Descended from Zoroastrians who migrated to India

Parsis affirm their identity as the descendants of Zoroastrians who migrated from Iran to India in the early medieval centuries, after the Islamic conquest of Persia, to preserve their faith in freedom. Tradition recounts their landing in Gujarat and their settlement under local protection, where they maintained their religion, sacred fires, and customs and in time became a distinctive community.

The name Parsi itself means "Persian," marking their origin, and their history in India is remembered as the safeguarding of an ancient faith through migration and endurance. The traditional account of the migration is preserved in the Qissa-i Sanjan ("Story of Sanjan"), a Persian-language poem composed in Gujarat around 1600, centuries after the events it describes, which tells that the migrants asked a local ruler, traditionally named Jadi Rana, for refuge; he is said to have sent a bowl filled to the brim with milk, signalling his land had no room for more people, to which the Zoroastrians responded by stirring sugar into the milk without spilling a drop, symbolising that they would sweeten society without displacing anyone. Historians treat the Qissa as a foundational communal narrative composed long after the fact, and the actual date of the migration, traditionally placed between the eighth and tenth centuries CE, is not established with precision from independent evidence.

Parsi identity fuses religion with this particular history of exile and settlement, and over the centuries the community developed customs and a calendar somewhat distinct from those of the Zoroastrians who remained in Iran. The Parsis became notable in Indian commercial, industrial, and civic life while sustaining their religious institutions. The affirmation of descent from the migration is thus both a historical memory and a marker of communal identity, complementary to the parallel Irani identity of the Zoroastrians who stayed in the homeland. The Parsi community's strict tradition of endogamy, historically denying full membership to children of interfaith marriages and to women who marry outside the faith, has produced serious modern legal conflict as the population has declined through low birth rates and increasing outmarriage.

In one prominent case, Goolrukh Gupta, a Parsi woman married to a Hindu, petitioned after Gujarat's High Court ruled in 2010 that she had forfeited her religious rights by marrying outside the community; India's Supreme Court later found in her favour, holding that marriage outside the faith does not strip a Parsi woman of the right to practise her religion, including funeral rites at the Tower of Silence, though individual Parsi trusts have continued to apply the traditional rule inconsistently.