Faith, migration, and survival: Zoroastrians from Qajar Iran to South Asia, 1789–1925

Abstract

The period under consideration (1789–1925) is the Qajar period in Iran and the migration of Zoroastrians to South Asia. This study explains the motivation behind the mass departure of the religious minority from their homeland, the means by which they traveled, and the life they established upon their arrival in South Asia. The Qajar period was a turning point: migration to the Indian subcontinent had earlier roots, but during the Qajar period, movement became a consistent community-level response to conditions that threatened not only the physical survival of Zoroastrians but also their cultural continuity. Zoroastrian decline under Islamic rule was a gradual process that resulted from more than a millennium of discrimination, and by 1789, when the Qajars consolidated power, the community's population was already limited to a handful of thousands in the two desert provinces of Yazd and Kerman. South Asia was, in effect, the only possible destination: the established Parsi community in Bombay and in Karachi was the only place in the world that could provide co-religious solidarity, institutional support, legal protection, and real economic opportunity. By offering a narrative that is neither solely driven by persecution nor solely by the geography of opportunity, this study confronts an uncomfortable truth: the very community boundaries that helped the Parsis to survive for centuries, including endogamy and opposition to accepting converts, also help to explain the demographic downfall that today sees the community in India at about 57,000 and in Pakistan at fewer than a thousand.