Mumbai, India —
Burning sandalwood thickens the air in a room that’s so exclusive only a vanishingly small number of people are allowed to enter.
This is an agiary, a Zoroastrian place of worship for India’s Parsi community, where priests in white robes stoke a sacred flame around the clock and recite ancient Avestan prayers that have survived three millennia.
I stand before that fire, head covered. Here, I am reminded of my Zoroastrian ancestors, who once ruled a vast Persian empire, but were forced from their homes during the Muslim conquest of Persia some 1,300 years ago.
Parsis are their descendants, a people who fled religious persecution and built a life for themselves on India’s west coast.
This sacred room is a place most Indians will never see – including my daughter. That’s because she doesn’t get to be a Parsi, not even through birth.
Rigid gendered rules mean only those born to Parsi fathers are considered part of the community. Parsi women who marry outside the faith, like me, may find themselves pushed to the margins, with their children excluded entirely.
It’s a rule that’s rankled many in a community plagued by a demographic decline so severe that by 2050, experts predict fewer than 25,000 Parsis could be left in India. For generations, those rules have been questioned and debated but rarely tested – until now.
A couple is fighting for their child’s place in India’s vanishing Parsi community
The founding story Parsis tell about their arrival in India dates back centuries. As the legend goes, when Zoroastrian refugees came ashore in western India, a local Hindu ruler greeted them with a vessel filled to the brim with milk. His kingdom, the gesture implied, was already full.
The Zoroastrian high priest responded by stirring a pinch of sugar into the milk without spilling a drop. “We will be like sugar,” he is said to have replied. “We will dissolve into your land and sweeten it.”
With that promise, came the principles that would define Parsi life in India: they would not proselytize, and they would marry within the faith. What began as a strategy for coexistence, over centuries, hardened into a strict resistance to conversion and interfaith marriage.
In 1908 a significant court ruling determined that only those born to Parsi fathers are recognized by the state as Parsi, laying the groundwork for more than a century of exclusion.
Now, a landmark Supreme Court case seeks to interrogate the question: who gets to be Parsi?
The story of the Parsis in India is one of a community much smaller in number than its influence suggests.
Celebrated figures include the Tata family (founders of the vast conglomerate that owns Jaguar Land Rover), the country’s first field marshal Sam Manekshaw, and Homi J. Bhabha, the mind behind India’s nuclear program.
Outside India, they gave the world Freddie Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara, the electrifying frontman of British rock band Queen.
A community more than 100,000 strong in India in 1941, the Parsis had dwindled to fewer than 60,000 by 2011, according to census data. Many stayed in India; others left and formed new lives.
I was born in Mumbai into a long, unbroken line of Parsis.
Raised in the heart of South Mumbai in a low-rise building built exclusively for our community, ours was a quintessential Parsi home. Inside, generations of history echoed in century-old, patterned tiles and heavy, dark-wood Victorian heirlooms that anchored each room.
My grandmother, Hilla Banaji, was deeply religious. She recited her prayers every morning, wore sacred Zoroastrian garments called the “sudreh and kusti,” and never walked out of the front door without first praying to the large photograph of the prophet Zarathustra hanging above the entrance. Once, she encouraged me to “find a good Parsi boy” when I grew up.
I moved to Hong Kong, where I found someone else – outside the faith.
Many Parsis carry a quiet resignation about the community’s strict boundaries. People may not always agree with them, but most accept and follow them.
In recent decades, however, that sentiment has seemed to shift. As a new generation of Parsi women build independent lives and families on their own terms, more are beginning to see these rules not as fixed traditions, but as something that must change.
Sanaya Dalal also grew up a tight Parsi community, about 6 miles (10 kilometers) from mine, in the Dadar Parsi Colony, a storied enclave that stands in stark contrast to the rest of Mumbai: quiet, languid, and blissfully free of the city’s notorious traffic.
Like me, she married outside the faith. Unlike me, she stayed in India, where her family is often excluded from community rituals and gatherings.
Dalal, 43, calls herself a “colony kid” – a common phrase that describes Parsi children who live in these exclusive enclaves. “We’ve grown up here. Our friends are here. Our children are growing up here,” she said.
Dalal’s husband Rishi Kishnani grew up among Parsis; his mother was Parsi; no one had ever told him he was anything else – until the day he walked onto a cricket pitch to bat and was halted by a sharp whistle.
At the time he was 15 and had played cricket with friends at the Dadar enclave so often that it felt like an extension of his home.
“No, no, you can’t play,” Kishnani recalled being told.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Your father is not a Parsi.”
Kishnani’s now 48 but the exclusion still burns.
And he’s furious the same is happening to his son.
The legal boundaries of who qualifies as a Parsi are relatively recent for a sect that’s millennia old.
The rules were set following a landmark 1908 court case involving French national Suzanne Brière, who had converted to Zoroastrianism after marrying a high-profile member of the Tata family.
However, when she made plans to be laid to rest in Bombay’s Tower of Silence – an open-air Parsi funerary site used for sky burials, where the dead are traditionally exposed to vultures – orthodox hardliners objected.
Brière’s husband took the matter to the Bombay High Court, where judges defined the Parsi community in strictly patriarchal terms: only Parsi men were able to pass on religious identity, irrespective of who they marry. Converts, as well as the children of Parsi mothers with non-Parsi fathers, were excluded. Brière lost her battle and is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris – also an illustrious site, but a continent away from what may have been her desired resting place.
The judgement set the precedent: children born to Parsi women who marry outside the faith can be forbidden from being initiated into the religion, entering places of worship, or qualifying for certain Parsi-only welfare, housing and education programs.
Many progressive priests and community members reject these exclusionary rules and quietly defy them.
But my own family has felt the brunt of the exclusion after my father’s parents – both of whom were Parsi – divorced and each remarried outside. My Christian step-grandmother was barred from attending her father-in-law’s funeral. My Parsi grandmother, who married a Hindu man, was also denied entry. Both were made to sit outside the gates, deeply upsetting the family who mourned within.
Over the years, several Parsi women in India have mounted legal challenges to such practices. In 2010, Goolrokh Gupta filed a suit after her interfaith marriage was used to bar her from performing her parents’ last rites. The case ultimately reached India’s Supreme Court, where in 2017, a constitutional bench issued an interim order allowing her to enter Zoroastrian places of worship.
In 2017, author Prochy Mehta went to court when her intermarried daughter’s children were denied entry to a Kolkata fire temple.
“(The fire temple) is what keeps the connection with our religion, and you’re cutting off that connection,” said Mehta, who has authored two books on Parsis. “It becomes very difficult for the child, for the parents, and for the grandparents.”
The fight is ongoing in the Calcutta High Court.
Zoroastrianism’s core tenets – a single God, the cosmic struggle between good and evil – are widely believed by historians to have formed the theological groundwork for the major Abrahamic religions.
Parsi photographer and filmmaker Sooni Taraporevala has spent years amassing what may be one of the community’s most intimate archives of everyday life, shaped by her access to the spaces that outsiders rarely see.
Sitting in her South Mumbai studio, she flips through the pages of a book she published in 2000, filled with images of Parsi titans, humor and rituals.
“Photographs freeze time and survive death,” she said.
Her book captures the community’s most personal moments, from family life and weddings to sacred religious rites. It is also a portrait of a minority community with a deep connection to the city in which she grew up.
“Mumbai would not have been the same without the Parsis,” she said. “For most of us, it’s our only home. It’s my only home.”
She doesn’t believe the community should “shut people out” and says the Parsis in India could survive if the rules change.
“Once the definition changes, once women who are married to non-Parsis… once their children can be classified as Parsis, then I don’t think we’ll go extinct anymore,” Taraporevala said.
She sometimes thinks of writing another book.
“If I ever did reprint, or if I ever did another edition of my book,” she said, “I would add photographs of Parsis, inter-communal couples.”
For years, Dalal took her son to the Dadar Parsi Gymkhana, a private members’ club. As a non-member, her husband Kishnani’s entry was restricted to four times a month.
Dalal said their son played there daily with his friends, taking advantage of a club policy that allows children under five to enter without a membership. But the moment he turned five years old, the rules changed. When Dalal tried to register him, he was turned away.
In their view, he was not Parsi.
CNN is calling the boy Aaresh for privacy reasons.
After Aaresh was denied entry to the clubhouse, the family began to limit their visits. Now they arrange to meet friends on “neutral” ground – someone’s home, a garden, or another location.
“He was a five-year-old child who wanted to play with his friends at the playground, and I was met with stiff opposition. They did not want it. They don’t want the rules to change. Parsi means Parsi,” Dalal told me.
In 2021, she and her husband decided to challenge the rule that had long plagued their community by taking the matter to India’s Supreme Court. After years of waiting, the case could finally be heard in the coming months.
Sanaya said they are fighting for his “right to worship, the right to inherit property, the right to have a social life and live with dignity.”
“I am not ready to accept the status quo anymore,” she added, noting that discrimination is “not rooted in religion.”
The Dadar Parsi Colony Gymkhana declined to comment because the matter is before the courts.
At the Dadar Athornan Institute, a boarding seminary for Zoroastrian boys, Ramiyar Karanjia gathers with his students to train the faith’s next generation of clergy. Wearing a traditional white robe, he stands in front of the century-old school, where he studied as a child.
“Being a Parsi is one of the most ancient legacies that one can carry,” he said. “And that itself is something to be very proud of.”
Parsi priesthood is hereditary, meaning all the boys here have been born into priestly families. Karanjia sees a future in these students and believes the population decline is “not so alarming that we have to take steps which are detrimental to the very existence of this community.”
“We have learned that the only people that have survived are in India, who have practiced and managed exclusivity. That is marrying within the fold, within the community as far as possible,” he said.
Karanjia told me with a polite smile that he and other priests like him “understand the circumstances” of the people like me, who have married outside.
“We have sympathy for them, not in the sense of negative sympathy, but that their circumstances may force them,” he said. “But we have to also see the safeguarding and existence of our religion and community… we have to see what is more important… personal interest or the interest of the community at large.”
Many in the community I’ve spoken with have hoped that opening the doors to the children of Parsi mothers might help slow or even reverse the demographic decline. Yet research shows the real influence rests with women themselves – and that change will only come if more babies are born within the community.
One of the most detailed studies of the Parsi population, conducted in 2011, found that recognizing the children of intermarried women would make only a “negligible” difference in reversing the decline – because the Parsi birthrate is so low.
After settling along India’s west coast, many Parsis built their lives as merchants in bustling ports. Their prosperity grew even further with the arrival of the British in the 17th century, opening doors that saw them attain greater gender equality than many other women in patriarchal India.
With an education and careers, many Parsi women tend to marry later in life – or sometimes not at all – and often have fewer children.
Combined with significant migration overseas, this has brought about a steep decline in India’s Parsi community. So much so that, even as the country grapples with overpopulation, the government has taken the unusual step of encouraging Parsis to grow their families.
Shahnaaz Dalal, no relation to Sanaya Dalal, lives on the ground floor of a quaint, heritage-style cottage, with her Parsi husband, Rohinton, in-laws and two daughters in another Parsi enclave in northern Mumbai.
The couple had their second baby late last year, with support from a program launched by the government in 2013 to boost Parsi numbers.
Under the scheme, Parsi families who earn below a certain threshold can receive financial assistance for fertility treatment and childcare. So far, the program has facilitated the births of about 490 children in 12 years, according to government figures.
Dalal gets emotional as she thinks about the mothers the program has helped. “When we see a baby after five years, 10 years… that’s happiness,” she said.
She pauses when I ask her whether Parsi women who marry out are eligible to receive the aid.
“No,” she says with a sympathetic smile.
Sanaya Dalal and Kishnani say that Aaresh, now 12, is unaware of the politics surrounding his own bloodline.
His parents haven’t told him why they don’t go to the clubhouse – and he knows nothing of the court case.
“We have brought him up within the faith,” Dalal said. “And he doesn’t know that he’s discriminated against.”
They show me photographs from his Navjote, a religious initiation ceremony, Rishi wearing a “dagli,” a traditional long-sleeved white garment, with a knee-length coat, and Sanaya dressed in a Parsi sari.
When they first decided to challenge the Supreme Court, their story made headlines across India.
Many supported their battle, praising them for taking the step. Some expressed their disapproval.
In the room next door, Aaresh plays video games with his friend, like any other 12-year-old boy, taking a break from his homework and studying for a French exam, and oblivious to how his parents’ fight could change his life and those of others like him.
His parents know that it might take years before their case is given its final hearing.
“So many people told me that the Indian judicial system is going to take 10 years, 15 years. It might take 50,” Kishnani said. “But I will do it, because this has to change.”
I don’t know what the future holds for our small Parsi community.
Back at the agiary where I stand, the sacred flame is sustained by ritual and discipline. But beyond these consecrated walls, continuity may depend as much on action as faith.
We like to tell the story of how our ancestors came to this country not as conquerors, and promised to dissolve into it gently. It’s a story we repeat because it offers a vision that is rooted in inclusion.
And yet, the question now before India’s top court is this: what remains of such a promise when the community’s own women and their children are left standing outside?
