombay who see a need for change. “You’ve got such a beautiful religion, why do you want to be so possessive about it?” says Bachi Karkaria, a Bombay-based journalist and Parsi. “Here, they’re forgetting the basics and fighting themselves to extinction. It’s a classic ghetto-ization. It’s ethnic arrogance to think you’re some chosen race. First, I think they have to get out of their ghettos, open some windows and get some fresh thoughts.”

It seems that it’s that fresh thought which has so affected the Parsis living abroad. The Pomona temple has even begun a Zoroastrian Intermarriage Group, headed by Viraf Ghadially, who has been married to a Kentucky-born American for nearly three decades. “The main reason for forming the group was to let the intermarried couples know that they’re still welcome in the community,” he says. “What was happening was the Orthodox people would ostracize people as soon as they married outside. That would create a negative effect because people would slowly migrate out. We can’t afford that. We’re such a small community.

“There is a battle being fought,” Ghadially continues. “If you look at the number of Parsis in India and the number of Zoroastrians abroad, you see that the ratios are changing. The number of Zoroastrians abroad are now greater than the number in India. That’s why the Parsis are upset—they’re realizing that the focus of Zoroastrianism is going to be abroad. It’s going to be a global thing, rather than spearheaded in India.”

Ghadially agrees with Irani that the community in India is too attached to rituals, at the expense of the meaning. “In India, you’re forced to get into that protective environment, because you’re such a minority,” he says. “The thing is the ritual became more important. But the understanding of the prayers is not there. The reverse is true over here. Let’s understand the ethics and values of it. The people who are moving abroad are looking at it and saying, ‘wait a minute, we are Zoroastrians first and Parsis second.’”

But those remaining in India are not entirely supportive of these new communities or the fact that their relatives who have emigrated are becoming more flexible about the rules surrounding conversion. Twenty-six-year-old Aysha Ghadiali’s parents immigrated to the United States 20 years ago and, to the displeasure of their relatives in India, have since become much more liberal in their attitude towards the faith and its requirements.

“My cousins, aunts and uncles who are still in Bombay, they really respect the way that communities outside have tried to forge bonds and build temples,” Ghadiali says. “But there’s also that disrespect that we’re trying to bend the religion to fit our lives here.”

Ghadiali thinks that her parents have changed their viewpoint because they want to see the religion continue. “They understand that the numbers are such that you can’t afford to be so picky.”

Maria Lobo Dumasia is a Catholic living in Bombay who is married to a Parsi. She says that because of the community’s refusal to accept outsiders, she and her husband dated for nine years before they married, a length of time almost unheard of in Indian society. “It is a matter of survival,” she says, noting the health implications among Parsis that have resulted from so many years of inter-marriage. “My husband’s sister is deaf and dumb because of inbreeding.”

“We are representative of the larger Bombay community,” she says. “My husband is still Parsi but we are raising our children as Catholic. He didn’t want his kids to be the first to experience the trauma of being acceptable.”

Irani, for one, is hopeful that the Parsi community in India will eventually come around. “Most of the people are reasonably well educated,” he says. “When they sit and think about it, they realize that if their mother is Zoroastrian, and if their children have been brought up partly in the Zoroastrian tradition, to say no to them seems irrational. . . ultimately reason must prevail.”

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AMRITSAR, INDIA -- Here, in the spiritual center of the Sikh faith, one man stands out. He appears to be a walking contradiction: he is both taller and fairer, but also much more visibly "Sikh" than almost everyone around him, even the Punjabis who have practiced the faith for generations. He is Sada Sat Simran Singh Khalsa and he is over six feet tall, with pale skin, a towering turban, ruddy beard, and floor-sweeping blue robes. As he walks the perimeter of the Golden Temple, he attracts stares from Punjabis and Westerners alike—all trying to classify him, all coming up short. India is rife with Westerners who adopt an Eastern philosophy and begin dressing and practicing like their Indian counterparts, but few are like Khalsa.

He was born and raised outside of Washington D.C, in a decidedly American community, but also in the Sikh tradition, albeit the particularly American variety of the Indian faith. At age eight, he was sent to Miri Piri Academy to study and now, on a warm spring evening some 18 years later, Khalsa can be found in the school’s music room, giving lessons to a group of young devotees.

At the Miri Piri Academy in Chhertha Sahib, outside Amritsar, India, the students faces look American, they speak in American English, and many of them have all the trappings of American youth: iPods, cell phones and reggaeton ringtones, but nobody could mistake these kids for the average American student. Neither could they be mistaken for the Indians among whom they live, pray and serve. Their white turbans are tied more elaborately, their robes are longer and their symbolic swords, kirpans, are bigger and less, well, symbolic.

Sada Sat Simran Singh Khalsa looking at a book of photographs of ancient Sikh warriors. (Erik Wander)

Located on 17 acres in a village in the Indian state of Punjab, Miri Piri Academy is a school for the children of Western, mostly white, Sikhs who are followers of Yogi Bhajan, an Indian Sikh who brought the faith to the west in the late 1960s. They are often called “American Sikhs,” but the group bristles at the distinction, asserting that Sikhism in the East and Sikhism in the West are one and the same and there is no such thing as an “American” version. Nevertheless, the school’s students are mostly the children of Americans who converted to the faith in the 1970s, often after becoming practitioners of Kundalini Yoga and eventually studying under Bhajan. Bhajan—who is alternately known as Siri Singh Sahib Bhai Sahib Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogi Ji, Siri Singh Sahib, and, simply, Yogi Ji—founded the school, and his influence is everywhere.

Bhajan’s philosophy is rooted in discipline. He taught, “Without discipline you achieve nothing. With discipline the doors of life are open and yours to choose.” That principle is echoed constantly in these words beneath the school’s emblem: “School of Royalty and Reality. Our first principle is the Love of Discipline.” The school’s mission is “to train the future leaders, teachers and healers of tomorrow through rigorous discipline, quality academics and strong self-discipline.”

At Miri Piri, students begin their day two hours before dawn with an hour of Kundalini yoga and meditation followed by physical training. “The reason, scientifically, is because your mind is calm then,” Sada Sat says. “The world hasn’t started. You can meditate and you can conquer all your demons at that time. There’s a whole science behind it. You have to experience it to really understand.” Twice a year, for 40 days at a time, they arise even earlier, at 2:30 in the morning to do their sewa, or service, at the Golden Temple. There, they wash the marble floors surrounding the “pool of nectar” upon which the temple appears to float.

Khalsa’s fiancée, Guru Das Kaur Khalsa (most followers of Yogi Bhajan take on the last name Khalsa), only came to the school as a high school junior, but she credits the rigorous structure with transforming her life. “When I was in school in America I drank and I partied,” she says. “But when I came to school here I decided not to. I think I just became happier.” She credits this happiness to the rigorous discipline the school enforces. “They pack the schedule in. One of Sri Singh Das’s philosophies was to be really disciplined in your life. He said, don’t leave room for them to be, like, rebellious. Keep them busy and disciplined and working hard and doing all that stuff and then kids won’t have time to do stupid stuff. He says that kids rebel because they’re unhappy and if you create a solid home for them that makes them feel secure in themselves then they won’t need that.”

Most of the school’s 130 students start young, some as early as age six and seven. Bhajan encouraged his followers to send their children at a younger age, teaching that when a child is one to three, their mother is their teacher; when they are three to seven, their father is the teacher; and after that, their peers and God are the teacher.

“He liked it when kids would come here when they were younger,” Guru Das explains of Bhajan’s philosophy. “He thought when you’re young, it’s so important for you to have good parents and for them to give you a good structure. But then send them to boarding school and let the environment be their teacher. Because kids get too attached to their parents and then they take on their parent’s issues, and then they might get divorced or whatever, it’s good to be separate.”

Guruka Singh Khalsa is representative of the older generation of Sikh Americans. He began to practice the faith in the 1970s, after a roommate who practiced Kundalini yoga moved into his home in Berkeley, California. “We called it Berserkly at the time,” he says. “We were a raggle-taggle bunch of gypsies.” Now a webmaster for the site sikhnet.com, he sent both of his sons, who are now 26 and 16, to Miri Piri Academy, even as he chose to stay in America as part of Bhajan’s core group of leaders, who are concentrated in Espanola, New Mexico.

Guruka’s elder son was sent when he was just 6 years old; it was his first trip to India. “The whole process of sending a child that young halfway across the world totally freaks a lot of people out,” Guruka says. “It freaked me out too. But for most of these kids, the overall experience of being in a third world country, not protected by your parents, having to face who you are much earlier in life, allows you to test your own grit, your own strength.”

Guruka says that part of the appeal of sending his children so far away for so long was the larger influence of spirituality and faith in India. “Overall when I look back, what does the experience of being at a school like that give to a child?” he says. “A deep grounding in a spiritual energy that simply isn’t present in America. To be in a culture in whose central values are steeped in spirituality is very different than to be in America and be part of a religion.”

He also believes that the distance between himself and his children has been beneficial to their relationship, noting that “When you live with your parents, you get fed up with your parents. There’s a theory called distance therapy. When my son is halfway around the world, I meditate on him every day. And he meditates on me. It’s very different to have an image of your parent. It leads to a very helpful experience when the kids grow up.”

Guruka maintains that aside from the occasional bout of homesickness, his children loved their years at Miri Piri. Still, when his older son graduated, he was, as Guruka says, “disoriented.” He spent a little over a year in Amritsar, working odd jobs and living with his friends, much like Sada Sat and his friends.

Guru Das went to the University of Oregon following her graduation from Miri Piri and on one recent day in Amritsar, she wears a “Sikh Student Association” t-shirt from her alma-mater. Other graduates have gone on to Yale and Harvard, but many more go to work immediately in one of the businesses founded by Yogi Bhajan, such as Akal Security in New Mexico or Golden Temple Foods in Oregon.

The school is accredited according to the U.S. educational system, and offers most of the same curriculum offered in America, supplemented with yoga, meditation, and Sikh studies, including music, sword fighting, and Punjabi language classes.

Aside from some Punjabi teachers, the students are largely separate from the local community. It is at the Golden Temple where Western and Eastern Sikhs truly come together. Equality is one of the founding principles of the faith and during the sewa, or temple service, American and Indian Sikhs work alongside one another, washing the temple’s floors with milk and honey, participating and serving the free communal meal, langar.

Sometimes the students play music in the temple itself as part of the daily evening ritual in which the sacred text, the Guru Granth Sahib, is put away for the evening. The golden temple glows, its reflection mirrored in the still water surrounding it, as pilgrims and tourists file slowly down a thin walkway leading across the water into the temple. Music resonates from an inner chamber inside the temple, where musicians seated cross-legged on the floor chant and play the tabla, a traditional Indian instrument. The crowd of devotees is often dense, but calm, as they walk through the small inner temple and then sit or stand outside its perimeter.

It was here at the temple that Sada Sat met and befriended Hardeep Singh Khalsa, a Punjabi Sikh, who one day playfully challenged Sada Sat’s knowledge of the faith. Sada Sat answered the challenge correctly and then challenged Hardeep in turn. Soon, the jousting led to a friendship and now, some seven years later, Hardeep is one of the few Punjabis who is closely aligned with the American Sikh school and community.

Hardeep Singh Khalsa and Sada Sat Simran Singh Khalsa at Sada Sat's home in Amritsar. (Erik Wander)

Hardeep admits that many of his friends and family are confused by the community of white Sikhs. “They see whites, they say, ‘What are they here for? They want to rule over India again or something?’” he says, referencing the extended history of the British rule of India. “Every single person asks me this question, ‘Do you know why they’re here?’”

Sunit Singh, an Indian Sikh pursuing his PhD. in theology at the University of Chicago echoes this concern. “They’re isolated. It’s not clear to me that they have much contact with people other than American Sikhs. What kind of experience are these kids having? Of India? Of Sikhism?”

Indeed, some of the graduates of the academy seem to belong neither here nor there, and are neither fully American nor fully Indian. Ram Das Singh Khalsa, 21, returned to Amritsar after having lived in America for a year after he graduated from Miri Piri. He admits a certain fear of returning to the States again, where the rituals of his faith are less diligent. “Here, we have to do it,” he says. “We don’t have the choice to do anything else. Going back to the States, you have to do it on your own. That is a big test, that’s why I came back. Here, the practice is every day. It’s just a matter of building myself until I don’t need to have that inspiration, until I can do it on my own.”

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Jesse Ellison and Emma Goldman, Holi-ed in Vrindavan. (Erik Wander)

It is day seven of our marathon journey through northern India and after a 3 a.m. wake-up call, a seven-hour train from Amritsar to Delhi immediately followed by a four-hour bus ride, and some very questionable “cheese” sandwiches, we were all fairly well convinced that our intrepid leaders were actually planning to sacrifice us to the country’s many gods, in the guise of helping us “submit to Mother India.”

We had finally disembarked from the bus (air conditioning options: tropical or frigid) and were approaching the ashram at the Jiva Institute of Vedic Studies in Vindravan, 150 kilometers south of Delhi. It was our destination for the day, and we approached by foot, as the bus could only go so far down the narrow streets. Monkeys ran alongside us; and as we grew nearer the drums got louder and louder.

We hear the chanting of “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna. Hare Rama, Hare Rama.” And we see a group of men and women dancing bhangra in the street outside the ashram. Then, out of nowhere, someone smacks me in the forehead with a handful of hot pink powder, gulal, and within minutes, our entire group, and theirs, is covered head to toe with pink, green and yellow powder. Our faces and clothes are suddenly tie-dyed, and everyone is dancing.

It is a fury of color as the drumming grows louder and louder. Shira is waving her hands wildly in the air, bouncing her shoulders up and down. Greg takes off his shower cap and shakes his hips with Mannika and the yogis from the ashram. Amanda, her face covered in pink powder, looks at me, “Are we having fun yet?”

According to Hindu mythology, an ancient atheist king decided he wanted to be worshipped as a God but his own son was the lone holdout, insisting on worshipping the Hindu god Vishnu. The king’s sister, Hollika, was said to be able to withstand fire, so he told her to take her nephew into a fire and sit him on her lap so that the boy would burn. But the king’s son survived and Hollika burned to death.

This story is the origin of the Holi festival and although it is not entirely clear why, today the Holi festival of color is considered a celebration of good over evil and an exuberant welcome of spring. Every March in northern India, Hindus and non-Hindus alike douse each other in powdered color and water, drink marijuana-laced bhang, and in some areas, women beat men playfully with sticks.

Even though today is only choti Holi, the smaller celebration, to be followed by the larger, even more exuberant one the next day, from the bus on the way down, we saw hundreds of men and women covered head to toe in the colorful powders. Watching people smack each other with handfuls of powder, play-fight, and get drunk on bhang, it’s easy to see how it could get dangerous—especially with a big group of foreigners. Our version of Holi takes place safely within the confines of the ashram; still, it was a welcomed moment of release for our weary group.

From the surrounding rooftops families of women and children watch our frolicking in the streets the whole time. I can only imagine they must be baffled. In the preceding days, we have visited so many temples and sites, and spoken with too many people for me to try to count now. This is the first time, as Aili pointed out later, that something has been staged entirely for our benefit. “It’s the first time I really felt like a tourist,” she says. “But then again, I don’t want to get groped.”

Later, after lunch with our hosts at the ashram, the head teacher there, Dr. Satya Narayana Dasa, affectionately known as Babaji, tells us how he gave up his comfortable life as an IIT-educated M-Tech engineer in the United States and moved back to his native India to study the holy scriptures of Hinduism. “Science and technology has made a lot of advancements towards making life easier materially, but there is also something lacking,” he says. “This is what I felt when I was in America. It is the first world power, but people also aren’t happy. I realized that what people need is something India can give: spiritual knowledge.” A few minutes later, the power goes out.

For a few moments outside the ashram, with our group dancing wildly to the drums and chants of “Holi Hai!” no one noticing the dogs chasing the monkeys up and over the walls, and even later, sitting together on the floor of the pitch-black basement, it feels as if maybe we have all finally submitted to this deeply foreign and mysterious place. But after this we will get back aboard our bus and go, of all places, to the Best Western Radha Ashok, where we will hide out until it is safe to carry on to Agra. This, I think, reminds everyone that no matter how much we submit during this short sojourn, we are only scratching the surface.

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Seven small children are gathered around a table at the Zoroastrian temple in Pomona, NY, with Avan Patel at the head. Patel, the daughter of the temple priest, has taught four to six year-olds about the Zoroastrian faith for seven years. The children in her class are preparing for their eventual Navjote, the ceremony in which they will be officially welcomed to the Zoroastrian faith.

“Where have we seen fire before?” Patel asks them. They shout out their answers.

“In the fireplace!”

“On a building!”

“Yes, and in the temple. Now, we must remember, we can pray near the fire but not too close to it,” she says.

“Yes, because it can make you dead.”

“Ok, now, God created seven special angels to be special protectors for each of his seven creations: sky, water, earth, food, animals, humans, and fire. Ahura Mazda has a team—it’s like a basketball team—they work together. They are the Amesha Spentas.

“One of them looks after the. . . “ Patel points upwards

“Sky!” the children say in tandem.

“One looks after the. . . “ Patel points down.

“Earth!”

“Good! One looks after the. . . “ Patel points at herself, then at each of the children sitting around the table.

“People!”

These children represent the newest members of a dying faith. Zoroastrianism is disappearing from the globe, in part because of a vehement stance against proselytizing and the rules surrounding the offspring of Zoroastrians and their non-Zoroastrian spouses. Here, at the Zoroastrian Association of Greater New York’s center, at 106 Pomona Road in Suffern, the rules are relaxed. Children of inter-marriages are more than welcome here, where in India, only the children of a Zoroastrian father would be welcome in the temple and be allowed to participate in the Navjote.

It is widely accepted that the non-conversion doctrine in Zoroastrianism has only been in place since the Zoroastrians fled Persia for India, where they are known as Parsis. Once in India, the Hindu king offered them refuge from persecution under the stipulation that they wouldn’t proselytize. Some American Zoroastrians argue that the stance on conversion is not inherent to the religion but was only added later and they ask why Parsis continue to be so vigilant about it now when their faith is threatened with extinction.

Many Zoroastrians in America today are open-minded and welcoming of those of every faith. Some members of the community, even the temple’s board members, have married outside the faith, yet their children and spouses are welcomed to classes and prayers at the temple.

In India, it is not so open, and members of the New York congregation universally said that Parsis in India are much more orthodox in their interpretation of the rules surrounding who is really considered Zoroastrian, despite concerns over the dwindling population.

“They will say they are not interested in quantity, they are interested in quality,” Lovji Cama said about his orthodox counterparts in India. “But the quality of zero is zero.”

But today, in this small room, these young children have little sense of the world they are being trained to enter. They don’t even know the meaning of the prayers they are being taught. They will learn the meaning behind the sounds later.

One young student already seems exhausted. “Do we have to do this,” Sarosh, 6 1/2 says with exasperation when Patel announces they will be playing a game. Then, with a decidedly adult sigh, “I’ve been in this class for years. I’m really bored.”

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