Part I of III: Hypergamy, Endogamy, and the Terminal Phase of the Parsi Model
With a nod to the Y. M. Hodiwalla thread on the Parsi Zoroastrians Worldwide Facebook page, 19 April 2026.
“The Parsis are a quarter Gujarati (genetically). Essentially their Nanis are Gujjus and interestingly enough culture is almost always transmitted via the mothers and their mothers.”
I. The Language Is the Mother
On 19 April, Y. M. Hodiwalla published a long lament on the Parsi Zoroastrians Worldwide page. He called the community’s shift from Gujarati to English a “cultural suicide,” a “refined, English-speaking whimper,” the surrender of a thousand-year linguistic inheritance for the “glittering tinsel of modern fashion.” The comments beneath agreed with him almost to a person. One commenter, KCR, asked the most interesting question in the thread, and everyone ignored it:
Did Jadi Rana tell Parsis to change their “mother tongue”? Was the language of Jadi Rana’s era called Gujarati? And no one retains MT after a couple of generations especially if their numbers are small after migration.
That single comment contains the argument Hodiwalla’s essay cannot bring itself to make. The Parsis did not “adopt” Gujarati in some conscious civilisational pact with Jadi Rana. They speak Gujarati because their founding mothers were Gujarati. The Qissa-i Sanjan gives us the romance. The genome gives us the picture.
II. The Parsi Genome