Zoroastrianism, while still a lived religion today, sees its practitioners as small in number, and increasingly scattered around the globe. Indian Zoroastrians, Parsis, are known in India for their wide spread philanthropy as well as the endurance of the traditional Zoroastrian mortuary practice of dokhmenashini, wherein the corpse is placed in large towers to be eaten by vultures and other carrion birds.
Funerals, Faith, and Finance in the Parsi Zoo
This funerary practice of excarnation, has been consistently practiced by the majority of the community in Bombay-Mumbai as one of the most important Zoroastrian rituals to be performed. The towers and the mortuary infrastructure are supported through communal giving and the instrument of the charitable trust. As merchant trade and the British Empire brought Parsis to settle in various entrepots, they brought with them these funerary rites, which actually established many early forms of communal associations in the diaspora. While many settlements (Hong Kong, Delhi) moved toward cemeteries to bury the dead where excarnation was unviable, the existing literature on Zoroastrian funerals, continues to focus solely on dokhmenashini, and hence there is no scholarship on the ritual adaptations performed with burials and other alternatives.
In contrast, this project broadens the focus and wishes to ethnographically investigate the practices associated with cemetery burials and a very recent move to cremation, as well as the finance supporting these alternate mortuary infrastructures. Due to the unviability of excarnation in the present even the Parsis in Mumbai are now moving away from dokhmenashini and seeking alternatives. This research will investigate how this transition away from millennia old ritual practice is not simply due to the reduced viability of excarnation outside of a few places, but also due to the newly acquired financial and political strength of diaspora groups particularly Hong Kong and the UK within the global Zoroastrian community.
