ABSTRACT
In the 89th quartier of Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery lies the grave of a French woman who tried to become a Parsi and failed.1 It is testament to Sooni Tata’s 1908 defeat in the Bombay High Court. Had Mrs Tata’s side won, her body could have been left in Bombay’s dokhmas or towers of silence to be exposed to vultures according to traditional Zoroastrian death rites. In 1903, Suzanne Brière married into the Tata family, the Parsi ‘royalty’ of mercantile-industrial Bombay (see Lala 1992: 8-9). Immediately before, she tried to convert to Zoroastrianism by undergoing the naujote or initiation ceremony. Whether conversion to Zoroastrianism was permitted was in dispute. For orthodox Parsis, being born into the community was a prerequisite for initiation. For reformists, birth was just one possible route into the Parsi community. The other was conversion. Dinshaw Davar, the first Parsi judge of the Bombay High Court, and Frank Beaman, a blind British judge, ruled against Mrs. Tata (Figure 9.1). Rather than declaring conversion itself impermissible, they held that juddins or non-Parsis were excluded from enjoying the benefit of Parsi trusts, the legal instrument governing Zoroastrian religious properties and funds.
