Navjote - Adrian's report

We started with even more difficulty than yesterday before K with his elder son Z (whose Navjote was to take place that evening) came to take us to the hall where there was to be another communal lunch.

I was able to spend time watching the kites - coming to the idea that they occupied the ecological niche that seagulls do in England - when a couple of vultures appeared and took up residence in the trees surrounding the property. Dhun told me they were white backed vultures (they had large white patches on the under wings) and that vultures were under threat. The use of Diclofenac in the cattle herds was the culprit (the eggs did not hatch?). This in turn affected the Parsis who leave their dead on towers for the vultures to reduce to bones. Green parrots and a type of starling (?) with a yellow beak and white/yellow flashes on the edge of its wings appeared, and in the evening there were cormorants and a heron in flight.


We returned early in the evening so that we could see the public part of the ceremony (the private part involved something to do with the purified/concentrated urine of a cow of spotless white coat, and a ceremonial cleansing bath).


The public ceremony took place on a stage backed with a semi-circular structure draped with cloth representing the sun's rays, decorated with flowers and a large Z.




An urn was burning a fire lit from the perpetual fire maintained in the holy temple since Parsis came to India. Four white garbed and hatted priests, looking more like surgeons ready to perform an operation, led him onto the stage to kneel on a white cloth. Prayers, etc, were said, petals scattered and finally a long white thread was unravelled and tied around Z's waist. This took about twenty minutes and public interest diminished as the ceremony was inaudible, and probably in Sanskrit so would have been unintelligible to most anyway.

An orgy of photo-opportunities then ensued before the band (with leader/drummer and guitarist from the family) started to perform, at much the same time as dinner service started. More Parsi food served on banana leaf plates, with a fish wrapped in a chutney paste and steamed as a new (to us) offering.

The band were still going, but were offering music to dance to, so we joined the group to shake our limbs about, during which a makeshift turban was wrapped around my head (see embarrassing photos)


We were told, during the evening, how the Parsis who fled persia (though there are still some there) came to part of India where the king said his country was too full to take any more people and illustrated his point by showing a full bowl of milk. The Parsi leader sprinkled sugar into the milk without it spilling to prove that they could sweeten life, and would not overcrowd the country, in the same way as the sweetened milk was still within the bowl. They were then permitted to stay, as long as they married only within their community and adopted local customs (such as the wearing of saris by the women).