 Yusuf Madhiya is a Chennai-based businessman and a talented and successful artist and author. He's become a good friend over the years I've been coming to Chennai. We have a shared interest in the city's heritage. And at the weekend, he took me around his home area of Royapuram in the north of the city, close to the commercial harbour. Yusuf is a Dawoodi Bohra, a religious community within the Shia Muslim tradition and akin to (but not the same as) the Ismaili community. There are about two million Bohra Muslims globally, and perhaps 2,000 Bohra households in Chennai. They are traditionally a prosperous trading community from Gujarat - Gujarati is Yusuf's first language and the language of his household.  The photograph of Yusuf was taken outside the impressive Dawoodi Bohra mosque and community centre in Royapuram, where many Bohra families live. It's just four years old, spacious and well designed. Photography inside the building is not allowed, but you can see from the exterior how much attention has been given to the detail of the design. And the fundraising which enabled such an impressive building to be constructed reflects the wealth and strong sense of identity of the Bohra community.
Before the mosque was built, the community for some time used the premises nearby of another even smaller religious community, also of Gujarati heritage. They met in the Parsee club. Just down the road, the Parsees (or Zoroastrians) continue to have a well-maintained fire temple - where prayers are held five times a day and the fire tended to ensure it never goes out.  The sign at the front of the temple reads: 'ADMITTANCE TO PARSIS AND ZOROASTRIAN IRANIS ONLY' - non-believers are not allowed inside. Parsees are the Zoroastrians whose forbears fled Persia by boat several centuries ago and found refuge in Gujarat on India's west coast; Zoroastrian Iranis are the more recent migrants, many of whom left what is now Iran in the nineteenth century. The fire temple has its own priest, known to everyone as Dastur-ji. After his training, he has served as a Parsee priest in Mumbai, Lahore, Nagpur, Bangalore, Jamshedpur and a few other places before coming to Chennai.  There's been a Parsee presence in Chennai for more than 200 years; the fire temple was built in 1910. Nearby there's a community centre and an anjuman or social centre, as well as a small graveyard. The number of Parsees in Chennai is variously put at between 90 and 200 - it depends on definition. It is an ageing community. There are no Parsees of schoolgoing age in the city, and no more than eleven Parsees still live in Royapuram, their historic heartland in Chennai. Many have moved out to more affluent areas. The community remains wealthy and has offered free accommodation to any young Parsees who want to move to Chennai. But most prefer to stay in Mumbai, home to by far the greater part of India's Parsees. So the community in Chennai faces an uncertain future. Older Parsees in Chennai remain Gujarati speakers - so Yusuf talked happily to Parsee elders in a language which only 1%, if that, of Chennai's population understands.  Our other stop on this tour of places of worship in Royapuram was St Peter's, a Roman Catholic church which dates back to the 1820s. The design is said to be like a ship, and the church used to serve the local maritime and fishing community before the construction of the commercial harbour displaced the small fishing villages..  It's a strikingly elegant building, widely known as the 'madha' or mother church, and it has a small separate bell tower - and its large grounds are thronged at the weekend by cricket players.  Some of the design elements on the outside of the church are unusual - at least to my eyes.
A real pleasure to see such varied religious institutions - and big thanks to Yusuf for showing me round, and for the wonderful dinner, with homemade dokla and excellent biryani, at his home afterwards! 
0 Comments
 Today is Navroze, the Parsi (and indeed Persian) New Year. And I had the privilege of celebrating the occasion at a community dinner which also marked the inauguration of the new Parsi pavilion in Chennai.  Most of Chennai's Parsis were there - along with friends and well-wishers - for a sit down meal on banana leaf featuring an array of meat, fish and vegetarian dishes. The pavilion used to be a down-at-heel badminton court. Now, along with the adjoining community hall, it can be used for social occasions as well as bringing in revenue from its use for Muslim weddings.  This was not my first Parsi meal of the week - on Monday I had an excellent breakfast in the grounds of the Parsi dharamsala, just up the street from the community hall and pavilion. In the photo, there's (on the left) Darius and Tehnaz Bahadurji, the leading figures in the community, along with Mahiar Shroff, who manages the dharamsala, and his wife Zavera, who cooked the breakfast.
 The centrepiece of the assembly of Parsi buildings in the Royapuram area of north Chennai is the fire temple. It was built by the Clubwala family and dates from 1910. There's a full-time priest and an assistant. The temple is wonderfully well kept and, as is customary, non-Parsis are not allowed to enter. Royapuram is near Chennai's docks, which came under Japanese attack during the Second World War. The area was evacuated, but the Zoroastrian priest at the time refused to leave - insisting that he would ensure that the fire in the temple didn't die out.
There's never been a tower of silence in Chennai, and the burial ground is a small but, again, well kept plot in the grounds of the dharamsala. As you can see, there have been a number of interments in recent months; the last Parsi wedding in Chennai was almost six years ago.  The Parsi community in Chennai numbers a little over two-hundred - two-thirds aged seventy and over. But the community here has not suffered the sharp diminution of numbers witnessed in some other Indian cities. There are about 55,000 Parsis across India, mainly in Mumbai and Pune. That number is shrinking - the community has a low birth rate and, by and large, is reluctant to accept those with only one Parsi parent as a full member. Apart from their cuisine (and their relative wealth), Parsis are noted for their philanthropy, towards their own and more widely. The dharamsala in Chennai (below) is, like the temple, more than a century old - a place to stay for Parsi travellers and those without a home. And on the adjoining land the community has a number of apartments available for young Parsi incomers, to give them a helping hand in a new city and to seek to fortify the community's future in Chennai. The community has well-attended monthly get-togethers and prides itself on its common purpose when (so I hear) many other Parsi communities, some much smaller, are prone to factions and feuding.   In the northern half of Regent's Park, not far from that venerated open-air cafe 'The Honest Sausage', stands this wonderful Gothic style monument. A watering hole, in its most literal meaning. And as you can see, enormously in demand on a wonderfully sunny bank holiday weekend. What I hadn't appreciated until now is the India - indeed the Parsee - connection. The fountain was built in 1869 by the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association (not many charitable endeavours encompass both human and animal welfare quite so magnificently), inuagurated by a member of the royal family, and paid for by a wealthy Bombay (now Mumbai) based Parsee industrialist. Parsees - Zoroastrians by religion, a community numbering only in the tens of thousands - have had, and continue to have, an influence out of all proportion to their numbers. They have played a role in Indian industry and commerce akin to that of the Quakers in Britain a couple of centuries ago. Their role in politics, in India at least, has been less evident - though both M.A. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and Indira Gandhi married Parsees. But quite remarkably in Britain, the first three Asian MPs were all Parsees - Dadabhai Naoroji ('Mr Narrow Majority'), elected Liberal MP for Central Finsbury in 1892, Sir M.M. Bhownagree a Conservative representing (unlikely as it seems) a seat in the East End of London, and Sharpurji Saklatvala, a communist who represented Battersea in Parliament in the 1920s.  The plaque on the drinking fountain in Regent's Park omits to mention the full name of its Parsee benefactor, and what a marvellous name it is - Sir Cowasjee Jehangir Readymoney. Here's his Wikipedia entry. As you can see, the plaque records that Sir Cowasjee provided the funds for the fountain 'as a token of gratitude to the people of England for the protection enjoyed by him and his Parsee fellow countrymen under the British rule in India.' This was barely a decade after the 1857 Rebellion/Mutiny - decsribed by some as India's First War of Independence - so quite a bold statement. Above the plaque is what appears to be a likeness of the benefactor - judge for yourself how well it captured his features:
|
Andrew Whitehead's blogWelcome - read - comment - throw stones - pick up threads - and tell me how to do this better! Archives
April 2025
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed