A Collective Reimagining of Parsi and Iranian National Identity

The story of Zoroastrian migrations to India in the wake of the Arab conquest of Sassanid Iran in the seventh century is well known. These Zoroastrians, who came to be known as Parsis, settled mainly in Gujarat. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to a longer history of migrations from Iran to the Indian subcontinent. Zoroastrian presence continued in Iran even after Islam became the religion of the overwhelming majority. In post-7th century Iran, most of the Zoroastrian communities were (and are) concentrated in the Yazd and Kerman regions. Contact between the Zoroastrians of India and of Iran seems to have been very limited, if not non-existent, in the centuries following the initial exodus. There were fresh migrations to India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which made it possible for the two branches to establish contacts and interact with each other. The history of this encounter has not received much attention in scholarly writings.