Sects: India's Prosperous Parsis

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In the West, Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, is a name meaningful chiefly to crossword-puzzle addicts and readers of Nietzsche. To the 100,000 Parsis of India who last week celebrated their New Year, the most sacred feast on their calendar, Zoroaster is still the one great prophet, the man who gave them their monotheistic faith in the god Ahura Mazda.

The last adherents of a great religion that once enlisted millions of ad herents throughout central Asia,&* the Parsis have traditionally influenced In dia well out of proportion to their numbers. Prosperous, cosmopolitan, literate, they dominate today the business community of Bombay. Industrialist J.R.D. Tata, whose steel mills constitute India's largest privately owned enterprise, is a Parsi; so are General Sam Hormuzji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw, one of India's top military leaders, and Zubin Mehta, conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Parsi girls for the last three years have won the title of Miss India.

The Balance Sheet. In a nation with a 25% literacy rate, the Parsis can boast that more than 90% of the sect's members can read and write. Despite the widespread hunger and poverty of India, the Parsi poor rarely starve; in the city of Bombay alone, one trust established by wealthy members of the sect provides low-income housing for more than 6,000 Parsi families and welfare payments for the unemployed.

Self-sufficiency and mutual aid are key elements of Zoroastrianism, a faith whose origin and even basic tenets are obscured in mystery. Although some devout Parsis claim that Zoroaster was born about 6000 B.C., most Western scholars agree that he lived and taught in Persia during the 6th century B.C.-an era of religious (lowering that also saw the birth of Buddha and Confucius and the revival of Judaism after its Babylonian exile.

The son of a wealthy landowner, Zoroaster apparently rejected the prevailing polytheism of his age and taught that the one true god was Ahura Mazda, who was to be served by self-sacrifice rather than blood sacrifice. Although Ahura Mazda was the supreme lord of creation, his influence over the world was challenged nonetheless by a lesser god of evil, whom Zoroaster's followers later named Ahriman. Caught up in the unending war of these two deities, man was constantly faced with an existential choice of doing good or ill; at the end of his life, his personal balance sheet of good and evil deeds would determine whether he went to Vahishta-ahu (heaven) or to hell.