MUMBAI (AFP) - – India's Parsis, the modern-day descendants of
migrants who fled persecution in Iran more than 1,000 years ago,
are turning to new technology to keep their ancient Zoroastrian
religion alive.
Websites, blogs, on-line directories and matchmaking portals are
being used by the close-knit but scattered and shrinking community
to stay in touch and true to the 3,500-year-old faith.
"The Parsis are a community without borders. We're almost all
over the world," said Yazdi Tantra, who runs a computer consultancy
firm in Mumbai, where 70 percent of the world's Parsis live.
"We have this technology so that we can keep in contact because
our numbers are very small. If there was no technology, we wouldn't
communicate with one another... it keeps the community together,"
he told AFP.
Tantra runs several websites, including the www.zoroastrians.net
portal, which includes everything from suggestions for Parsi baby
names to traditional Parsi food, adding to a global network of
sites on the community and religion.
What started out as being "just for fun" and a way to catalogue
Parsi contacts for his own use three years ago unearthed an
enthusiastic online community in India and across the world, he
said.
"Our website does a lot of connecting people," he added.
Such connections are more important than ever as the largely
prosperous, urbanised minority that produced the likes of Indian
industrialist Ratan Tata, conductor Zubin Mehta and Queen singer
Freddie Mercury gets smaller every year.
The editor of "Parsiana" magazine, Jehangir Patel, told AFP that
there were now only about 90,000 Parsis around the world "at most",
as a low birth rate, marriage outside the community and emigration
takes its toll.
In India, the last national census in 2001 recorded just under
70,000 Parsis -- Zoroastrians who follow the prophet Zarathustra
and worship one god, the creator of the universe, Ahura Mazda.
They believe that good thoughts, good words and good deeds will
triumph over evil and chaos, and the ancient religion is said to
have influenced Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
But demographers predict that there could be as few as 32,000
Parsis left by 2051, based on studies of fertility rates.
In Mumbai, the influential Bombay Parsi Punchayat governing
council is looking to young people to save the community by
launching what has been called a "Facebook for Parsis" website and
a youth wing.
"Interaction among youngsters will be encouraged so that they
find partners through the social events and networking sites, and
eventually marry within the community," trustee Khojestee Mistry
told the Hindustan Times recently.
Zpeakerbox, an online youth magazine for the Zoroastrian
community, and the social networking site www.ushtatebook.com
already exist.
Elsewhere, Tantra's theparsidirectory.com and the Parsi Yellow
Pages on the "Parsiana" website aim to log as many Parsis as
possible plus listings for everything from Parsi accountants to
Parsi yoga institutes.
"As a minority, we tend to stick together," said Patel. "Almost
33 percent marry out of the community, so we're getting a situation
about how long people will see themselves as Parsis and how long we
exist as a community."
A debate is raging about whether Parsi women who marry
non-Parsis should still be considered part of the community.
Traditionalists say they shouldn't while reformists say they should
if the community is to survive.
"We are always under a cloud. That reflects the need for
organisations and associations in the community... It's a way of
sticking together," Patel added.
Mumbai architect Arzan Sam Wadia runs parsikhabar.net, one of a
number of blogs on Parsi matters. Half of his readers are from
outside India, he told AFP from his base in New York.
Online news portals give an immediacy to community news and
allow for a range of views that cannot be duplicated by existing
print publications, he added.
"Within Bombay (Mumbai) and outside, just the fact that people
are spread out so far and wide geographically, there's no
mainstream publication in the traditional sense that can really do
justice to it," he said.
Journalist Shernaaz Engineer said her blog,
parsi-link.blogspot.com, and others like it were the latest sign of
how one of the world's oldest living faiths was adapting, she told
AFP.
It was also a way of avoiding the "factionalism" that has crept
in to the Parsi media over issues like marriage outside the
community, she said.