Cama Sutra

IF tracing the beginnings of one’s culture is a daunting task, facing up to its imminent annihilation must be soul-destroying. Especial...

IF tracing the beginnings of one’s culture is a daunting task, facing up to its imminent annihilation must be soul-destroying. Especially if you care enough to have spent four years travelling and researching the roots, branches and twigs of the family tree. Ask Shernaz H Cama. As director of the UNESCO Parzor Project, she had only one guiding mantra: ‘‘God forbid, should the Parsi community die, there should be some proof of the greatness of their culture.’’

The 70,000 Zoroastrian Parsis may make up less than 0.01 per cent of the country’s population, but as standard-bearers of the world’s oldest known culture—Zoroastrianism is celebrating its 3,000th anniversary this year—they are a part of history that has been inadequately recorded at best. So when UNESCO, concerned about the alarming demographic decline of the Parsis, approached Cama in 1998 to document every aspect of the community, she leapt at the chance. ‘‘I had always been interested in minority issues and the paradoxes of multiculturism and multipluralism,’’ explains Cama, 43, a lecturer in English at Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi.

Perhaps fittingly, it was on a tone of ‘‘emotional hurt’’ that Cama began her project. ‘‘I had gone to the Hazira-Suhali belt for a recce. At one time, this region was thickly populated with Parsis. Now I would be lucky to find one old Parsi man in an entire village. I wanted to know where everybody had gone,’’ says Cama. ‘‘I owed it to history.’’

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During her first field trip to Bharuch, she distributed a ‘Reet-Rivaz’ questionnaire touching on issues of art, culture, health and environment. ‘‘We wanted to find out which traditions have survived, which have changed and which have disappeared altogether,’’ says Cama. ‘‘I’m still getting responses to those questions, which shows that we touched a sensitive chord.’’

Describing her project as ‘‘a documentation of the roots of the entire Indian culture,’’ Cama narrates how the Parzor Project team-members discovered the Meherjirana Library at Navsari, which houses Akbar’s sanad (deed of gift), signed by Abul Fazal. ‘‘If we make efforts to preserve Parsi culture, in a way we are preserving the threads of India,’’ she says.

The Parzor Foundation has also commissioned a film on Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw in its endeavour to profile Parsis in public life. The Jessica Gupta-directed film, In War and Peace, was released on the occasion of the Field Marshal’s 90th birthday. ‘‘Right from Dadabhai Naoroji to Manekshaw, Soli Sorabjee, Shiamak Davar and Cyrus Broacha, Parsis have been at the forefront in various spheres, but their efforts haven’t been chronicled.’’

To make sure that doesn’t happen again, Cama is leaving no stone unturned to document every aspect of her research. Last week in Delhi, the Parzor Foundation held an exhibition titled ‘Pictures with a Purpose’ to showcase the life and rituals, arts and crafts, and archival discoveries of the Parsi community; there are plans to take the exhibition to Kolkata and Mumbai as well.

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Cama admits that some of the graver questions facing the Parsi community—especially so far as numbers are concerned—are more easily identified than answered. But she’s also hopeful that Zoroastrian culture will go down in history—and not become history.