Zoroastrians in the Great Game
In the early 1900s the small but influential Zoroastrian community in India contemplated establishing a colony in Iran. Could the Parsis rely on British support?
At the turn of the 20th century members of the small Zoroastrian community of India, known as Parsis, debated the merits of establishing their own colony. The key proponent of this scheme was Khan Bahadur Burjorjee Patel, a wealthy Parsi who lived in the city of Quetta. According to the Parsi – ‘The English Journal of the Parsis and a High Class Illustrated Monthly’ – in 1905, Patel spent several months ‘agitating’ in the Rast Goftar (The Truth Teller), a Parsi-run Anglo-Gujarati newspaper, for ‘the necessity of establishing a colony’ for the community.
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