Dear Parsi Zarthosthi readers, My fellow Humdins, Sahebji to all,
I am Esfandyar Patrawalla, and I am here to speak to our community as a young, concerned Zarthosthi and an enabler of action to reverse the crisis we are facing.
As no culture or people survive without a spiritual hinge, we too must always be conscious of the fact that the Mazdayasni Zarthosthi tradition is the foundation of our entire culture and cultural consciousness. Should it disappear, so do we.
We must also recognise that our culture and spirituality are in grave danger of being lost to the sands of time.
As was noted by different eminent Parsi scholars and personalities, like Shehnaz Cama in her recently published piece in The Times of India titled “Time is running out for Parsi culture. Race to save it from extinction is on”, the time is running out and most Parsis are entirely unaware of what constitutes their spiritual system and the cultural and linguistic elements that bind them all together, in essence, like the Pārsīg language (also called Middle Persian or Pahlavi) in which many of the most important of our texts and our intellectual heritage are preserved, as well as our prayers, many of which we utter every day while doing our sudro-kusti prayers, but are unaware of the language as well as their meaning.
As Shehnaz Cama noted in the article:
“It is a crisis of memory as well as memory-keepers. The loss is at once urgent and historical. They fear that the tangible and intangible threads of their history, culture, philanthropy, and memory would vanish as well. It was the history of an entire community simply vanishing.”
The grammatical tense structure of the sentence is present-continous. As in, we are living through this decay, and this must make us tensed.
To reverse this decay and revitalise one of the pillars of the Ēr (= Mazdayasni, Iranic) spirituality, we have the great pleasure to announce the launch of “Ērmān ī uzvān ī pārsīg”, an independent project in Iranian Studies that emphasises public education and authentic practice of the Pārsīg language by using a Natural and Immersive Method.
The project, which owes its foundations to renown behdēn scholar Raham Asha, is currently coordinated and directed by Ario Sedaghat, a fellow young Iranian humdēn and a researcher in philosophy based in Milan, Italy.
The website, set to expand over the coming year, not only features materials from the Pārsīg classical corpus transcribed to the highest orthographic standards, but also presents new texts freshly written, translated, and retro-translated into Pārsīg, each serving a distinct purpose, made by our colleagues.
As for education, we have a comprehensive teaching plan involving both self-study and online lessons.
The core purpose of Ērmān is the meticulous rehabilitation of this highly misunderstood and wrongly dismissed language as the main key to the entire spirit of Ērīh and the enormous heritage associated with it. As a group of young Iranian scholars and students, Ērmān seeks to build an online school for the Iranian public and intellectual frahang, i.e., education, that has the Daēnā Mazdayasni and its teachings as its core. This project has been in the testing phase for two years, and it is part of a larger effort in Iranian Studies (Perso-Aryan Studies) to transcend the conventional orientalistic naiveté that pervades academia and ignores many contexts and the richness of our intellectual and spiritual heritage.
There is a serious danger that the Zoroastrian community, and the Parsi community in particular, might forget everything that our ancestors and ourselves have stood for over the course of thousands of years. There will be nothing left of “Parsipannu” once the spiritual aspect of it is lost to time. We simply then devolve to the very Karapan vapid ritualists that mumbled prayers without understanding their meanings & against whom our very dear Asho Zarthost stood so defiantly to keep intact the spiritual essence of Asha and Mazdayasni Daēnā.
Thus, it is my kind request to all my fellow Parsi readers here to kindly get involved with the project and, if you find it useful, make contributions to it, either as patrons or as students enrolling to learn the language, so as to understand the contextuals of our holy Daēnā and culture.
I thank everyone for reading and supporting.
Yazdān panāh bād ud ahlāyīh bē abzāyād!
Esfandyar Patrawalla
(esfandyarpatrawalla@gmail.com)
I am also attaching images below that help navigate through the website more readily & help understand the structure:
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Learning the Pārsīg Language:
Here you will find information about our periodic online classes, the “Pārsīg in 30 Lessons” self-study program, A Concise Grammar, Dictionary and exercises for learning Pārsīg.
Mādayān | Texts:
Here you will find a selection of Pārsīg texts, from classical literature to new works written, translated or retrotranslated to Pārsīg.
Among the present works we have: The Book of the Deeds of Ardašēr, the Memorial of Vazurgmihr, the Jāmāspīg; stories from Aesop, ʿAwfī’s Collections of Stories,…
Māhrōz | History:
Here you will find historical works such as Pārsīg inscriptions and texts relating to the traditional history of Iran, and research about the historical narrative in relation to the religious & royal institutions, and Iranians’ bipartite ideology to these two institutions.
Dānišn | Sciences:
Here you will find works about the sciences in Ērānšahr, ranging from encyclopedia-writing, logic and philosophy to cosmology, astronomy and medicine.
āfrīn ud jašn | Benedictions and Feasts:
Here you can find texts and researches related to benedictory formulas and rituals of Iranian festivities, banquets and such.
Poetry
A selection of extant Pārsīg poems; a set of translations into Pārsīg from modern Iranian languages like Farsi, Luri, Ādari etc., and more.
