The Towers of Silence

The choicest residential area in Bombay is Malabar Hill, where gleaming mansions and apartments house the city's elite. But the crown of the hill remains a jungle, thick with date palms and banyan trees, girded by two concentric walls that protect it from the encroachments of civilization. Inside the walls, amid the trees, are six low, stadium-like enclosures. Residents of Bombay know them as dokhmas--the "towers of silence." It is to these structures that the city's powerful community of Parsis bring the bodies of their dead, exposing them to the air so that scavenger birds can pick the corpses clean.

The origins of this bizarre practice are ancient. The Parsis, as their name implies, are descendants of Persians who fled the conquering armies of Islam in the 7th century. Like their Persian ancestors, they are Zoroastrians, followers of a myth-enshrouded religious prophet named Zoroaster who lived some six centuries before Christ. Zoroaster's exact teaching is obscure but, as passed down by the Parsis, it is basically a vision of life as conflict between a spirit of goodness and light--Ahura Mazda --and a spirit of evil and darkness--Ahriman. The Parsis worship Ahura Mazda in the form of fire, one of three sacred elements. Because the earth is also sacred (as is water), they choose to bury only the bones of their dead--after the flesh has been stripped away in the towers of silence.

Now both the tower ritual and the Parsi community itself seem to be on the decline. As high-rise apartments go up around Malabar Hill, it has become easier to catch a glimpse of what was once forbidden to all but the tower attendants--a view of the interior of the towers, where the dead are left as carrion. Visiting one of the new buildings, a horrified Parsi was able to see shrunken corpses stacked in grotesque piles inside one tower. After he complained, a wall was quickly built to screen the tower. But Parsis now realize the shortcomings of the ancient method. The vultures still come, along with other birds, but for some unexplained reason scarcely touch the corpses these days. Many Parsis want the old custom changed.

First Cousins. Other traditions may have to change if the Parsi community is to survive. Indian Parsis number only about 100,000 worldwide; 65,000 of them are concentrated in Bombay. They are an uncommonly talented community:

Parsis started twelve of India's 15 major modern industries; others helped lead India's independence struggle. But the community is in danger of dying out. Between 1966 and 1970 in Bombay, 5,195 Parsis died; only 3,828 were born. The religion does not accept converts. The faith is inherited, and Parsis marry late, producing few children. Moreover, only a man may pass on the faith to his children if he marries an outsider. A woman cannot. To wed within the faith, Parsis often marry first cousins. Generations of inbreeding have caused a high incidence of such hereditary illnesses as diabetes, epilepsy and certain heart diseases.

India's Parsi community has been further diminished by emigration to other countries, but that could possibly be the religion's salvation. In New York last week, when Parsis from the Eastern seaboard gathered to mark the spring equinox with a New Year's festival, many of the couples present were mixed marriages in which the Parsi father raises his children in the old religion. The Parsis of the New World (as well as a few in India) have also hit on a resolution of the burial problem--apparently without breaking the tenets of their faith--by cremating bodies. As they see it, the use of electric cremation ovens instead of flame does not violate the purity of the sacred element of fire.

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