Chronicling a community’s culinary traditions through the pages of a magazine

My aunt Manjula Padmanabhan remembers the food from when she worked at Parsiana magazine. “There was dhansak , of course,” she says. “And a very rich chicken curry made with almonds.” This was probably sau badam ni curry , which is actually made with 101 almonds, one extra added for good luck.

The food was a benefit of Parsiana’s peculiar location, in the Parsi Lying-In Hospital, a heritage building in Mumbai’s Fort area that was built for Parsi mothers to deliver their babies in restful, hygienic conditions. This had extended to a crèche and the food for the children came from Maki Adenwalla, the mother of Jehangir Patel, Parsiana ’s editor. Anything extra was happily eaten by the magazine’s team.

Patel took over Parsiana in 1973, from Pesi Warden, who started it in 1964. Warden wanted to preserve community traditions, but was also a gadfly to institutions like the Parsi Punchayet. When Patel, who had studied at Yale and worked in American newspapers, took over — for just one rupee — he instilled strict journalistic rigour along with an appreciation for Parsi quirks. The latest issue reports on a Parsi Lego lover who is building a model of ancient Persepolis using the plastic bricks.


Community media is often conservative, influenced by how the most vociferous defenders of traditions tend to be reactionary. Parsiana was always firmly progressive, even in its public notices, where it published news of the interfaith marriages abhorred by traditionalists. Its opponents vilified it, yet never stopped reading it, perhaps reluctantly acknowledging its scrupulous reporting. Beyond just the Parsi community, Patel also mentored generations of Mumbai journalists, including some who worked at Parsiana . My aunt and my mother Geeta were both examples, respectively designing covers for the early issues and writing features and reviews. This meant that I spent time as a kid in the office (though sadly, never got the food!) It stayed seemingly unchanged over the decades, even as the rest of the building fell silent, a symbol of plummeting Parsi birth rates and migration abroad.

Parsiana ’s coverage kept pace, reporting on the diaspora as much a s the communities in India, while the office remained an evocation of an ideal small magazine office, with Patel’s desk labelled ‘Editor’, old covers on the wall and neat piles of more current issues.

The deep Parsi involvement in hospitality and love of food was well reflected in the magazine. I remember covers on Parsi bakeries and soft drink manufacturers, and reports on young Parsi chefs making their name in India and abroad. Keeping up my family involvement, I was roped in by Patel to review Parsi cookbooks, like Niloufer Ichaporia King’s My Bombay Kitchen . The food interest even extended outside the magazine when it opened a shop to sell Parsi products, like marvellous aged sugarcane vinegar from Kolah’s of Navsari and their lemon and date and mixed fruit pickles. (Sadly, the shop closed a few years ago). Parsiana recently announced that it would be ceasing publication from October. In a characteristically frank editorial, it said the publication “has fallen prey to the ills that plague the community, namely a dearth of new entrants to the profession”. Suggestions had been made to outsource or create content in other ways, but for that to happen credibly, those doing the job would need to have a deep knowledge of “the community, its decision makers, trends, history, religion, strengths, weaknesses”. The implicit question, perhaps, was if it could not be done properly, was it worth doing? Food offers a piquant twist to this question. Cookbooks can make Parsi recipes widely available. Hospitality brands, in India and abroad, like Sodabottleopenerwala and Dishoom, can draw on Parsi food traditions to create a commercially successful simulacrum. So, does it matter if real Parsi food gets ever harder to find? Parsiana was a place where such questions could be seriously debated, and for that alone, its ending feels like a real loss.