Acceptance, rather than rejection should be the norm for the intermarried and their progeny
Ava Khullar
Following the 2001 census report for the community, Parsiana requested Delhi-based demographer Ava Khullar to analyze the census findings.
The first installment, pertaining to the census findings, was carried in the January 2005 issue of Parsiana.The second part gave a background to the demographic decline and this concluding section deals with interfaith marriages, community attitudes and examples from other communities that have dealt constructively with the issue of demography.
A direct result of my presentation on demography at the executive council meeting of the Federation of Parsi Zoroastrian Anjumans of India in 1978 was the decision to undertake a study of the Parsis of Delhi. Being then working with a social science research institute, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, this study was undertaken at the Centre. It was a 100 percent survey of every Delhi Parsi family, including mixed marriages, and looked into their demographic and socioeconomic situation. While the demographic features corroborated the earlier predictions of Sapur Desai, the long serving secretary of the Bombay Parsi Punchayet, and others, the new data that emerged was pertaining to the mixed marriage component of the study. We discovered that 33 percent of families in Delhi had a non-Parsi spouse. However when we carried out a comparison between the three groups: Parsi married to a Parsi, Parsi male married to a non-Parsi female and, Parsi female married to a non-Parsi male on the three indicators of education, occupation and income, we discovered that the maximum compatibility between spouses was in the third category, followed by the second category and then the first. This meant that the Parsi woman and her non-Parsi spouse both had the highest level of education, occupation and income, while the Parsi couple showed the highest disparity with the husband far above the wife in levels of education, occupation and income. The conclusion was that the best educated and professionally active Parsi girls who married out chose their partners from the highest strata of other communities. Such families were therefore able to give the best in lifestyle, education and culture to their children — what Desai would refer to as the "able group.”
While much controversy surrounds this issue, several advantages can be gained by the community if a pragmatic and balanced approach is taken towards this phenomenon. This is a social issue which is being attacked on religious grounds. However nowhere in the Zoroastrian faith is there an injunction against choosing one’s partner from outside or against accepting their children, except the reasoning that this has been a practice adopted when the Parsis came to India. This ignores the Vansda navjotes episode and many others such, unrecorded, during the long period of Parsi history in pre-British rural India. The further assertion of our racial purity as an argument against mixed marriages is now rejected as an absurdity in this DNA and genome age which has established that the whole human race shares 99.5 percent of genes and that humans share 98.5 percent of genes with apes. Rabid racism, as history has demonstrated, can only lead to untold and unjust human suffering.
It is understandable that exclusivity is a natural sociological reaction for a small community in the midst of other more dominant religious and cultural groups.
However in the midst of the dominant Hindu society, which is basically peace loving and non-interfering, we have lived unharmed and prospered far beyond our numbers warranted for around 1,400 years and have no reason to feel threatened now. On the positive side, in mixed marriages, attitudes towards the size of the family is often influenced by the non-Parsi spouse and such couples tend to start their families early in marriage and tend to have more children. Since Parsis choose the spouses from the elite of other communities this ensures a healthy and better lifestyle for the whole family, and education and advancement for their children. The ethical and value system of the Zoroastrian faith is strong and this would be imbibed by the children from the Parsi mother or father. It gives an option to Parsis unable to find partners within, to avoid the single status and the loss that ensues demographically to the community. Finally, marriage being a very personal matter, whatever the arguments against it, the trend cannot be stopped. The ex-president of the Federation of Zoroastrian Youth Associations of India had the last word at the end of a protracted discussion on the issue of mixed marriages at the Federation meeting in Bardoli: "You all can say whatever you like, but if a Parsi has made up his or her mind to marry a non-Parsi, he/she will.” To argue that marriage outside is an act of defiance or rejection of the Zoroastrian faith or the community is erroneous. If suitable partners were available, most Parsis would marry Parsis.
The argument that interfaith marriages are the biggest threat to the community is misguided. It is, in fact, the attitude of a certain section, of opposing and ostracizing interfaith families that alienates them and their children and is a threat to their harmonious assimilation within the community. Instead of this negative position, we should try to keep them close to the fold. For a community as minuscule as ours, this living in cohesion is necessary, for by alienating our own we lose their children. The scenario we should envisage is that of the daughter of a Parsi mother and non-Parsi father marrying a Parsi boy and thus bringing her children back into the Zoroastrian fold. This would be possible if children of Parsi and intermarried couples have occasions for social interaction instead of being segregated.
"Silently withdrawn”
Sadly however, this understanding of the various factors affecting our demographic predicament has not sunk in, where in fact it needs to get ingrained upon the consciousness of the average Parsi. And therein lies the great danger for it is we Parsis, each one of us, who can make a difference:
the men and women who delay marriage and then restrict the size of their families with one, at most two or often no children;
those young couples who need fertility counselling but do not make the effort to take the help of medical science, now so advanced in the field of fertility that even women after menopause can get a fertilized egg implanted into their womb and deliver a baby;
those of us who do not marry but remain single;
those who find partners outside the community;
those parents who complacently allow their children to remain unmarried or wash their hands off in helping raise their grandchildren when the young parents are both working and need help;
that vital spirit of ambition, hard work necessary in pursuing higher education and acquiring skills in technical, managerial or professional arenas which is sagging among a growing section of youth thereby leading to mediocrity, lack of self image and confidence, economic downslide and often inability to find suitable marriage partners in the community;
the role of parents in not encouraging and pushing their children, mostly sons to seek out the best opportunities for their educational and employment advancement, even if it means leaving the safe haven of the home, the baug or Bombay.
But most of all it is that very crucial group of youth in the 20 to 40 age-group, who are educated, perhaps professionally well placed, who are most likely aware of the crisis situation facing the Parsis, but have for various reasons "silently withdrawn” from the Zoroastrian faith and any involvement in the community over which there is hardly a whisper of concern. This is far more subtly dangerous as Aspi Moddie points out than Dr Wilson’s blunt attack 160 years ago by converting Parsi boys to Christianity or recent heated conflicts over interfaith-marriages. Martin Luther King cautioned against "the silence of our friends rather than the words of our enemies.” How large is this segment? How has this important segment, on whose shoulders the demographic and economic fortunes of the community rests, become alienated? This question should haunt the thinking Parsis and efforts initiated to bring this group into the mainstream of community activity.
The Nagpur example
To understand what actually happens at the ground level to a community which displays all the demographic features Desai and others have analyzed, let us take a smaller concentration of Parsis in an urban city, Nagpur, where its concerned and active anjuman has collected some relevant data in 2003.
Parsis were attracted to Nagpur when J. N. Tata set up his first textile mill, the Empress Mills in the mid 19th century. Half a century ago, Nagpur boasted a larger Parsi population, but with the Mills taking a downturn, many families left and thus the tally now is 203 families with 615 individuals. A total of 66, (32 males and 34 females), approximately 10 percent, have remained unmarried and 34 (21 males and 15 females), around 5.5 percent, are married out.
With only 12 births in the last five-and-a-half years the percentage of the 0-5 years age-group is just two, while the 50 plus age segment is 42 percent and the 60 plus group comprises 31 percent, equaling the 2001 census figure for the whole of India. Forty-eight deaths were reported in the five-and-a-half-year period which means around nine persons died each year or 90 in a decade. A loss of 90 per decade for a population of 615, (note that 42 percent are over 50 years and, in the next three or four decades will be in their 80s and 90s) would mean in around seven to eight decades the Parsi population in Nagpur would be non-existent if replacement levels by births continue at this rate. I am from Nagpur, and my memories of the wonderful Parsi community and the happy times we spent, contributing some distinguished Parsis to the nation fills me with nostalgia on the one hand, and sadness that it has come to this stage.
The situation in Nagpur would be quite similar to other smaller settlements say in Madras, Calcutta, Belgaum, etc and we would get a clearer picture if the respective anjumans would prepare this data and then keep updating it every quarter or annually. It is easy to imagine similar scenarios in the past, in other towns where once there were Parsi populations, as testified by the remaining infrastructure of agiaries, dakhmas, burial grounds, community halls, etc, which are now abandoned and encroached upon.
Are we seeing in front of our eyes the passing away of a glorious civilization?
Search for remedies
Analyzing the situation of a community is easy, but finding solutions to remedy it and then taking the appropriate measures to achieve this, are often not so. This seems to be true for the Parsis.
If we explore what our strong and weak points as a community are, we will find that most of us are individualists who like to air our views loudly. This appears to be especially true of those with an orthodox bent. We have never been a community of team workers; we do come together to organize programs, stage shows for Parsi festivals, etc but where major serious issues are concerned for the welfare of the community there is a meaningless confrontation between the traditionalists and modernists, or clash of egos, while the thinking segment with a balanced view turn away in indifference. Are we at the stage in our existence that we live only for bread, butter and jam without any higher vision beyond the enjoyment of material goodies? As a community are we psychologically dying?
While we have the highest talents and ability in various fields and can produce gifted people, what is lacking is their involvement in providing visionary leadership. The collective has to and can be moved by a vision, something bigger than themselves. We have to fight this sickness of indifference and bring in the best talent in every field to initiate the process of revitalising the community. This needs organization, massive funding, inspired leadership and above all the "willing Parsi,” to cooperate in this venture.
Can this come to pass? When J. N. Tata set out to bring India into the modern world he did not only envision infrastructure growth in terms of iron and steel, textile industry or hydroelectric power, all ingredients for a developed society, but he looked way ahead to ensure India’s place in the future by investing in education and scientific research by setting up the Indian Institute of Science. When we are privy to that type of legacy our present state of general apathy is regrettable.
The case of the Kutchhi Jains is worth considering. Called the Kutchhi Dasa Oswal Jains (KDO), they number 28,164 as against the 40 lakh total number of Jains. Since a century the KDOs have had the foresight to keep a record of their families spread in India and all over the world — a rare example of detailed community data preservation. They have compiled seven volumes, called Vastra Patraks, giving detailed family profiles each updating, defining and improving on the earlier data giving professional, educational, marital information regarding families their members marry into and other genealogical data. I was told by an active KDO member, an Indian Police Service officer, that when his son of marriageable age went to Singapore for work he had a list of all the KDO families with profiles of girls of marriageable age for ready reference. Recently there was a newspaper report of KDOs queuing up for the genome mapping of their group which they hope will identify the causes for decrease in their birth rate and help them remedy the situation. What is admirable is the active involvement of the old and the young in the preservation of their community. There are no panic buttons going off, just sensible reaction to meet the challenges facing them.
Perhaps we Parsis can learn from them.
Concluded
A trustee of the Delhi Parsi Anjuman, Ava Khullar is a social scientist, who was for 17 years associated with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), a research organization in Delhi. Since 1978 she has been studying the demographic trends in the community and the problems facing the Zoroastrian population. She also started an embroidery business in the name of Sonava.