The Parsi Zoroastrian community is a small minority in the Indian subcontinent, descended from Iranian Zoroastrians who migrated to the west coast of India around the 10th century. There they cultivated a syncretic ethno-religious identity by interweaving Iranian and Indian elements and maintained it over centuries through strict adherence to endogamous marriage.1 The Parsi Zoroastrian community is known for its successful integration into host societies, but in recent years discourse within the community has focused on preserving its unique identity and conserving at-risk cultural heritage.2 This is because of a steep and possibly irreversible population decline in once-thriving communities in South Asia due to an ageing population, low birth rate, migration, intermarriage, and late or non-marriage. Today, in India, the Parsi Zoroastrian population is estimated to be between 45,000 and 50,000, and approximately 1,000 in Pakistan and 45 in Sri Lanka.3
The challenge of preserving tangible and intangible heritage has been taken up primarily by the Parsi-Zoroastrian (Parzor) Foundation. Established in Delhi, India, in 2002, the Parzor Foundation is a UNESCO New Delhi initiative that aims to ‘make known and preserve Zoroastrian culture’ by ‘conserving tangible heritage and places of memory, ensuring continuity of knowledge, traditions and community well-being.’4 For the Parsi Zoroastrian community, cultural preservation is time-sensitive and the Parzor Foundation acknowledges that some of its most critical work—to capture and record intangible heritage from priests, artists and musicians, traditional medical practitioners and others—is a ‘race against time’ before knowledgeable people are lost forever.5
Although demographically the community is small, there is a significant amount of tangible cultural heritage present in books, artefacts and archaeological sites, as well as intangible cultural heritage in the form of oral histories, social practices, and cultural and religious rituals. However, there is ‘apathy and disinterest toward efforts to help preserve their culture’ within the community which impedes the speed of preservation.6 As a result of the efforts of the Parzor Foundation and other concerned community organisations and people, there is a reservoir of material on various topics of interest (which are increasingly being digitised for broader accessibility), but many in the community are either unaware of the material or choose not to engage with it.7 Dispersal of existing knowledge has also suffered due to migration and intermarriage, fuelling concerns that vital cultural heritage and knowledge is at risk of being forgotten by the community, especially the younger generation.
One recent initiative to gather statistical information from Zoroastrian communities around the world was Gen Z and Beyond: A Survey for Every Generation (hereafter called Gen Z and Beyond Survey).8 The survey was conducted from August 2021 to January 2023 and was the first of its kind conducted within the Zoroastrian community. It was open to persons aged 18 and over with at least one Zoroastrian parent, grandparent, or spouse of Iranian, Irani, or Parsi descent.9 The data for each category was collected, analysed, and presented in the final report separately so as to not conflate the findings. At the end, the online, globally accessible multiple-choice questionnaire yielded a total of 4893 valid responses.10
The Gen Z and Beyond Survey aimed to understand all aspects of Zoroastrian life today, including the many positive aspects of belonging to a tiny global minority. The survey also provided an opportunity to quantify, verify, and examine the many challenges the community faced. The questionnaire was divided into three sections: demographics, behaviours, and attitudes. There was one open-ended qualitative question at the end of the questionnaire asking respondents for their thoughts on how the future of the community could be strengthened and most multiple-choice questions had an option for respondents to enter their own answer if they could not find the relevant answer in the options provided. The survey addressed a wide range of topics and identified instances of collective or cultural forgetting.
In this conversation, Nazneen Engineer and Veera Rustomji discuss some key findings from the Gen Z and Beyond Survey that highlight aspects of cultural heritage with an emphasis on Zoroastrians based in South Asia, focusing on Pakistan. To add more contextual detail, Veera interviewed community leaders and priests of the Karachi Zoroastrian community to understand their current predicament with regard to preserving cultural heritage. She wanted to examine their awareness of and interaction with artefacts associated with the Zoroastrian religion such as Sasanian-era coins, which were excavated at a site an hour outside Karachi and are on display at two public museums within the city, the State Bank Museum and National Museum of Pakistan. Archaeological assessments of these artefacts, as discussed below, attest to a Zoroastrian presence in the province of Sindh—a presence that is neither widely known nor integrated in the culture of the Zoroastrians living in Pakistan today. Artefacts physically preserve and transmit cultural traditions, and the coins are highlighted here because they provide evidence of Zoroastrianism in Pakistan that predates the 10th-century migration of the Iranian Zoroastrians to Gujarat, India.11 While there is little reliable data about the migration of Iranian Zoroastrians to and their subsequent settlement in India, this is a foundational story that is at the core of a Parsi Zoroastrian identity, especially in South Asia.12 Archaeological discoveries that precede this story are important because they offer tangible evidence of an alternative way of looking at Zoroastrian expansion from Persia into South Asia.
One of the main purposes, therefore, of the Gen Z and Beyond Survey was to discover what community members perceived about their history, cultural identity, religious beliefs and traditional practices. Multiple strategies were used to collect as many survey responses as possible, including sharing the survey’s purpose, potential benefits, and updates on social media. Ambassadors and volunteers from communities around the world publicised the survey and collected responses within their regions. They assisted those who were not tech-savvy to take the survey online and addressed queries about privacy, research outcomes, eligibility criteria, and so on. The volunteers’ presence was especially important in communities such as India and Pakistan where there is a large, ageing population. We prioritised this because responses from the older generation were an integral part of the survey and enabled thought-provoking generational comparisons. Veera was one such volunteer, based in Karachi, Pakistan and experienced first-hand the complexity of conducting community-based research.
Continue reading here