‘Only a Parsi’

While Behramji M. Malabari’s emotional agitation was openly supported by the British public and the English Press in England as well as in India, the directly involved Hindus split into a faction favoring reform and a majority rejecting a reform being imposed on them by an outsider. (Dadabhai Naoroji and the founders of the Congress were trying desperately to keep this split out of the unifying political movement begun in 1885.) Vidyasagar (Bengal), Sir T. M. Iyer (Madras) and Ranade (Bombay-Poona), three of India’s leading social reformers, took Malabari’s side, while orthodox and nationalistic circles in Bengal and Maharashtra (Bal Gangadhar Tilak in his newspapers Mahratta and Kesari) fought Malabari’s reform movement under the "Hinduism in danger” cry with more bitterness than in any other matter before. These opponents were not willing to permit the English government such an intervention in essential Hindu socioreligious traditions. Apart from this, Malabari was a Parsi, and "… no one but a Hindu can possess that intimate knowledge of the Hindu Shastras, and the daily observances enjoined therein which is essential in any writer who attempts to prepare papers on the question now placed before Government.”

Malabari answered this argument with:

"If my Hindu friends take this line of argument – that I am ‘only a Parsi,’ I will be forced to reply that I am as good a Hindu as any of them, that India is as much my country as theirs, and that if they do not give me a locus standi, in the case, I will take my stand on the higher ground of humanity. I have not taken up the work as a holiday pastime, and I am not going to be bullied out of it by the holiest of Brahmins. I respect their right of action and will continue to do so, but at the same time they must not question my right of eliciting discussion nor attempt in a sinister manner to stifle such discussion.”

"In another place I am gently asked to look after the reform of Parsi customs. Well, as a matter of fact, we Parsis have got rid of infant marriage, bigamy, polygamy and several other evils borrowed from Hindus. And it is after having reformed ourselves that we are appealing to the educated sense of the mother community to do likewise.”

The Parsees in India: A Minority as Agent of Social Change by Eckehard Kulke