Category Archives: India

Navroze Mubarak

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Saal Mubarak! With these words, Parsis across the world would have greeted each other tomorrow as they heralded the arrival of their new year. Another greeting heard across the agiaries (Fire Temples) would have been Navroze Mubarak!

I studied for 12 years in a Parsi school and so this community holds a special place in my heart. This small, minority community comprises of the followers of Zarathustra. The Parsis in India are those who fled Persia (modern day Iran) due to religious persecution and arrived in western India (modern day Gujarat, Kutch in India and Sindh in Pakistan).

There’s a very sweet story that was told to me in school about the Parsis’ arrival in India. When they arrived in Gujarat, the leader of the Parsis, the head priest or Dastoorji, sent a messanger to the local king asking for his permission to stay in his land as refugees. The king sent back a bowl full of milk. The Dastoorji looked at the bowl of milk his messenger brought back, added a spoon of sugar to it and sent it back to the king. The King understood the message and gave them permission. Soon one of the people in the Parsi group asked the Dastoorji what just happened and he replied that the bowl of milk the king sent over indicated that the land was currently occupied and full and he didn’t want to do anything to disrupt the lives of his people. By mixing sugar in the milk, the Priest sent a message that the Parsis will do nothing to disrupt the land and it’s people and instead, like how sugar adds sweetness to the milk, they will assimilate into the land and only add to the sweetness of this land and not take away anything. And this is how the Parsis adapted the Gujarati way of life – in their language or dialect as well as the dress. Parsis speak a dialect of Gujarati, which we call Parsi Gujarati and women also adopted the saree as their main form of dress.

The more recent arrivals of Parsis, those who arrived in late 19th and early 20th centuries, fleeing from the repressions of the Qajar dynasty in Iran are differentiated from the original Parsi settlers and are called Iranis. This Irani community is smaller than the Parsi community, though both profess the same religion, but religious customs may be slightly different.

In the centuries that they have lived in India, the Parsis, have integrated themselves into the Indian society, while at the same time, maintaining their ethnic individuality.

This community has been faced with dwindling numbers for a while now, the most significant being childlessness or having less than two numbers (which is basically the total fertility rate) or migration. Demographic trends project that by the year 2020 the Parsis will number only 23,000 (less than 0.002% of the 2001 population of India). The Parsis will then cease to be called a community and will be labeled a ‘tribe’.

During the British rule of India, because this community was highly literate and extremely fluent in English, they occupied many important places in the East India Company.

One interesting aspect of the Parsis is that instead of burying or cremating their dead, they place their dead in a Tower of Death where vultures peck the body and pick it clean. Once the bones are bleached by the sun, they are pushed into the circular opening in the tower. They believe, this way is the most ecological way, where even the dead are used as food by vultures and no part of the polluted human body is pushed back into the earth (by burying it) or into the atmosphere (by cremating it).

The Parsi place pf worship is called an Agiary in the Parsi dialect or a Fire Temple in English. The most holy place for Parsis in India is a place called Udwada in Gujarat. Legend says that one of the groups of refugees brought with them the ash of one of sacred fires from Iran and this ash serves, even today, as the bed for the fire in the Udwada Agiary. I remember friends from school going to the Agiary which used to be opposite our school before important exams. Unfortunately, as a non-Parsi I can’t enter the Agiary.

The Parsis have made considerable contributions to the history and development of India, all the more remarkable considering their small numbers. As the maxim “Parsi, thy name is charity” reveals, their greatest contribution, literally and figuratively, is their philanthropy.

Happy Independence Day India

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Tomorrow is India’s 68th Independence Day.

I have really mixed feeling about India – one on hand, it’s the land of my birth and there’s so much to love there, but the way people are literally destroying the country, makes me very sad. There’s so much potential there, but most people, especially the politicians seem to have made a game of “What can destroy India faster”!

An ancient civilization, which has given so much to the world, Indians are, in my opinion, more inward looking than outward looking. We are so much in love with our past that we tend to brush aside our present and give little or no thought to our future. We get so caught up in little and silly things, that we miss the forest for the trees!

The country is so rich and diverse, both geogrphically and culturally starting with the Himalayas in the north to the Indian Ocean to the south, the deserts of the Thar and the Rann of Kutch in the west to the hilly terrain of the exotic north-east. There are 25 states, 7 Union Territories and is the second most populous country in the world, after China with an estimated population of 1.21 billion who speak more than 1365 rationalised mother tongues with 29 languages having more than a million native speakers each!

India’s cultural history spans over 4,500 years and the foundations of India’s main religion, Hinduism was laid down as between 3500 to 2500 years ago, when most of the western world was probably cavemen! Probably this is why India was the rich bird, ripe for plucking through the ages – from the Persians, Greeks, Mongols, Mughals, to finally the English, Portuguese and the French. A lot of India’s historically rich treasures were plundered and taken away by the conquerors (and never returned till date)

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as of April 2015, the Indian economy is nominally worth US$2.306 trillion; it is the 7th-largest economy by market exchange rates, and is, at US$7.996 trillion, the third-largest by purchasing power parity, or PPP.

All this talk about India has now made me super nostalgic. I remember reading how the last of the British soldiers left India from the shores of the Gateway of India in Bombay, an edifice, which ironically was constructed in 1911 to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary

Ok, going to stop with this nostalgia with a tune that many of us, especially those who grew up in a certain era will recognize…..Mile Sur Tera Mera….the original plus the new version

Raja Ravi Varma: India’s First Modern Artist

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I want to preface this post with a disclaimer: I am not an artist or even someone with any knowledge of art. What I have written here is based on my research and knowledge. If there is any error in my post, please reach out to me and I will correct it and at the same time, learn something new.

In the past few weeks of posting, whenever I did a post on Indian culture, somehow, most of the pictures I got from Google (the ones I liked that is) turned out to be from Raja Ravi Varma’s collection. His paintings are super familiar to most Indians – his images of the different Gods and Goddesses are the ones we are used to seeing in our Pooja Rooms (family prayer rooms or altars) and so this inspired me to do find out more about the man whose work, about 2-3 generations of Indians have gazed at every single day and then do a post on him today, which is his 167th birth anniversary.

Raja Ravi Varma is considered among one of the finest painters in the history of Indian art and his paintings among the best examples of the fusion of Indian traditions with the techniques of European academic art. Raja Ravi Varma achieved recognition for his paintings from Indian literature and mythology including the epics of Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

Raja Ravi Varma was born in the erstwhile princely state of Travancore in today’s Kerala state today in the year 1948 in a royal family which was very accomplished in the arts. He was patronized by the Maharajah of Travancore and then began formal training with the learning of the basics of painting in Madurai, Tamil Nadu and then trained in water painting by Rama Swami Naidu and then in oil paintings by the Dutch portraitist Theodor Jenson.

His exposure in the west came when he won the first prize in the Vienna Art Exhibition in 1873. In the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he received three gold medals and then teavelled all over India in search of subjects for his paintings.

He also started a lithographic printing press, initially in Mumbai and then near Lonavala (near Mumbai) and the oleographs printed were very popular and continue to be printed even today.

Among the various honours he received, the Kaiser-i-Hind, bestowed by the then Vicerory, Lord Curzon in 1904 on behalf of the British King was the highest. Considering his vast contribution to Indian art, the Government of Kerala has instituted an award called “Raja Ravi Varma Puraskaram”, which is awarded every year to people who show excellence in the field of art and culture.

Raja Ravi Varma died on 02 October 1906 at the age of 58, but his art still lives and delights peoples even today.

Below are some of the prints we generally see in Indian homes – mostly the Gods and Goddesses of the Indian pantheon….

Goddess Saraswati

Goddess Lakshmi

Some other famous paintings:

Lady with Fruit

Lady in the Moonlight