Contemporary Parsis: Demographics
Ninth class in a series on the TISS-PARZOR Academic Programme in Culture & Civilisations: A Zoroastrian Perspective. Facts, figures, and controversies. Is extinction inevitable?
Prof. Shernaz Cama began the demographics class with facts. The discussion quickly entered controversial territory before the guest lecturer returned us to disturbing figures on population decline. I’ll focus on numbers, marriage and birth controversy, and stereotypes.
For further reading, see the four-volume set The Parsis of India: Continuing at the Crossroads.
India vs. Diaspora
Prof. Shalini Bharat, former Vice-Chancellor of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, through which this Zoroastrianism course is offered, presented demographics of the Indian Zoroastrian population. Neither Prof. Shernaz Cama nor Prof. Bharat provided facts and figures on the diaspora.
The prescribed readings related the history and numbers of the diaspora in Pakistan and the UK and spoke about using the internet and social media to disseminate knowledge on our dying community, but neither the class nor the readings gave an overall picture of the diaspora. So this post will focus on the Zoroastrian demographics in India.
The Hard Numbers
Let’s start with the birth rate. We in Canada and Europe have all heard of the dire, declining birth rates in our countries. Less than replacement, less than two live babies per couple. But compared to the Parsi birth rate, our countries’ rates seem robust.
Parsi birth rate: 0.94.
Yikes!
Parsis, the descendants of ancient Persians, comprise the smallest religio-ethnic community in India and the world. Although the Indian birth rate overall is predicted to start declining by 2050 — and even though some states like Kerala are already experiencing a decline — the consequences are not dire because they start off with an enormous population.
But Parsis start with a small and shrinking population. In 1891, the population was 89,490; it rose to a high of 114,890 in 1941 to 1951. Then it began declining. My family was part of the highest decline rate in the 1960s and 1970s as we migrated out of India.
As of 2011, the Parsi population in India is 57,264. It’d be lower now because…
…for every 174 live births, 756 Parsis die.
Impediments to Increasing the Birth Rate
Horrified at the rapid decline in population, Jiyo Parsi was launched in September 2013. Its mandate, as I understood it (a bit difficult since Zoom’s and my broadband connections sucked), was to help Parsi married couples have children.
To have children in India, one must marry.
I’m not kidding.
Almost every adult in India is married. Singlehood may be prevalent here in Canada and the US, and cohabitation pretty much the norm in the West, but neither is common in India. Ninety-seven percent of Indians are married at some point in their lives.
Eschewing Marriage
The shift to delaying marriage or eschewing it altogether seemed to me to be common among ethnic groups who live in dominant cultures and common to any country where women gain power: the power to live healthily; the power to receive an education; the power to have gainful employment; the security of hospital births, lowering the risk of dying in childbirth. These powers put women on an equal footing to men.
Apparently, men and women in the Indian Parsi community dislike each other. Some of it sounded familiar to me from my high school days. Girls in my friend group from Asia didn’t want to date boys from their origin countries. Prof. Cama agreed with my comment that this antipathy is a symptom of the Marginal Man Syndrome, which I discussed in my last post.
I don’t think the genders would dislike each other if Zoroastrianism had stayed true to Zarathushtra’s edict of equality between the genders. In India, Parsis are considered patrilinear under the law. That should not have meant that the community itself becomes patriarchal or that the diaspora should have. But it did. Under Indian law, because my father is Zoroastrian, I’d legally be Parsi. If my mother had been and my father not, I wouldn’t have been. As I mentioned before, the Parsi community can learn from First Nations experience and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada.
Eschewing Having Children
Another impediment to increasing the birth rate is that young Parsis don’t want to have children. For the same reasons as you’d hear here. Humans are humans everywhere, eh?
Delaying Conception
A third impediment is that couples are delaying having children. Prof. Cama said it may be controversial, but women need to start having babies before the age of 26. Although I know this statement gets people’s backs up, I think planting a political sticker on a biological fact leads to misery. Women who believe the myth they can conceive any old time and delay having children, discover in their thirties when they begin trying that that’s not true. The disappointment, frustration, and grief is heart breaking.
I knew in my teens and early twenties from biology classes in high school and at the University of Toronto that if I wanted to have children, I’d have to start in my early twenties like my mother did. There’s no getting around the fact that as you age, it gets harder and harder, and the risk for miscarriages, stillbirths, and health issues in both mother, fetuses, and newborns rises.
I think patriarchy biases women to see this kind of statement as political instead of biological fact because we’re forced into the male model of adult life. Given that we now live in to our 80s (at least in Canada), that means we no longer have to stuff every aspect of adult life into the first decade of adulthood. Yet our patriarchal society remains stuck in the early 20th century of short lifespans and male dominance and rewards those who hit the ground running in the workplace in their twenties. You can’t do that if you become a parent unless you’re a man (or increasingly a women) and shift all the responsibility onto the other parent, assuming you’re not a single parent. But since people are calling the sixties the new forties and since people in their eighties and nineties are still driving and working, why must we continue that fallacy? Why can’t young adults prioritize marriage, children, and relationships, and ease into working life? Then, once the children are older, in their teens perhaps, parents can emphasize work more. They’ll still have decades left to build a successful career. Only rigid attitudes and elder ageism prevent that.
Why must we prioritize work and making more money than we need to live well over everything else for decade after decade?
Maybe if we women influenced the way we live onto the rest of society instead of transforming ourselves into female forms of patriarchal men, we’d all be a whole lot better off. Women wouldn’t be forced to delay childbirth or have only one child because all their time and energy is taken up by caring for elderly, sick parents, aunts, and uncles (and maybe grandparents, too), leaving them no energy to raise multiple children. You wouldn’t get the deathbed confession either from men of, “I wish I’d spent more time with my spouse, children, friends, and relatives and less time at work.”
Although their ads apparently caused an outcry, Jiyo Parsi helped at least two couples conceive through medical support. I wasn’t clear on why they needed fertility treatments. Was it age-related, or was it the result of being in a small community that has inbreeding health problems? My grandmother had fertility problems in her twenties: multiple miscarriages and stillbirths.
Stereotype
Because of the tremendous wealth and success of big-name Parsis like the Tatas, there exists within the Zoroastrian community the idea that Parsis are successful and wealthy and don’t need special support from the Indian government. My father used to tell me that when India became independent, Parsis were proud to tell the government that they didn’t need special help. They’re the minority group who can make it on their own without governmental support. Those like Prof. Cama who’ve done the research and visited the baags beg to differ and believe strongly this policy must be revisited, for the facts and figures prove that assertion was a myth.
Asset Rich, Cash Poor
When nationalization and prohibition after Independence in the 1940s took away Parsi livelihood in the rural areas by cutting down trees whose fruit they used for making alcoholic drinks — without any compensation whatsoever — and with no other plant able to grow in the saline soil — what an environmental desecration! — Parsis moved to urban areas. They sold their land and used it to build baags in the cities (just Bombay? I’m not sure) to house the Parsi elderly and poor. This building of flats to help the marginalized in their community is part of the Zoroastrian good deed value to use wealth for charitable purposes.
Today, elders live in enormous flats in those baags, eat soup made from bones, and have no children, no siblings, no family, no one to spend time with. They’re asset rich, cash poor. So poor they cannot afford proper food.
No Marriage, No Children, No Big-Buck-Success
Loneliness is as endemic in the Indian Parsi community as it is in North America. Maybe for different reasons, but the result is the same.
As a Parsi in Canada, I can relate. The overall ethos of this community is thou must be successful aka be a professional who makes good money, else thou is a failure and has no drive. My health care team are perplexed by how engrained this attitude is in me as they tell me I’m the hardest worker they know or I’m doing better than 90% of their patients with brain injury or look at all the books I’ve written.
I understand Prof. Cama’s frustration when she talked about the stereotype of Parsis being successful and rich when, in reality, the Indian Parsi community has the largest elder population in the world (60 years of age or older); a great number live in poverty; and loneliness is pervasive. It sounded to me like the Parsi norm in India is poor, old or challenged (disabled?), and alone.
Is Extinction Inevitable?
Maybe Parsi men don’t want to be equal in parenting like I see Canadian men here. Maybe Parsi women don’t want to be confined by marriage and children. But the long-term effect is an extinct community and an impoverished old age, lived alone. For me, I’ve lived through the catastrophic effects of brain injury, which, as one doctor said, shot me into my 70s except for chronological age. I’ve worked hard to treat my brain injury and regain health, but I’ve known all my life that I won’t have children supporting me. On the other hand, we seem to live in a world where children no longer support their elders, anyway.