NEW DELHI: One of India’s oldest and most prominent Parsi magazines, Parsiana, will publish its final issue this week, closing after a six-decade run of chronicling the country’s declining Zoroastrian minority population.
Founded in 1964 by Pestonji Warden, a Parsi doctor and entrepreneur, Parsiana was for the first nine years focused largely on religious, historic, and academic subjects.
The focus changed to current affairs in 1973, when it was bought by Jehangir Patel, who, a few years earlier, returned to India after graduating from Yale University.
Having worked for the San Francisco Examiner and the Hartford Times in the US, and upon return, the Mumbai-based Freedom First magazine, Patel took on board professional journalists to cover contemporary issues concerning the Parsis both in India and abroad.
But over 60 years after its founding, the magazine’s readership has been shrinking along with the community, which has declined sharply over the past decades, leaving the editorial board without successors to continue running it.
