CHAPTER LIII
PROSELYTIZING COMES TO BE VIEWED WITH DISFAVOUR
Beginning of the spirit of exclusiveness among the Parsis. We have already seen that the handful of the Parsi fugitives who emigrated to India after the final overthrow of the Persian empire in the middle of the seventh century had to face enormous difficulties in the earlier centuries of their settlement in the new home. The precarious condition in which they lived for a considerable period made it impracticable for them to keep up their former proselytizing zeal. The instinctive fear of disintegration and absorption in the vast multitudes among whom they lived created in them a spirit of exclusiveness and a strong feeling for the preservation of the racial characteristics and distinctive features of their community. Living in an atmosphere surcharged with the Hindu caste system, they felt that their own safety lay in encircling their fold by rigid caste barriers.
The community was divided regarding the question of admitting lower classes of aliens into its fold. Though the practice of an active religious propaganda had thus fallen into desuetude, the question of conversion does not seem to have died out entirely, for we find recorded in the Rivayat literature that a heated polemic regarding the subject was carried on during the latter part of the eighteenth century. With the beginning of economic prosperity, the Indian Parsis, we learn, were in the habit of purchasing male and female slaves of low Hindu castes. These slaves, in many cases, were invested with sacred shirt and girdle and admitted into the Zoroastrian fold by the priests at the request of their masters. Those members of the community who were opposed to the mingling of their blood with that of such a low class of people denied to these converts the full privileges of a true believer. The contesting parties applied to their coreligionists in Persia for their advice and decision in the matter. The point made by those who favoured the cause of the
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