Sir Dinshaw Manockji Petit v Sir Jamsetji Jeejeebhoy (Bombay High Court, 1908) — a Zoroastrian need not be a Parsi

Every Parsi statute — the Marriage and Divorce Act, 1936 and the Parsi intestacy rules in the Indian Succession Act, 1925 — applies to "Parsis". Neither says who is one. Section 2(7) of the 1936 Act merely says "a 'Parsi' means a Parsi Zoroastrian", which pushes the question back a step. This is the case that answers it, and the reasoning is quotable.

Seven members of the Parsi community of Bombay sued five trustees of the funds and properties of the Parsi Punchayet. The suit had two limbs. The first challenged the trustees' appointment and claimed that the right to appoint lay in the general body of Zoroastrians in Bombay. The second, which caused the greater stir, was brought by the plaintiffs as champions of converts: they claimed that the Zoroastrian religion permits and enjoins the conversion of aliens, that a person invested with the Sudra and Kusti after the Navjot ceremony at the hands of a Parsi priest acquires all the rights of a born Zoroastrian, and that such converts are therefore entitled to the benefit of the community's religious and charitable institutions, including the Towers of Silence at Malabar Hill. The occasion was the marriage of a Parsi to a Frenchwoman who had been admitted to the faith.

Davar J. framed the case around two questions: whether the defendants were validly appointed trustees with the right to fill vacancies, and whether a person born in another faith and afterwards converted to Zoroastrianism is entitled to the benefit of the religious institutions and funds in the defendants' hands.

On the first limb the Court found, on the evidence, an established usage among the Bombay Parsis of electing headmen to the punchayet, the surviving members nominating a successor whose name was approved at a meeting of the community.

The second limb produced the passage that is cited to this day. Davar J. held that the question presented no difficulty: "a Zoroastrian is a person who professes the Zoroastrian religion. A Zoroastrian need not necessarily be a Parsi." Anyone who professes the religion promulgated by Zoroaster, "be he an Englishman, Frenchman, or American", becomes a Zoroastrian on conversion; but he does not thereby become a Parsi, because "the word Parsi has only a racial significance and has nothing whatever to do with his religious professions". The word derives from Pars or Fars, the province in Persia from which the original emigrants came, so that in India "the word Parsi... could only mean the people from Pars", and all the descendants of those emigrants came to be known as Parsis. Hence: "A Parsi born must always be a Parsi", whatever religion he later professes. The trusts, being for Parsis, did not extend to a Juddin convert. The Court also refused the plaintiffs relief on the pleadings: they were themselves born of Parsi parents, professed the Zoroastrian religion, and had suffered no denial of any right — "My answer to these questions is in the negative", because "the word 'relief' necessarily implies the pre-existence of a 'wrong'".

1. "Zoroastrian" is a religious description; "Parsi" is a description of descent. The two are not interchangeable.
2. A convert to Zoroastrianism becomes a Zoroastrian but not a Parsi, and so takes no interest in trusts settled for the Parsi community.
3. A person born of Parsi parents remains a Parsi.

Read the holding for what it decided, which was the construction of community trusts in 1908. It is authority for the meaning of "Parsi", not for any proposition about the validity of a marriage.