NEW DELHI: One of India’s oldest and most prominent Parsi magazines, Parsiana, will publish its final issue this week, closing after a six-decade run of chronicling the country’s declining Zoroastrian minority population.
Founded in 1964 by Pestonji Warden, a Parsi doctor and entrepreneur, Parsiana was for the first nine years focused largely on religious, historic, and academic subjects.
The focus changed to current affairs in 1973, when it was bought by Jehangir Patel, who, a few years earlier, returned to India after graduating from Yale University.
Having worked for the San Francisco Examiner and the Hartford Times in the US, and upon return, the Mumbai-based Freedom First magazine, Patel took on board professional journalists to cover contemporary issues concerning the Parsis both in India and abroad.
But over 60 years after its founding, the magazine’s readership has been shrinking along with the community, which has declined sharply over the past decades, leaving the editorial board without successors to continue running it.
Parsiana’s current team has 15 members. Most of them have been working at the publication for 40 years and are in their 60s.
“One lady is almost 80, and I’m also 80, so it didn’t seem possible for us to continue,” Patel said.
“To find new people to come and work with us, or even non-Parsis, is very difficult, and generally in journalism, people are looking to other professions.”
The Parsis are a small community of Zoroastrians in the Indian subcontinent, who originally came from Persia. Some of its prominent representatives include the Tata family — India’s key industrialist — as well as the conductor Zubin Mehta and Freddie Mercury, the late lead singer of Queen.
Most of the community’s members live in Mumbai, but there is also a diaspora in India’s south, in Bengaluru, and in Karachi, Pakistan. A few thousand Parsis also live in the US, UK and Canada.
Over the last century, the number of Parsis has fallen by half due to late marriages and low birth rates.
“We’re dwindling. According to the 2011 census, 57,000 Parsis were in India. Now, the figure must be less than 40,000,” Patel said.
“It’s very hard to increase the population. No government in the world has succeeded in reversing a declining population trend. People don’t want to get married. If people get married late, and maybe have one child or don’t have children, our replacement ratio is probably less than 1 percent … It’s an aging community.”
Parsiana’s final issue will be published on Oct. 21, with a story featuring clocks in Zoroastrian fire temples. Some of those tower timepieces at the 50 remaining temples in Mumbai do not even function anymore.
“We’ve written about clocks in the fire temples, how they are maintained, how they are looked after … To find parts for them is not easy. So, a lot of these clocks are just not working,” Patel said.
“A lot of these clocks are just not working, or are just lying over there, only to get one person who maybe comes to wind them up. But even that person is too old now to come around … At our fire temples, there are hardly any visitors, hardly any devotees.”
When Parsiana announced its closure in one of its editorials in August, a reader commented that its closure would leave a void.
“Your professionalism, courage, and passion have not only elevated the standards of community journalism but have also given a voice to countless Zoroastrian stories,” they wrote in a letter to the editor. “Parsiana has been our pride and our companion — its absence will be deeply felt.”
