Elders hope to halt decline of Zoroastrianism's last bastion

India's Parsis served both the Raj and the battle for independence, built many of the country's commercial legends, and gave the world Freddie Mercury, but the fire-worshipping community is now facing its greatest challenge - staving off extinction.

Faced with falling birth rates and growing emigration to the west, 1,000 years of rich history is looking increasingly frail. In 1941 there were 114,500 Parsis in India, mainly living in Mumbai and the surrounding area. That figure has fallen to less than 70,000, according to recent census results, and is expected to drop to 21,000 by 2021.

Leading Parsis fear a unique culture may be gone within a century. 'Over the past 200 years the contribution of the Parsis to the development of India and Mumbai in particular has been out of this world,' said retired army general A.M. Sethna, president of the Delhi Parsi Anjuman. 'But since the 1950s we have had more deaths than births. That's a fact of life, but it's one many Parsis seem unable to accept. They don't see that too many of us have grey hair.'

Thirty-one per cent of the population is now over 60. Every year there are 900 deaths and only 300 births. According to a Tata Institute of Social Studies report, 40 per cent of Parsi men and women are unmarried, and an offer by the community's governing body, the Parsi Panchayat, of a monthly bonus for having a population-boosting third child has failed to attract many takers.

Adding to their woes is a desperate attempt to maintain what the eight Parsi high priests term the religion's 'purity'. While the children of Parsi men who marry outside the community are welcome in the fire temples, if a woman marries a non-Parsi - and more than 30 per cent now do so - her children are usually lost to the faith forever.

The Parsis are followers of the 6th-century BC Persian prophet Zoroaster, the world's first monotheistic prophet, and are named after the city of Pars in what is today southern Iran. Zoroastrians worship fire as the purest symbol of the divine and the creator of life.