Emigration Simpliciter

Thanks to Lt Gen Adi Sethna (Retd), the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) held a full day seminar on December 4, 2004 when outstanding demographers gave a very scientific and indisputable analysis of the declining numbers.

Some religious fanatics and pseudo-scholars totally pooh-poohed the figures and made the august audience believe that everything was hunky-dory with the community, and wanted the Parsis to cast away those figures, as worthless. If we did that, we would do so at our great peril.

Barring Armaity Desai, Dr Homi Dhalla and solicitor Nadir Modi, the other speakers were highly erudite non-Parsis who had no axe to grind in projecting and analyzing the figures produced by the 2001 Census Report on the Parsis.

Some other Parsi speakers wanted to impress the audience by suggesting that our depleting numbers were totally explained by emigration, which I contested, hotly. They tried to make an Emigration Simpliciter out of the foreboding trend. The first wave of emigration started soon after the end of World War II (1945), when a lot of Parsi servicemen and others emigrated to England just as the Anglo-Indians emigrated, in bulk, to Australia. The second wave to Canada started in the mid-60s, and it continues, though not as a torrent. The emigration to the West was also from Pakistan, Iran, Sri Lanka, Hongkong, Singapore and from small British dependencies.

After 1951, our numbers have been depleting very fast for the reasons adequately explained in Parsiana earlier.

Emigration Simpliciter is a dreadful bogey, and the Parsis of India need to guard against it. Ours is perhaps the only community in the world which rejects, summarily, those who marry outside and also the non-Parsis who marry into it.

Harbandana Kaur Sidhu, a very level-headed columnist, has rightly said, "If Zoroastrianism is to flourish, it should shed its rigidity and adopt some liberalization. Other religions have flourished mainly because they embrace everybody who wants to join their fold.”

One in three Parsis marries out in India, in England, in Canada and in the U.S. (In N. America in the age group of 19 to 31, one in two marries out.)

Zoroastrianism was not created for the Parsis of India, but for all mankind, as the Gathas say. If there is a choice between the Parsis of India dying out and Zoroastrianism dying out, Zoroastrianism should survive. We have become myopic, bigoted, rabid and purblind to the realities of our age.

BEHRAM T. DASTUR