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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Day 12. We are almost broken.

For nearly two weeks, we have rumbled across India, taking in two, sometimes three, world-important sites per day.

We have slept on trains. We have been bounced silly in five-hour bus rides on stretches of cratered terrain that prompt Sree Sreenivasan to quip, “and these are the GOOD roads!” We have been overcome with fatigue, and some of us (ahem) have been stricken with stomach ailments best described as medieval.

But we have also gazed at the moon from the Golden Temple in Amristar, ascended the steps of the mighty Jama Masjid, watched the changing of the guard at the border with Pakistan, broken bread with gurus, imams, and political leaders, and begun to form a view of this great country and its religions that could only come from a journey that has been as vast and varied as it has been arduous.

And now, in our bus, in an opulent section of Mumbai, where there are neither cows nor beggars, and where we are shaded by a canopy of trees (trees!), I get the sense that the group’s attention is beginning to wane.

We are quiet. We stare out the window. Our tour guide’s words are like a breeze floating over us. Perhaps I’m not alone in assuming all the surprises on this trip are over.

How wrong I am.

Meet The Zoroastrians

11:40 a.m. We arrive at the Athornan Boarding Madressa. It is a school for training Zoroastrian priests.

We are seated on wooden pews in a large concrete room. There is a small altar up front on which there burns a small but intense fire. Two children, dressed in white tunics stand next to it, watching its flames in silence. They are training to be priests and their mouths are covered with thin veils of white cloth to protect the sacred flame from their saliva.

Two young Parsi priests demonstrated a fire ritual. (Dikla Kadosh)

Ervad Parvez M. Bajan, the head priest of the Mevawala Fire Temple, presents us the history of the Parsi people and of the Zoroastrian faith. How it is the first monotheistic religion. How it charges its followers with three edicts: good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

How its priests are required to memorize every syllable of their single-volume sacred text. Why this policy was created: to avoid the calamity of the Arab conquest hundreds of years prior, when every last copy of the other 20 volumes was destroyed and lost forever.

The Parsis are a numerically tiny ethnic group that settled in India after fleeing persecution by Muslims in eighth century Persia. They are followers of the ancient Zoroastrian faith and they have achieved spectacular commercial and intellectual success in India. They own hotels, run finance companies, and were leaders in the movement for independence from the British.

And there are only 60,000 of them in a country of one billion people.

As Mr. Parvez speaks, we can’t help noticing the small boys. They’ve been standing the whole time. Sullen is the word that best describes their faces.

“Do these kids seem happy to you?” Amanda Millner-Fairbanks turns to ask me.

“Of course not,” I say, though I am aware I posses a very Western, bourgeois idea of what kids that age should be doing. It involves lots of television and very little priestly training.

Jesse Ellison, who studied the Zoroastrians while we were in New York, broaches the subject of inter-marriage and conversion. The Zoroastrian community worldwide is at a crossroads when it comes to conversion. For generations, the Parsi community in India has refused to allow conversion, but now the ethnic group is in danger of dying out, with the Zoroastrian faith potentially disappearing along with it. Recent census data projects there will be fewer than 20,000 Parsis in India by 2020. Despite the dwindling numbers, the Indian Parsi community has refused to open the Zoroastrian faith to converts, even as communities worldwide have grown more flexible, opening the doors of their fire temples to the children of inter-marriage and non-Zoroastrian spouses.

So why is the Parsi community so rigid in their stance?

“Well, even Hitler said keeping races pure is important,” says Parvez, as if this settles the matter. He reiterates the point a bit later. The Hitler part. We take it all in for a few moments, then get a short tour of the first floor.

Later I ask Jesse about the comment.

"I was surprised," she says. "I had heard Parsis here were more militant in their stance against conversion, but I had no idea they would be this extreme."

After our meeting with Parvez, Sreenivasan explains to the group that references to Hitler in India shouldn’t be perceived as having the same significance as they would in, say, Jerusalem. Many Indians just don't have a sense of the scale of Hitler's evil.

So much for a day without the unexpected.

A Party That Night

9:30 p.m. The Wodehouse Gymkhana.

We are at a reception that has been arranged for us by Sameera Khan, a Mumbai-based journalist and activist, and Columbia J-School alum along with Manjeet Kripalani, Mumbai bureau chief of BusinessWeek magazine, and a Columbia School of International and Public Affairs alum. There’s food and wine and even a face I recognize. It’s Bachi Karkaria, an op-ed columnist for the Times of India. Some say Ms. Karkaria is as famous in India as Maureen Dowd is in America.

“I’m a Parsi,” she tells me. “And let me tell you something about what this priest said about racial purity.”

“I personally think it’s foolish and it’s suicidal and many Parsis agree with me. The trouble is that the extreme group can be that much more articulate... I sometimes think of an old American bumper sticker: The Moral Majority is Neither.”

She describes how the refusal to allow the children of inter-marriages to become Zoroastrians has led to a frequency of intra-Parsi marriages that may be contributing to higher incidences of diabetes, diverticulitis, and even birth defects among Parsis.

“This is something no one wants to talk about,” Ms. Karkaria says.

Her overall message is that however strident our high priest may have been, there are many other Parsis who feel differently, and that there is a movement afoot to reevaluate the current interpretations of rules concerning the children of intermarriages.

My surprise at what she’s told me reminds me of a lesson this trip has taught me over and over: don’t fall into the trap of giving extremists a bullhorn. There is, at the very least, a silent minority in any religion, and the only way to learn what its members think is to find them and ask them questions.

Another Party

11 p.m. The group has crashed a nightclub called The Red Light. Stacey Samuel and Jesse Ellison have persuaded the managers to let us in, even though the space has been booked for a private event.

We enter. There are three women and what seems like 1,000 men. They are staring at the televisions. They are British. They are here to watch cricket highlights.

Numerous rounds of drinks later, the British guys and the ladies of our group are dancing the night away.

I spend most of my time observing. And I can’t help thinking that we’re still in India, we still have a day to go, but already we’re a very long way from the madrassas.

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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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