Taraporewala’s opus

In 1951 Dr Irach J. S. Taraporewala, an amazing Avesta, Pahlavi and Sanskrit scholar, published his opus, The Divine Songs of Zarathushtra, a 1,166 page masterpiece. I was a student at that time of the M. F. Cama Athornan Institute and Taraporewala was the second principal of the Institute from 1930 to 1940. When his book was published, our Institute received a number of copies and those who stood first in the class and had other achievements to their credit were given the book as a prize. I had three or four copies of the book which remained in a big wooden petaaraa (storage box) in the first floor storage in our home in Tarapur.
A few years ago, I was looking for a copy of the book and in 2003 someone gave me a copy which had actually been the personal copy of our acting principal, Framroze P. Patel, who was also our Avesta Pahlavi teacher, as can be witnessed by his signature on the cover and title page. I am extremely grateful for this. I scanned the complete book, together with nine other books (some of them have been placed on www.avesta.org by my very good friend, Joseph Peterson) but did not do anything with Taraporewala’s book due to copyright restrictions.

Dr Irach J. S. Taraporewala: Avesta scholar

At the May 2013 FEZANA (Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America) annual general meeting, the subject of this book was brought up by Behram Pastakia and I mentioned that I had scanned the entire book which is available to interested students. Pastakia recalled this discussion recently and informed me that he wanted to place this book on FEZANA’s website and/or also publish a new edition. He requested me to inquire with the Taraporewala family to see if they were willing to grant us the right to do so.
My sister’s son-in-law, Nairyosangh (called Nehru) Taraporewala is a grandson of Taraporewala and I informed him about our intentions. He referred me to Soonoo Taraporewala, the author’s granddaughter, who is the owner of the copyright of this and other books written by him. We also learnt from Soonoo that her father had, under the auspices of the Hukhta Foundation, Bombay, published a second edition of the book in 1993. There are a few copies left which can be obtained from the Parsiana Book Club (Rs 900 plus postage) as well as from her. Lately, we came to know that Amazon is selling the book for as much as $ 150 (about Rs. 7,500!) without permission of the Hukhta Foundation. (No permission is required to sell the book. – editors)
Soonoo was very receptive and appreciative of FEZANA’s intentions. I sent a zip folder of all the 1,166 pages of the book to both Pastakia and Soonoo, and then got web master ArZan Sam Wadia to place it on the FEZANA website which he did in no time in PDF format! After that, we had some concerns from Soonoo about the copyright, logo of the Hukhta Foundation, etc. and along with Pastakia, ArZan, Peterson and myself, we came up with an amicable solution of placing a watermark of the Hukhta Foundation logo on each scanned page, a copyright declaration and a warning not to sell this PDF format file under any condition. The final result of all these emails and hard work is now on the FEZANA website for all to use at: http:/ www.fezana.org/node/ 325

SOLI P. DASTUR
Sarasota, Florida, USA
dastur@comcast.net