Acknowledging Zoroastrians

Maintaining interfaith connections makes for a large part of the functions of the managing committee of the Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe (ZTFE), says its vice president Malcolm Deboo. Recently some of them attended a conference on interreligious development at Lambeth Palace, the official base of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the seniormost functionary of the Anglican Church, he tells us.

The development officer of the Faith Based Regeneration Network, a non-governmental organization in the UK, Deboo visited Parsiana informally while he was in Bombay recently.

Malcolm Deboo: part of multi-cultural UK

"Harrow is the most diverse borough in the UK,” Deboo tells us. The presence of the Zoroastrian Centre there contributes to this diversity to some extent and Zoroastrians are invited to participate in the UK’s religious education curriculum update. Indeed, it is a part of the British government initiative to involve representatives of all the nine official faiths in the country — Zoroastrianism is one of them — in discussions on contemplated legislative changes before a bill is passed into an act. A recent example was prison reform, though "we had nothing to say as there are no Zoroastrian prisoners,” as noted ZTFE trustee and former president Rusi Dalal in the course of a telephone chat.

The oldest Zoroastrian association outside the subcontinent — ZTFE was founded by Dadabhai Naoroji, among others, in the latter part of the 19th century — now has a progressively younger managing committee. "Under Pauru­shasp Jila and Dorab Mistry (current and erstwhile presidents of the ZTFE, respectively) the average age of the committee has been coming down. It is now on the younger side of 50,” says Deboo. "They are younger and more IT (information technology) oriented people,” he adds.

While "entrepreneurship is looking up in the community,” according to Deboo, the ZTFE is a conservative bastion that has shunned conversion into the Parsi Zoroastrian community and avoided the presence of converts at its functions. However, the Iranian members who hold their own celebrations permit converts to attend. "We are an anachronistic community… Old boundaries are now breaking down.”

A recent event was the unveiling of a plaque at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) acknowledging the donation of philanthropists Mehraban and the late Faridoon Zartoshty towards a chair for Zoroastrian studies amounting to nearly half a million pounds sterling.