Did You Know? Type 4 Qs

There are some demeaning interlinked narratives floating around in our community which distort plausibility and disrespect our sacred history?

They go along the lines as if Parsees migrated from Iran to India, cleverly placed sugar in the local king’s milk bowl, settled, mixed & mingled to live happily after, and which we should continue doing. Yeah right.

Hence the below multifarious analysis to place a needle in the hot air balloon of baloney misleading our people.

Part 1

Our valiant and virtuous Ancestors did not leave Iran as migrants seeking opportunity in the manner that migrants seek in current day terms; Migration means choice, leisure, or opportunity. None of which were choices for our Ancestors.

Our Ancestors’ exit from Iran was a desperate act of last resort after their lives, property and possessions was killed, lost and stolen; They did not exit with choice or with preference.

They left their prosperous, beautiful, healthy, high altitude highland homeland under serious duress after suffering insurmountable loss of lives within their families, including but not limited to their women being kidnapped as sex slaves by the invaders.

They left their homeland, not for advantage, but for the survival of our Religio-Culture.

They did not abandon Iran; Iran was taken from them by the invaders.

Our ancestors had to plead for refuge. Not for rights like refugees seen demanding today.

They carried with them no privilege, no security, and no guarantee of acceptance anywhere.

They left behind their homes, farms, livestock, possessions, clothes. Everything.

What they preserved was not a Religio-Culture in evolvement or relocation (like shifting houses), but they steadfastly preserved a culture that had fallen under savage siege. That which our Ancestors remarkably rescued through their sacrifice, not fluke or coincidence.

The moral weight of distinction between the harsh conditions our Ancestors faced, and the wrong word of migration is enormous. Such inappropriate use of vocabulary shows not just ignorance, but utter disrespect.

Our Ancestors’ journey into the unknown without a penny in the pocket or a mobile phone with GPS was a testament to their mental willpower to survive and successfully sustain our Ethno-Religio-Culture under extenuating circumstances. There were not doing it for economic mobility or to go to 1st world comforts. They were leaving behind a relatively cooler, high altitude mountain country known for its robust health-giving properties into near-equatorial sea-level lands known for their heat, sweat and flies.

This establishes that such Ancestors would not have been who they were, were the following have happened.

In suffering prolonged genocidal conditions and ethnic cleansing our Forebearers could well have accepted the new religion being forced upon them at sword and spearpoint. They could have retained some of their ancestral land/wealth/possessions within their own Iranian homeland by accepting ill-fate and pinning their decision to convert out of the Zarathushti religion to the new one, but our Ancestors said NO, which still echoes in the minds of Faithful Zarathushtees. In 2026, present day Iranians are once again saying NO if you have had time to look at the news.

Our Ancestral males could have well bid goodbye to monogamy, and indulged themselves in polygamy which the invaders indulged in. But they resisted the urge to have more wives than one, as well as to not marry additional women which the new rules of the Arabs made possible.

Our Ancestors' courage, restraint and wisdom to be FORTHRIGHT in the face of extreme duress is what allowed those Ancestors of ours who survived to remain Zarathushti and later also come to be known as Parsi. Our Forebearers role-modelled valor in the face of death. Not treachery to faith like the vanity with which Parsi & Irani in the last few decades have been doing with marriage outside our Faith.

Through their informed choice of conscience despite extenuation circumstances, they patriotically elected to become penniless refugees in places out of Iran that were out of reach of the arabs, but not marry out-of-faith, or give-up our religion.

And even those Iranians who were forcibly converted through no choice, did their best to retain whatever they could of their Persian heritage, which is the subject of many works of appreciation for their zeal, now again visible for the world to see with the sacrifices they are making to regain back their original Persian identity by calling themselves – Sons and Daughters of King Cyrus the Great.

Thus, it could not plausibly be that penniless and deeply traumatized Zarathushti refugees, having fled holocaust horrors that shattered their families and their whole world, somehow ‘picked up’ willing Gujarati women upon arriving empty-handed in India, as if Hindustani women had no self-respect for their own Ancient heritage and lineage.

Such narrative (as the headline of this analysis) defies both basic social logic and practical reality. India’s tightly knit large families and village structures, guided by grandparents, village elders, sages, priests, parents and siblings, were neither lacking in caste ‑ appropriate, locally funded grooms nor would be delighted to hand over their daughters and sisters to unknown, destitute strangers.

It is not even remotely plausible that Iranian Zarathushti men (before being termed Parsi) who had valiantly fought under extenuating odds, witnessed genocide and rape of their family members in resisting forced conversion in Iran would capitulate to voluntarily forgetting all of that and take up supposedly freely available Indian women.

Similarly, it is not even remotely plausible that valiant Iranian Zarathushti men would have exited Iran, leaving behind their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters to be ravaged by the invaders. Would such narrative maker leave behind their family’s women to vultures?

It is thus deduced that such narrative/s arise from ignorance, or unconscionably to whitewash our sacred history for vested interests justifying marriage outside our Faith & Fold.

Part 2

It is evident that only steadfast Endogamous Conservatism ensured our Ancestors’ intact survival after taking refuge in Gujrat whilst enduring the vagaries of struggles there.

They were led by senior Mobeds, one of whom is known as Dastooraan Dastoor Neryosang Dhaval (Aval), followed by others like Dastooraan Dastoor Meherji Raanaa.

They are the ones who negotiated the ‘Terms & Conditions of Refuge’ and led our beleaguered people through tumultuous times including but not limited to defending against local bandits, guarding Paak IranShah’s Holy Atash through the number of times it had to be relocated to save it from bandit threats, and yet at all times with guidance, ensuring Zarathushtees married Zarathushtees in line with the commandments of our Faith; which was the whole purpose of sacrificing everything they ever had in their homeland.

Given, a lineage as conscientious as our Zarathushtrish faith could not have survived near ‑ extinction, prolonged persecution and exile from homeland without indelible intergenerational spirituality woven into its very being, it follows that those who step outside its Endogamous Code cannot plausibly claim to truly embody the identity and values of the Ancestors they deviated from.

A Religio-Cultural heritage that’s been known to be preserved through devotional fidelity cannot be owned through lip-service convenience.

It can live and thrive only where its disciplines are honoured through Zarathushti matrimony and progeny that enable unfettered intergenerational continuity.

Our Religio-Cultural ethos has effectively been a “moral trust” which has been carried from ancestor to descendant despite several centuries of darkness. Metaphorically, it is an eternal flame of Religio-Spiritual enlightenment, memorized through Avesta prayers as our guiding light to be passed from ancestors’ soul, heart & hands to progeny souls, hearts & hands; all underpinned on the auditory, sensory and visual ambience of our Atash-Behrams, Agiyaries or the home Bati/Divo.

In the manner that our scriptures prescribe “peaceful honour” to the Faith of our birth and that we live with peaceful self-dignity amongst others of different Faiths, there is no real place for proselytizing, aka conversion.

By its very nature, such conversion infers the one being converted out from is not as good as the one being converted to and that God’s decision to place a soul into their Faith wasn’t good enough. Worse, that such conversionary outlook has had irrefutable ramifications which the world and individuals have had to struggle with ever since converting started.

Zarathushti refugees from Iran who reached places like China, Rajasthan, Konkan, and other unknown places did not appear to have such leaderships and guidance, due to which they “liberally” mixed & mingled, entered cross-cultural relationships, got absorbed, died-out into surrounding cultures and disappeared into oblivion, out of historical record.

If at all, God Forbid, Our immensely brave Ancestors who stayed-put in Iran despite arduous conditions and Those steadfast valiant Ancestors of ours that struggled in India for centuries, been conversionary/liberal and not resolutely “CONSERVATIVE, then they would not have survived the tumultuous centuries which followed the massive upheavals since the 7th century in both Iran & India. Nor would they have been able to sustain that lineage into the 19th, 20th & 21st centuries, to bequeath to descendants like us.

Part 3, Conclusion

Dear Brethren, the ones dicing with conversionary/liberalistic narratives, kindly heed the insights herein for your own sake, because you and yours may actually well be on the fast-track to being condemned to extinction much earlier than the conservative, orthodox and traditional who you condemn.

Experimenting despite all evidence with the opposite of Endogamy risks you and yours to oblivion. As highlighted through innumerable combinations of insights contained herein, marriage outside our endangered Religo-Cultural fold stands to decimate us. Not multiply.

Children are thrown between worlds, belonging everywhere but nowhere, incapable to rest fully in either inheritance, nor another new one; stretched between their parents’ deep-seated instincts that grow stronger with age and often times divisive; leading to higher rates of divorce in cross-cultural relationships compared to same-faith.

Let alone, that the soul can unwittingly drift into cultural no-man’s land, where lineage thins, memory dims, and the ancient flame within, grows lonely, and extinguishes, aka extinction.

After taking all datapoints starting from long-duration trauma suffered by our forebearers to liberalistic Parsi & Irani of recent times, it would appear that empathy to cross-cultural matrimony (without wide picture comprehension), sounds like the virtue signaling of the woke who were all fired-up at rallies for a certain people in the middle-east, but who do not care about innocents in Iran, or Afghanistan, or for the matter in Nigeria.

It is as though such Parsi Irani are in empathy with sacrilegious perpetrators who defile sanctity but themselves live in apathy towards our Ancestry which had gifted them their original Parsi and Irani identity, the result of which is that our community’s conflicted & compromised want to lead the community’s innocently confused.

If there was any truth to cultures like ours who believe that Ancestors keep watch over their descendants, then one must wonder: do those who break the covenants and values that sustained their lineage understand the sorrow they most trigger in those Ancestors? For the elders who guarded the flame with their lives would surely feel the tremor of cold, when their own blood turns away from the path they preserved.

If you have at all admired or loved your grand or great grandparents, and had they been staunch Zarathushtees, spare them a thought as to how they came about, and how far away your values may have deviated compared to them. You may find you are in breach.

On the other hand, conservative Zarathushtees are only but endeavouring to walk in our Ancestors’ footsteps with as little deviation as possible whilst honouring them as much as possible, because those footsteps have proved to be time-tested historically, compared to conversionary nothingness.

• Can you match such resolve?
• Is it fair to disrespect what they represented and role-modelled?

Uninformed, compromised or conflicted Parsi Irani, wrongly deeming conservative Parsi Irani as orthodox and traditional, does not alter the extinction trajectory the former are on, themselves.

So, in closing, if Bolly, Hollywood, etc., have typically been your windows to the world, then please pause and start updating yourself on the plight of people like our Forebearers who went through hell to safeguard what some of you people are willingly discarding.

• (a) Have you watched or read ‘Sisters In Arms’?
• (b) Have you read ‘The Last Girl’, a story of captivity and depravity?
• (c) What about the ‘Beekeeper of Sinjar’, story about rescuing stolen women?
• (d) What about ‘I am Malala’, the Afghani girl?

I hope such insights open your conscience and eyes instead of arguing with conservative Zarathushtees who respectfully have never forgotten their Ancestors’ sacrifices and who want to preserve our Religio-Culture in the form it was inherited.

Your consideration will be much appreciated.