What Is the Most Serious Issue Facing Zoroastrianism?
My essay for the TISS-PARZOR Culture and Civilisation: A Zoroastrian Perspective — Foundation Course 2026 led by Prof. Shernaz Cama.
Essay Question: What, do you believe, is the most serious issue facing the community sociologically and demographically? Is it too late to turn back the tide? Give a reasoned answer.
Many years ago, I asked myself, “Why were Zoroastrians decimated?” The Bible chronicles why the Hebrews faced exile and losses, but no such explanation in the sacred texts or myths exists for Zoroastrians. Straying not only from God but also from the values whose roots lay in the Hebrews’ relationship with God and the Ten Commandments, led to the Hebrews’ Babylonian exile. So perhaps the way to answering my question lies in examining whether Zoroastrians strayed from their roots, justifying it as a means to survive and thrive economically within a dominant culture. I also examine if Robert E. Park’s Marginal Man theory can point us to answering the question: Is it too late to turn back the tide?
About a century ago, Park coined the term “Marginal Man” to describe either a mixed-blood person or a migration of a people wherein an individual strives to live within two diverse cultures, one of which is dominant and their own is subordinate. The two cultures conflict within this individual’s mind then merge to advance civilization.
Marginal Man: two cultures conflict within an individual’s mind then merge to advance civilization
Everett V. Stonequist in 1935 honed this theory by identifying three stages in the progression toward merging. In the first stage, the individual learns of the two diverse cultures: theirs and the dominant one of the society in which they live. During the second stage, the individual falls into crisis. In the third stage, they resolve the crisis.
Stonequist notes five ways individuals or a community resolve this conflict in their minds.
Become an accepted member of the dominant culture.
Move in the opposite direction and identify wholly with their own subordinate culture.
Withdrawal or isolation.
Removal to a place where both cultures exist relatively equally or where people of mixed-blood are prevalent.
“In individual cases certain roles of adjustment, investigation, creative science, and art enable the individual to profit by his special position, and perhaps ease the problem by expressing it.”
Such was the situation the descendants of Cyrus the Great found themselves in after they fled the Arabic Muslim conquest and scattered to India, China, Burma, and Pakistan in the first diaspora. Centuries later, they scattered from South Asia in a double diaspora to the UK, Australia, New Zealand, USA, and Canada, where the largest population outside of India resides in Ontario. They went from being the dominant culture that ruled a vast land to a subordinate culture in a dominant society. Cyrus the Great called himself a “Parsa,” and his Empire’s descendants are known as Parsis. Following the central tenet of good thoughts, good words, good deeds, his and succeeding Zoroastrian Empires accepted all religions and allowed those within their Empires to practice their own faiths; it also accepted people to become Zoroastrians and for Zoroastrians to “marry out,” that is, evangelism.
The First Diaspora
In the first millennium after migrating to India, Parsis not only survived, they found influence and wealth, first in the rural areas then later in urban areas, mostly in Bombay. Their survival hinged on the now-famous story of the head priest telling King Jadi Rana that like sugar in milk, Parsi refugees would sweeten and blend in with the dominant culture. To do so, they agreed to five conditions:
They must explain their religion.
They had to give up their language.
Their women had to give up their clothing styles and wear the Gujarati saris of the dominant culture.
They must put away their weapons.
Their marriages would occur after sunset, implying that Rana was giving them land, but these migrants must remain under the radar.
These conditions changed a part of tangible Parsi culture — their clothing — and replaced their language with the dominant culture’s one. Without language, culture dies or changes. Although Avestan, their language, barely managed to survive, this language substitution corrupted their intangible culture. Because they had to remain under the radar, building their fire temples in ordinary structures at the end of narrow lanes, their evangelistic culture turned one hundred and eighty degrees into a closed culture.
This foundational transformation led centuries later not only to conflict over who is a Zoroastrian but also to health issues from inbreeding as the community shrank and married first cousins to avoid both marrying out and mingling with the local population, thereby risking a violent reaction.
Centuries later, when the British ruled India, Parsis resolved this second Marginal Man crisis by identifying with the British. Under Stonequist’s three stages, Parsis as individuals and as a collective encountered the British, experienced a conflict between British male values and their own equal-gender values, and resolved this crisis to fit in as British.
T.M. Luhrmann wrote in “Cultural responses to collective trauma” section of Cultures under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma that Parsis transformed their core values that emerged from their central tenet in order to adapt to patriarchal British rule. Truthfulness became business reliability. Purity became racially different from other Indians — retaining their fair skin through penalizing marrying out. Charity became a sign of business success. Progress became a sign of successful participation in British cultural reform and rationalization. The latter led to adopting the English language and patriarchal and boarding school aspects of the successful man.
The Parsi community chose Stonequist’s option one. They mutated themselves into a business success useful to the British. This mutation into a patriarchal community seeking wealth, status, and racial purity, counterbalanced with charitable givings, led to a backward knock-on effect on what good thoughts, good words, and good deeds actually means.
It also inevitably led to their diminishing numbers.
If Parsis hadn’t supplanted Zarathushtra’s equality teaching with patriarchy, then Parsi women would have been as educated, healthy, and active in the workforce as men for centuries; they would’ve been priests in equal numbers; and they would not today be experiencing the same pushback from Parsi men as women everywhere experience from patriarchal men everywhere objecting to women becoming their equal.
Seeking emancipation began more than a century ago in the West and spread outward through the decades. All British women received the right to vote in 1928, and Indian women in 1950. The Parsi population decline began in the same decade as women were emancipated in India and accelerated with the double diaspora migration to the West, where women had more rights and people more freedom. As a result, gender conflict from Parsi women’s emancipation led to diminishing marriage rates. Diminishing marriage rates in India, where marriage is a precondition of pregnancy, led to birth rates dropping to less than a quarter of death rates, with 174 births to 756 deaths in 2013. Although Jiyo Parsi helped two couples give birth through medical interventions, this support was a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed to reverse the decline in population.
Meanwhile, controversy continues to plague the community over returning to Zarathushtra’s evangelism. Traditionalists want to keep the community closed, restricting who can become Zoroastrian, who can become priests, how myths are interpreted, who can enter the fire temples, who can call themselves Parsis, and prohibiting marrying out.
Tradition plus purity has led to the injunction against marrying out for the sake of not diluting the genetic pool. Parsis not only divide themselves against other cultures, they also divide themselves within their own community: fair skin from darker-skinned, reflecting who intermarried in the past and who did not. This is racial purity. We’ve seen in other societies how divisive and violent, physically or verbally, racial purity politics is. Parsis claim they are non-violent, yet purity along genetic lines is inherently violent. It others people by dint of their parentage. It sets the accepted group against individuals deemed unacceptable. It rationalized the “pur laine” movement of Québec in the 1990s; the ever-present habit of gerrymandering voting districts in the USA; Partition; and regular sectarian clashes and enactment of laws to promote one religious or language or racial group over another.
Yet is this kind of purity tradition? Aren’t the traditionalists really enforcers of the Marginal Man crisis resolution to surviving in India? Aren’t the true traditionalists the ones who want to return to Zarathushtra’s teachings and Cyrus the Great’s human rights code of acceptance and openness?
Return to Roots is a youth-initiated program to reconnect young Zoroastrians in the double diaspora to India. It “is a unique means of fostering community links and identity by taking small groups of youth on trips to explore their religious, social and cultural heritage.” However, Zoroastrianism’s roots are in the Central Asian Steppes where Zarathushtra lived and began his evangelistic mission to bring monotheism to Asia. My grandmother taught me that my family’s ancestors came from the far north of the Empire; thus, I theorize my roots would be in the region of Georgia’s Ateshgah fire temple in Tbilisi, not in the first diaspora of Burma and India.
Gieve Patel in his poem On Killing a Tree describes in the last stanza how to extinguish a religion and a culture.
“The root is to be pulled out —
Out of the anchoring earth;
It is to be roped, tied,
And pulled out — snapped out
Or pulled out entirely,
Out from the earth-cave,
And the strength of the tree exposed,
The source, white and wet,
The most sensitive, hidden
For years inside the earth.Then the matter
Of scorching and choking
In sun and air,
Browning, hardening,
Twisting, withering,
And then it is done.”
The white, wet root of Parsi culture, long hidden under millennia of genocide, lies in the regions where outdoor fire temples were built. India is not the root of the religion nor its original culture; it’s the first diaspora, which twisted some aspects of the culture so that Parsis could settle safely in a foreign land according to Rana’s five conditions. In essence, Return to Roots re-categorizes the five conditions of settling in India as roots and so reinforces their deleterious effects.
Claiming the culture that sprouted like a rose sucker is the root itself, makes it the poem’s “done.”
All this leads back to good thoughts, good words, good deeds. How do we live out this Bronze Age tenet in modern society so as to allow the culture to reinvigorate itself? Zarathushtra was about following a good and wise God, resisting evil from thought to deed, and treating each other and the natural world with compassion, kindness, acceptance, and equality.
I think where we stand in the current gender wars, in climate action, and in the digital age, using Parsis’ famed intellectual prowess responsibly, will determine if Parsis survive as a respected people.
Parsis must return to the value of gender equality in every aspect of life.
Here in Canada, fathers push strollers to shops while the mothers are at work. Yet in India, Jiyo Parsi had to promote this kind of fatherhood to Parsi men. Parsi men are behind Canadian men in the equality mindset. Sticking to patriarchal gender roles doesn’t reflect good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Since Parsi women are wanting to claim what Western women have and what Zarathushtra taught and what good thoughts, good words, good deeds engender, they’re unlikely to change their attitude toward Parsi men and may marry out to men belonging to cultures that are more accepting of married women working and of fathers sharing the parenting role fifty/fifty. In a tiny, shrinking community, that will accelerate the trend of fewer births and drop the birth rate to lower than 2011’s 0.94.
Marrying out doesn’t mean extinction unless Parsi women and men don’t teach their culture and/or the Zoroastrian religion to their children in the face of the wider Parsi community arguing over racial purity. The wider community needs to return to their evangelistic roots as the Asp-i-Siha myth teaches and to heal the Marginal Man mutation so that people, especially women — who we know from other cultures determine a people’s success — become proud once again of their tangible and intangible culture. When they do, they’ll choose Parsi names. They’ll wear Parsi designs. They’ll expand Parsi dishes to embrace vegetarianism.
Facing up to the climate crisis and our individual and societal response will affect Parsi extinction.
Climate scientists have identified animal agriculture as the second-most major contributor to climate change; leaders advocate changing one’s diet as an easy way for individuals to embrace climate action. Yes, the food root of the Central Asian Steppes is meat; but Zarathushtra’s good and wise God’s instruction to be kind to animals, humans, and Nature underscores the value of climate action in the foods we eat. Will Parsis lead in climate action or drag their heels, claiming tradition as justification for supporting a major source of climate change while crowing theirs is the first ecological religion with a reverence for Nature? Does “tradition” hold greater sway than using Parsis’ fabled intellectual prowess responsibly by following Ahura Mazda’s good thoughts, good words, good deeds toward climate action? Will Parsis be followers or become societal leaders in climate action? The answers will either lead to extinction or regenesis.
Although it brings benefits, the digital age is spawning evil on several fronts.
It threatens the environment with its heavy use of fossil-fuel-powered electricity and individual freedom and security with servers and dominant technological platforms located in an increasingly fascist USA. Some advocate for small modular nuclear reactors to power servers as a way to green their heavy power usage and reverse their increasing damage to the environment and contribution to the climate crisis.
The digital age also threatens human rights. Platforms that sell people’s data, control what members read and watch with a bias toward misinformation in order to increase viewing rates, support fascism, and flout privacy laws are a threat to democracy and individuals’ mental and physical health.
Generative AI (artificial intelligence) based its LLMs (large language models) on stolen copyrighted written work and visual arts. On the one hand are educators who talk about Generative AI replacing them; on the other are the informed who recognize that the owners of Generative AI built it on stolen art and know it is subject to disseminating mis- and disinformation, has led to youth suicide and, most recently, chose not to prevent the mass murder in Tumbler Ridge, BC, Canada.
A handful of excessively rich men design platforms that control algorithms, AI, and Generative AI to make themselves and corporations wealthier and politically influential — and to purchase media corporations — in order to monopolize and control information flow.
We are facing an emerging ethical landscape that requires people of good thoughts to investigate and ponder their deeds so that they respond in a way that lowers their contribution to the climate crisis, increases personal safety, safeguards democracy, empowers artists and writers against theft, supports AI that helps while blocking AI built on the backs of stolen works, resists participating in digital platforms that increase division and misinformation, and rewards ethical public benefit companies, co-operatives, or non-profits rather than rapacious social media and virtual platforms.
To do that, one must pay attention to the news, investigate, make difficult decisions, and always use good thoughts, good words, good deeds as a guide to making the tough changes to ensure one isn’t rewarding bad corporate behaviour, government malfeasance, divisive politics, and climate change. At the moment, Parsis in India are behind Canadians in all these aspects, yet Canadians aren’t the ones who have Zarathushtra’s teachings as a guide nor a millennia-long commitment to ecology. For example, Parsis who use WhatsApp are not only behind Canadians, but also their fellow Indians. In January 2021, after WhatsApp changed their privacy policy to share WhatsApp data with Facebook, breaking Mark Zuckerberg’s (Meta) agreement with the EU when Facebook purchased WhatsApp, the Indian “mass exodus” to the Signal app overloaded Signal’s servers. This news was reported around the world and in India. Since then, Meta has only increased its surveillance capabilities, data sharing between its platforms and products, and selling of people’s data.
One would assume Parsis would’ve followed their central tenet and used their renowned intellectual prowess to lead the move toward more privacy-retaining non-profit messaging apps like Signal and toward federated public-benefit social media platforms and videoconferencing platforms whose servers are located in the EU or Canada, which have the strictest privacy laws. Yet experience says no. It takes more effort and less relying on others to be informed, but staying in Stonequist’s option one appeasement mode, not rocking the boat, not being in the forefront of human rights is more likely to lead to extinction.
Being from a tiny, diminishing community, Parsis must wear many hats, including the difficult one of keeping on top of technological advances, both good and evil, and changing what they participate in as digital companies and platforms evolve.
Parsis being behind implies they’ve abandoned good thoughts, consigning the central tenet to a brand-identification, no longer a guide to intellectual rigour and wise decision-making.
For that reason, although I think it’s not too late to turn the tide, Parsis will nevertheless continue to zoom toward extinction except in pockets here and there. Parsis may survive but in a distorted form where good thoughts, good words, good deeds is a brand not a guiding force in the Anthropocene, where women are treated as equals only superficially, where marrying out is seen as diluting the culture instead of a way to evangelize and expand it, and where the ecological ethos remains as a remembered past that doesn’t force individuals and the community to take climate action steps that put them ahead of the rest of society as responsible stewards of our planet.
If interested in reading my posts on the Foundations course, start here:
References
Robert E. Park. Human Migration and The Marginal Man. The American Journal of Sociology. Vol. XXXIII. No. 6. May 1928.
Everett V. Stonquist. The Problem of The Marginal Man. The American Journal of Sociology. Vol. XLI. No. 1. July 1935.
T.M. Luhrmann The traumatized social self: the Parsi predicament in modern Bombay. Cultural responses to collective trauma. Cultures under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma. September 2000.
UK. Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representation_of_the_People_(Equal_Franchise)_Act_1928
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Shaun Walker. The last of the Zoroastrians. The Guardian. 6 August 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/06/last-of-the-zoroastrians-parsis-mumbai-india-ancient-religion
Return to Roots. 2020 Report. https://zororoots.org/wp-content/uploads/6th_RTR_2020_Trip_Report-1.pdf
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