Sacred armor

The image on the cover has a stark resonance. It is both dramatic and simple. It depicts the finished form of a kusti, the soft woven fleece of white wool in an ever-winding spiral that has been wound into a circular form like a Sun sign, or a disc. The plaited end portions that hold the spiral together rise out of the dead center like an umbilical cord and both bind the shape and suggest that it can be opened up to embrace the wearer into a world of infinite possibilities.

The spiral motif is one that has been integral to many of the ancient cultures known to human beings. From the ying-yang signs of Chinese origin to images of a dragon, or serpent swallowing its tail, to geometric mazes and Tantric motifs that incorporate elements of light and dark, good and evil, the nucleus around which atomic particles swirl and repel each other.
In celebrating the art of kusti weaving the authors Ashdeen Lilaowala and Dr Shernaz Cama engage with both the mystical origins of the practice of tying of the sacred thread of the Zoroastrians and the practical everyday aspects as it pertains to its usage today. Their approach is both specific to the Zoroastrian community that they describe as a community without borders, spread out as they are across different regions of the globe, and generic, explaining the significance that both the making and the wearing of the kusti and the sudreh, or sacred shirt, under the knotted kusti has for this significant minority.
Lilaowala’s involvement with the UNESCO’s Parzor Foundation (Project on the Presentation and Promotion of Zoroastrian culture) and their exhibition "Parsi Panorama” under the aegis of the Ministry of Textiles in 2005-6 sparked his interest in the subject that forms the nucleus of this book. Textile designer, author and curator, he is a part-time lecturer at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad and has his own label, "Ashdeen” that specializes in reviving the embroidery traditions of the Parsi community as well as designing and working on original designs.
Founder trustee of the Parzor Foundation Cama has a "deep interest in promoting interfaith harmony.” An academic, who has been teaching at the Delhi University since 1983 and a scholar specializing in Zoroastrian studies, she is knowledgeable in gender studies, music and literature.

The authors’ study will appeal most to members of the community who may not be in direct touch with its ancient traditions. While focusing on the kusti, it also serves as a deeply thought out but simple guide to unite the followers to a common sense of how to live their daily lives, as well as a reminder of the rituals connected with the important thresholds of birth, initiation (navjote ceremony), marriage, marking of the changing seasons with festivals and of course, the final frontier of death.
One cannot do better than to quote from the text: "Over millennia, the sudreh-kusti has become key symbols of the Zoroastrian faith. They are garments of identity as well as sacred armor, protecting the Zoroastrians. Created during the Bronze Age, they bind the community to their faith in our postmodern world.
"In Parsi Zoroastrian history, change has been a constant. Language and dress adapted to assimilate into India, food habits changed and a complex layered identity developed.
"Yet these changes, particularly in dress, were always external. Beneath the layers, physical and metaphorical, a core armor remained — the simple white muslin sudreh, or religious undershirt, with the kusti or sacred thread. These garments remained invisible beneath; just as a core identity remained, unaffected by external shifts in location, changes in language or even across centuries of time. The sudreh-kusti seems then to provide the self-definition of the community.”
For those not of the faith, the book is remarkable in other ways. From the superb visual documentation of the different customs, ceremonies and celebrations that have been recorded of the Parsi community in India, the similarity to the local Gujarati community seems apparent. Of particular interest are the photographs that document the step-by-step process of the making of the sudreh; and of the tools and materials used to the making and the weaving of the sacred threads into the kusti. Credit must be given to photographers Jonas Spinoy, Dushyant and Hemant Mehta and Rustom Havewalla; and Bonita Vaz-Shimray for the design and layout of the book. As the authors note, the survival of both the stitched garment, the sudreh and the ritual weaving of the kusti thread must rank as an extraordinary affirmation of identity that has survived both time and change of a notional birthplace. This is what makes the step-by-step research into what goes into the physical weaving of the kusti and the actual stitching of the sudreh so important. These are processes that have survived over the millennia through an oral tradition that continues both at Navsari, where many of the images of the kusti weaving undertaken by the women of the community were recorded as well as those from Iran, at Yazd, where again it is the women who have kept the tradition alive. Appreciating the weavers who "generously opened their homes” to him, Lilaowala adds, "In Navsari, I must first thank Tehmina Jokhi and her family for teaching me the whole process of kusti weaving.”

By describing the sudreh as armor and the kusti, as a talisman against the forces of evil, the study also raises interesting questions to those who like to engage in a debate about the role played by ancient religions in developing human attitudes towards the world around them. The Lebanese author, Amin Maalouf in his elegiac study of the life of Mani, a third century CE (Christian Era) Persian mystic, who travelled to India and tried to propagate a non-theistic religion that combined the best of ancient Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Gnostic Christianity, called "The Gardens of Light” describes a different kind of Zoroastrian priesthood. The Persian King Shapur l conferred his blessings on Mani who liked to preach his gospels of light from the marketplace and probably because of this, his priests took it upon themselves to hunt down and destroy what they believed was the teachings of an apostate.
Manichaeism did not survive the disappearance of Mani, but Maalouf gives him the last word: "The same divine spark is in us all. It belongs to no race, no caste; it is neither male nor female. Each person must nourish it with beauty and knowledge; that is the way it can flourish.”
It’s a different age, another time, but reading the book, one is conscious that the divine spark can take many forms. One of them is in the message that survives in these simple threads of continuity.