Nariman Hoshang Opens the Persian Rivayats Correspondence

In 1478, a Parsi layman named Nariman Hoshang carried a list of religious questions from Changa Asa, the respected lay leader of the Zoroastrian community at Navsari in Gujarat, to the priests of Yazd in Iran, opening the correspondence later called the Persian Rivayats, more than five centuries after Zoroastrians first migrated to Gujarat in 936, already recorded here. Hoshang spent roughly a year among Yazd's Zoroastrian priesthood, learning Persian and supporting himself through petty trade while the questions were answered, since the Parsis had carried few religious texts with them into exile and needed guidance on ritual and law they could no longer settle for themselves. His journey inaugurated a correspondence that continued for nearly three centuries: twenty six rivayats passed between the communities of India and Iran between 1478 and 1773, thirteen of them before 1600, preserving instruction on marriage, purification, the calendar and temple ritual that might otherwise have been lost to the isolated Indian community. The exchange gave the Parsis of India a durable link back to their ancestral priesthood in Iran, more than a century before Akbar invited the Zoroastrian priest Dastur Meherji Rana to his Ibadat Khana in 1578, already recorded here.