Of boats and bowls

Among the small number of international writers or scholars who focus on Zoroastrianism and/or Zoroastrians is Azar Mahloujian. An Iranian Muslim who fled Iran during the reign of Ayatollah Khomeini, she found refuge in Sweden.

Mahloujian wrote of her travails in Iran, evading arrest by the Revolutionary Guards and of her danger fraught escape through several countries before finally securing asylum. Her 134-page book, The Torn Pictures, is a stark and poignant tale that reads like a thriller and brings home the sense of loneliness and alienation a refugee faces.

But Mahloujian’s experience, rather than leaving her depressed, motivated the former librarian to research the story of refugees from Iran both in the present and the past.

One thousand years ago Zoroastrians fled from religious persecution unleashed on them by their Islamic conquerors and newly found zealous converts. In the present times it was Muslims who fled the tyrannical reign of the Mullahs.

Mahloujian was intrigued to find out what the two diasporas had in common and visited India twice to research the subject. Her findings will be a published in a book in Swedish and thereafter in English if she can find an interested publisher.

Until her book is published we can only surmise what similarities and differences the two migrations have in common. We put forward our unsubstantiated assumptions.

When Islam first came to Iran in the seventh century A.D. Zoroastrians were faced with three choices: convert to the new religion and enjoy the rewards offered, or remain Zoroastrians and face discrimination and persecution, or flee the country.

All three alternatives must have been painful. Those who embraced the new religion probably prospered. Those who stayed behind and continued to practice their old religion found themselves economically and socially disadvantaged. And those who fled...?

Of the latter we only know of the Zoroastrians who landed on the west coast of India and were termed Parsis. Of the rest we know nothing. They disappeared without a trace. Either they were absorbed into their new social surroundings or they were decimated or they were waylaid en route and enslaved or imprisoned.

No doubt those who fled must have sought refuge in what they believed to be friendly environs, preferably countries that would be tolerant of immigrants following a different religion and observing different customs and traditions. They must have sought lands where they may have had some earlier contacts or trade ties and where their language would be comprehensible to the local populace. Allowing for Islam’s vast spread, the Zoroastrian immigrants must have had to travel great distances to avoid their conquerors’ tentacles. Many may have perished en route.

Mahloujian herself traveled through several countries at great risk to herself, often being at the mercy of the mercenaries who smuggled people from one country to another. Her initial goal was the USA or the UK but neither materialized and so she settled for what was possible: Sweden. And that too, through subterfuge. Here too, like so many Muslim refugees she faced discrimination on account of her nationality and religion.

In Iran the religion and its followers survived because Zoroastrianism was one of the religions recognized in the Koran. Though not favored, Zoroastrianism was permitted to exist. But how did the religion survive in India? Why were we not absorbed into the vastness of this country and its hospitable people? The answer, most probably, was the caste system prevailing in the country. You kept to your own. The higher castes would not accept you and you did not wish to (officially) fraternize with the lower castes.

Thus the story of the Parsis landing in India and being greeted with a vessel of milk in which they poured sugar is highly unlikely. It would be presumptuous of a group of impoverished and bedraggled refugees to assume their presence was going to sweeten this great and ancient civilization or even for that matter the kingdom of Jadi Rana, assuming such a monarch existed. The legend of a ring being inserted into the bowl of milk is a more likely scenario for it could have indicated we were few in number and would stay within our small circle.

And for that matter which ruler welcomes refugees with a bowl of milk? Even today boat people are unwelcome in all countries. India does not want Bangladeshis, Europe and America impose strict restrictions and quotas, New Zealand shut its open door policy, and the list goes on. The Statue of Liberty in New York may carry the inscription ‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuge of your teeming shores; send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me’ but in reality the developed nations want your information technologists, doctors, scientists and the moneyed.

In Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, he tells of a father and son who flee the tyrannical Taliban in Afghanistan. Like Mahloujian, they too face discrimination, taunts and insults. Housseini’s protagonists lived a privileged life in Kabul, in a sprawling mansion, throwing lavish parties at the slightest opportunity, hunting with the King. In America, the father worked in a garage to earn money to send his son to college. Mahloujian was forced to take a job as an unskilled employee despite her qualifications and experience.

The fact that our forefathers and their religion survived a thousand years in a new land is a remarkable achievement. No other migrant group of Zoroastrians in ancient times achieved this. The caste factor played an important part but over and above that there must have been highly unusual characteristics that made these people so special. Those characteristics surfaced again when the British came to India and the community shone like none other in the country.

But after Independence and the advent of democracy, the social barriers erected over the centuries started to crumble. Maintaining a caste system in the cities became impossible. You could not control who sat next to you in a bus or train. Government strove to right the wrongs of past millennia. Quotas and reservations were created for the socially disadvantaged. In a community like ours where out-marriages were taboo, young people wed non-Parsi spouses. When Parsiana first started publishing the interfaith marriage data in 1988, some subscribers cancelled their subscriptions, others withdrew advertising support and we were considered an enemy of the community by the orthodox. Eighteen years later, the data is no longer as controversial. Rather the startling findings that prompted the former census commissioner J. K. Banthia to observe a day would come when a Parsi marrying a Parsi would be a cause for national celebration, have spurred renewed activity in trying to encourage Parsis to marry within the fold. But with one-third marrying non-Parsis, with the children of Parsi women married to non-Parsis not being considered Parsis, with each successive out-married generation continuing to marry outside the community, it is possible that Banthia’s second prophecy of Parsis becoming extinct in the coming century (or two) may become true.

If we want to survive into the next millennium, we have to plan from now. Fertility clinics, matrimonial meets, subsidized housing will all help. But until we accept instead of rejecting all the children of interfaith marriages and the non-Parsi spouses (as do all the great religions), the prognosis will not change. The efforts of a thousand years will be lost.