ABSTRACT
The Parsis adhere to boundary maintenance norms because of the stringent purity laws that govern their religious and ritualistic practices and interpersonal relations with non-Zoroastrians. These boundaries are most apparent in their endogamous marriage structure and refusal to engage in active proselytism. While the boundaries have mostly stayed intact in the domain of not accepting a complete non-Zoroastrian, their maintainability in the realms of interfaith marriage and acceptance of children born to interfaith couples has been repeatedly challenged by a faction of the priestly class and laity over the last century and well into the present times. In Mumbai alone, for every four marriages within the community, two were interfaith marriages, and for every two females who married within, one chose to marry outside in the past two decades. In the backdrop of these numbers, the continued denial of socio-religious infrastructure to those who intermarry, especially to intermarried Parsi women and their children, has resulted in lawsuits and acrimonious debates. This has led to the establishment of separate infrastructure to cater to the socio-religious needs of the excommunicated members. Based on a mixed-methods approach, this chapter presents preliminary findings from the author’s visit to the Asha Vahishta Centre in Pune, India, and an anonymous survey conducted by the author in 2021–2022 to study Parsi attitudes towards acceptance of non-Zoroastrians to evaluate the changes in the perceived ethnoreligious boundaries among Parsis in twenty-first-century India.
