ABSTRACT
Following closely in the wake of British imperialism, the first Masonic lodge of India was constituted in 1730 by officials of the East India Company in Fort William, Calcutta. From there, Masonic lodges spawned in the other British trading posts, including Bombay from 1758 on. The expansion of the Empire of India brought the British into closer contact with the Eastern world. Although the first Indian mason was a Muslim prince, the Parsis of Bombay were the first to join the Craft in significant numbers, to the point where they soon became the most represented native group in Indian Freemasonry. But how can the Parsis’ strong engagement with Freemasonry be explained? How did the Freemasons conceive of Zoroastrianism? To what extent were the Parsis able to set their cultural stamp on Masonic ritual and practices? This chapter seeks to explore the appropriation of Zoroastrianism by Freemasonry as well as the reverse phenomenon by focusing on the processes of acculturation and vernacularisation at work throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
