It's the range of images that first strikes the viewer. From Zubin Mehta conducting the Israeli Philharmonic orchestra to the ringletted Kaizad Gustad of the MTV generation. From an austere Ratan Tata in his office to a village woman cleaning fish. From silver-haired dowagers decked up for a wedding to a solar hatted man paying homage to the dying sun.

Sooni Taraporevala captures all these in her self-published book Parsis: A Photographic Journey, a 20-year study interspersed between 13 film-scripts including the award winning Salaam Bombay, Mississippi Masala and Such a Long Journey. The book is the first visual documentation of the ecologically endangered community, lovingly crafted by a woman nurtured on its best precepts. The accompanying text traces the history of prophet Zarathustra's followers and documents their contribution to contemporary India in fields as diverse as industry and art, medicine and music, law and nuclear science. A book to quicken every proud Parsi's heart.

A personalised tone adds to the book's success. Several photographs are of her family - grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, cousins - but transcend being family photographs because of Sooni's eye for composition and humanist perspective. A photograph of her grandfather taking his pen for repairs captures both the doggedness of the older generation as well as the pathos of age, imbuing it with a universality that cuts across time and place.


"The book is the first visual documentation of the ecologically endangered community, lovingly crafted by a woman nurtured on its best precepts"


Having grown up in a religious family Sooni has devoted a whole chapter to navars or young priests, another to rituals in Aatash Behrams and agiaries, to rites of passage like navjotes and weddings and to the unique Zoroastrian system for the disposal of the dead at the Tower of Silence. Through her camera's eye the rituals come across as solemn but colourful, at times deeply spiritual, at other times laced with gentle humour. A photograph of a woman lighting diyas with an agarbatti captures the tranquil beauty of fire. In another a dog looking soulfully into the camera at an agiary beside a board stating 'Only for Zoroastrians' seems to be asking, "Can I go in?"

The most evocative photographs feature dancer Astad Deboo swirling a white achkhan and a priest tying a pugdi on a young boy. The achievers coming before Sooni's camera range from constitutional expert Nani Palkhivala to painter Jehangir Sabavala, from Miss India, Mehr Jessia to field marshall Sam Maneckshaw, from attorney general Soli Sorabji to rock singer Freddy Mercury who denied his Parsi roots after achieving success.

Too many photographs feature elegantly dressed sophisticates attending navjotes, weddings, parties and the races. Far more touching are those of Parsis in villages. A goat against the wrought iron grill of a typical Parsi house, women, heads covered with white mathabanas, drawing water from a well, an admirer of John Kennedy sitting under a photograph of the late American president in his simple rural house. They are anachronisms caught in a time warp.

The disappointment of the book however lies in the last chapter focussing on the Tower of Silence. Not only does Sooni make no mention of khandhiyas, the pall-bearers whose pathetic living conditions she herself had photographed for a magazine, she also steers clear of the current controversy regarding retaining the dokhmeni system in view of the dwindling vulture population in Bombay.

These glaring omissions detract from the strength of an otherwise commendable effort.

Meher Pestonji