Abstract
This paper examines the portrayal of Parsi culture and religion in Rohinton Mistry’s novel Such a Long Journey (1991). Set in Bombay in 1971 against the backdrop of the Bangladesh Liberation War and the political intrigues of the Indira Gandhi government, the novel centers on the life of Gustad Noble, a Parsi bank employee whose story illuminates both the specific religious and cultural traditions of the Parsi community and the community’s complex relationship to Indian national identity. The paper argues that Mistry uses the Parsi community’s experience to explore broader questions of cultural identity, religious belief, political disillusionment, and the survival of minority communities in a changing India.
Keywords: Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey, Parsi, Zoroastrianism, Indian diaspora fiction, minority identity, Bombay, postcolonial India
Introduction
Rohinton Mistry is one of the most significant contemporary writers of the Indian diaspora. Born in Bombay in 1952 into the Parsi community and now based in Canada, Mistry has produced a body of fiction that engages deeply with the life of the Parsi community in Bombay and with the broader social and political history of postcolonial India. His novels — Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995), and Family Matters (2002) — have won international critical acclaim and have established him as a major voice in postcolonial literature in English.
Such a Long Journey (1991), Mistry’s first novel, won the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. Set in the Khodadad Building, a residential complex in Bombay’s Firozsha Baag neighborhood, the novel follows Gustad Noble, a Parsi bank employee, through a period of personal and political crisis in 1971. The novel’s richly detailed portrayal of Parsi community life — its religious practices, its social customs, its relationship to the broader Indian society — provides the cultural texture within which Mistry’s narrative of individual and collective experience unfolds.
The Parsi Community in India
The Parsis are a small religious minority in India, numbering today fewer than 70,000, whose ancestors fled Persia in the seventh and eighth centuries CE to escape persecution following the Arab conquest and the forced Islamization of Iran. Settling primarily on the western coast of India, the Parsis maintained their Zoroastrian religion and developed a distinct cultural identity that combined Persian and Indian elements.
Under British colonial rule, the Parsi community achieved considerable prosperity and influence, playing an important role in the development of Indian commerce, industry, and the professions. The Tata family, whose industrial empire is one of the foundations of the modern Indian economy, are Parsis. The Parsis also produced notable figures in the arts, law, and politics, including Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian to be elected to the British Parliament.
In the postcolonial period, the Parsi community has faced the challenges common to small minority communities in a changing society: declining numbers (the Parsi population has been shrinking for decades due to low birth rates and emigration), questions of community identity and endogamy, and the negotiation of a minority religious identity within a predominantly Hindu India.
Zoroastrian Religious Practices in Such a Long Journey
A central element of Mistry’s portrayal of Parsi life in Such a Long Journey is his detailed and sympathetic depiction of Zoroastrian religious practice. Gustad Noble’s daily prayers at the fire altar, his reverence for the sacred fire, his observance of Zoroastrian festivals, and his relationship with the local priest Dinshawji all convey the living reality of Zoroastrian religious practice as it is observed in the Parsi community.
Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of the Persians, teaches the existence of a supreme deity (Ahura Mazda) and the cosmic struggle between the forces of good (Spenta Mainyu) and evil (Angra Mainyu). The central symbol of the religion is fire, which represents divine wisdom and purity. Zoroastrian practice includes the maintenance of the sacred fire, the wearing of the sudreh (sacred shirt) and kusti (sacred thread), and the observance of purity laws.
Mistry depicts these practices not as exotic curiosities but as living elements of a religious tradition that sustains the spiritual and community life of the Parsis. Gustad’s prayers are moments of genuine devotion, not mere performance, and they provide him with a framework of meaning in the face of personal and political crisis.
The Khodadad Building as Community Space
The Khodadad Building in which the novel is set functions as a microcosm of Parsi community life. The building’s residents — Gustad and his family, the Madon couple, Malcolm Saldanha, the retired teacher Tehmul Lungraa — form a small community with its own social dynamics, gossip networks, mutual support, and conflicts. Mistry uses this intimate community space to explore the social textures of Parsi life: the importance of hospitality, the role of communal memory, the tensions between tradition and modernity.
The wall that Gustad creates at the entrance to the building — covered with images of gods and religious symbols from multiple Indian traditions — becomes a symbol of the syncretic religiosity of Indian urban life and of the Parsi community’s relationship to the broader Indian religious landscape. The wall, which draws pilgrims from multiple faiths, represents the possibility of communal harmony across religious boundaries, even as the political events of the novel speak to the fragility of that harmony.
Political Crisis and Parsi Identity
The novel’s political backdrop — the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 and the political machinations of the Indira Gandhi government, including the Emergency and the nationalization of banks — connects Gustad’s personal story to the broader history of postcolonial India. Gustad’s involvement with his old friend Jimmy Billimoria and the political intrigue surrounding the transfer of funds for the Bangladesh liberation movement draws him into a world of political corruption and betrayal that threatens to destroy him.
The Parsi community’s experience of postcolonial India is one of gradual displacement from the privileged position they had occupied under the British Raj. Mistry depicts this displacement with sympathy but without nostalgia: his Parsis are fully engaged participants in Indian society, not remnants of a colonial order. At the same time, the novel acknowledges the anxieties of a small minority community navigating the complexities of postcolonial national identity.
Language and Cultural Identity
Mistry’s prose in Such a Long Journey is notable for its incorporation of Parsi Gujarati dialect expressions, Zoroastrian prayers and invocations, and the rich mixture of languages that characterizes Bombay’s multilingual urban life. This linguistic texture contributes significantly to the novel’s portrayal of Parsi cultural identity: the characters speak a version of English that is inflected with Gujarati, Hindi, and Parsi idiom, reflecting the linguistic reality of an educated middle-class Bombay family of the 1970s.
The representation of Parsi speech patterns — with their characteristic mix of languages and their distinctive idioms — is one of the ways in which Mistry conveys the particularity of Parsi cultural identity from within, without reducing that identity to a set of stereotypes or exoticizing it for a non-Parsi readership.
Conclusion
Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey provides a richly detailed and sympathetic portrayal of Parsi culture and religion that is simultaneously an intimate portrait of a specific minority community and an exploration of broader questions of identity, belief, and survival in postcolonial India. Through Gustad Noble’s story, Mistry conveys both the beauty and the pressures of Parsi life in Bombay in the 1970s, and in doing so creates a literary monument to a community whose future in India is uncertain. The novel’s engagement with Zoroastrian religious practice, Parsi social customs, and the community’s negotiation of its minority identity within Indian society makes it an essential text for the study of postcolonial literature, minority identity, and the Indian diaspora.
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