This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Facing the gradual Islamisation of Persia that followed the Arab conquest, a group of Zoroastrians chose exile over assimilation and sailed for the west coast of India. According to the community's own account, the Qissa-i Sanjan, they landed at Sanjan on the coast of Gujarat, where a local ruler granted them refuge on the condition that they adopt the local language and customs rather than keep their own.
The Qissa-i Sanjan is the only surviving account of the landing, and it was composed at least six centuries after the events it describes, so the precise year of arrival is not settled even among Parsis themselves; traditional dating places it around 936. What is not in doubt is what followed: the refugees' descendants, who became known as the Parsis, preserved Zoroastrian practice in India for the next twelve centuries, adopting the surrounding Gujarati language while keeping their ancestral faith intact.
What this changed for Zoroastrianism's spread was the creation of a second homeland for the religion outside Persia, one that would eventually hold the faith's largest surviving population anywhere in the world. The bargain struck at Sanjan, refuge in exchange for linguistic and cultural adoption, let the exiles keep the one thing that mattered most to them, their religion, even as everything visible around them, from language to dress, became Indian rather than Persian.