Origin from 1702
After the East India Company moved its headquarters from Surat to Bombay in 1687, Parsis migrated to the growing port city and rose within its colonial commercial life; Rustom Maneck was appointed the Company's first official broker there in 1702, and through the 1720s his son Naoroz Maneck established Bombay as the primary centre of Parsi habitation and work, founding the Bombay Parsi Panchayet in 1728 to govern the community's own affairs. By the mid eighteenth century Parsis were one of Bombay's most prominent commercial groups, a status the community held into the modern era.
Facts
Dates
Start YearSourced to the subject's own account1702, Rustom Maneck's appointment as the East India Company's first broker in Bombay, the start of the Parsi community's rise there. End YearSourced to the subject's own account1728, the founding of the Bombay Parsi Panchayet, the community's own self-governing body. StatusSourced to the subject's own account Learn More
How Parsis Established Bombay as Their Community's Centre
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Bombay became the centre of Parsi life only after the East India Company itself relocated there, moving its headquarters from Surat to Bombay in 1687. Parsis followed the Company's commercial activity into the growing port city and began rising within its colonial trading economy almost from the start.
Rustom Maneck was appointed the Company's first official broker in Bombay in 1702, giving a Parsi a formal position at the heart of the city's commercial administration. His son, Naoroz Maneck, built on that foothold through the 1720s, establishing Bombay as the primary centre of Parsi habitation and work rather than merely one Parsi settlement among several on the Gujarat coast. In 1728 the community formalised its own self-governance there, founding the Bombay Parsi Panchayet to govern Parsi affairs directly rather than leaving them to Company or local rulers.
What this changed for Zoroastrianism's spread was the concentration of a diaspora community, until then spread across Gujarati coastal towns since the Sanjan landing centuries earlier, into a single dominant urban centre. By the middle of the eighteenth century Parsis were one of Bombay's most prominent commercial groups, a status built inside two generations of the Maneck family's own rise and formalised through the Panchayet's self-government, and one the community went on holding into the modern era.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Occurred In
Bombay (now Mumbai); no separate city entity exists in the graph, so this anchors to India.
Spread Event Of
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