The Silent Exodus of Pakistan’sOriginal Cosmopolitans-The Parsis

For those who left and those who stayed: remembering the hands that shaped a city, and
the silence that replaced them.

The Faded walls:

There is a road in Karachi still called Parsi Colony. The buildings wear their age like a quiet badge — wrought-iron balconies, high ceilings, facades that remember a different city. But the people who gave that road its name are almost gone. What was once a community of a few thousand — vibrant, indispensable, woven into the fabric of Karachi itself — has dwindled to perhaps twelve hundred souls. And Pakistan barely noticed.This is not a story of persecution. The Parsis of Pakistan were not burned, not lynched, not driven out by mobs. Their tragedy is quieter, and in some ways more damning: they were
simply forgotten.

The Woman Who Haunts the Founding

Before we speak of institutions, we must speak of a person. Ruttie Jinnah — born Rattanbai Petit — was a Parsi girl of eighteen when she married Mohammad Ali Jinnah in 1918. Her father, Sir Dinshaw Petit, disowned her for it. The Parsi community excommunicated her. She gave up everything — her name, her family, her faith as the world knew it — for a man who would one day be called the Quaid-e-Azam. The marriage unraveled. Jinnah’s law practice and political ambitions consumed him; Ruttie, mercurial and lonely, drifted into illness. They separated in 1928. On February 20, 1929, she died in a Bombay hotel room on her twenty-ninth birthday, leaving behind a letter that still stings: “Try and remember me, beloved, as the flower you plucked and not the flower you tread upon.”
She never lived to see Pakistan. She never saw the country her husband would live in. But here is what matters: the nation that claims Jinnah as its father cannot accommodate the memory of his Parsi wife. She is erased from textbooks, from monuments, from the national story. A woman who was x communicated by her own people for loving a Muslim man is now excommunicated by the Muslim nation her husband built.And the irony deepens. Years later, Jinnah’s daughter Dina fell in love with a Parsi industrialist, Neville Wadia. Jinnah objected. Dina reportedly replied: “There were millions of Muslim girls in India, why did you marry my mother then?” The founder of Pakistan, who had defied his own community to marry a Parsi woman, could not accept his daughter doing
the same. The pattern repeats across generations: the Parsi beloved is embraced in private,erased in public.Ruttie Jinnah did not build Pakistan. But the fact that Pakistan cannot make room for her memory — or for the inter-faith love that produced its founder’s only child — reveals something about the nation it became. The same indifference that airbrushed a Parsi woman from the founder’s story would later airbrush the entire community from the city’s institutions.

The Hands That Built Karachi:

Most Pakistanis know the Parsis were a “successful minority.” Few know how deeply they shaped the city they live in.In 1918, a young Parsi councillor named Jamshed Nusserwanjee Mehta was elected to the Karachi Municipal Corporation. Within years, he became its president, then the city’s first elected mayor. Over nineteen years, he transformed Karachi from a dusty port into what was called the cleanest city in the East — streets washed twice daily, planned ighborhoods,
public parks, sanitation systems, cooperative housing, libraries, clinics. He was called the”Maker of Modern Karachi.”Long before the state existed, Parsi ilanthropists were building what the state would later fail to maintain. The Bai Virbaijee Soparivala Parsi High School — BVS — opened in 1859,before Karachi was even a city worth naming on maps. It began as a small vernacular school in a private home; by 1906, it occupied a grand building on Victoria Road. In 1947, atJinnah’s personal request, it opened its doors to non-Parsi children for the first time. Today,Muslim students outnumber all others there — a quiet reversal that speaks volumes.The Mama Parsi Girls Secondary School. Lady Dufferin Hospital. Spencer Eye Hospital. Dinshaw Dispensary. Goolbai maternity homes. The Jehangir Kothari Parade. The Karachi Chamber of Commerce. Public wells, gardens, roads, fountains, educational trusts — built not for Parsis alone, but for everyone. This was philanthropy without walls, community without borders.Bapsi Sidhwa — born in Karachi in 1938, a Parsi girl who would become one of Pakistan’s first English-language novelists to achieve international recognition. Ice-Candy-Man —published in America as Cracking India — gave the world a Pakistani lens on Partition’s trauma. She won the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan’s highest honor in the arts. She died in December 2024, far from the city of her birth, in Houston.Moreover, the contributions and achievements of the Parsi community in Pakistan’s armed forces are undeniable. Despite their small population, Parsi servicemen and leaders have left an enduring legacy in the nation’s defense history. They served with courage and distinction across various branches of the armed forces, particularly in the Navy and the Air Force,playing a vital role in solidifying the country’s defense capabilities. A prominent example is Lieutenant Colonel J. F. Golwalla, who was awarded the Sitara-e-Jurat in recognition of his exceptional leadership, bravery, and distinguished service

The Competence Vacuum:

Here is where the story turns from melancholy to indictment.The Parsis did not just build buildings. They built an ethic — of neutral, technocratic governance, of institutional loyalty above tribal loyalty, of merit above identity. When they managed banks, airlines, municipal corporations, they saw themselves as stewards, not proprietors. They were, in the truest sense, cosmopolitans: loyal to the city, not to the clan.When they left — gradually, quietly, without headlines — they took that ethic with them.And no other group replaced it.What followed is visible in every institution they once ran. The banks that Parsi managers kept prudent became playgrounds for political appointees. The airlines they kept efficient became bloated, loss-making monuments to patronage. The municipal systems they keptlean became the chaos Karachi knows today. This was not demographic change dressed up as progress. It was institutional decay disguised as normalcy.The Parsis became the canary in the coal mine. Their leaving was a symptom that the country had chosen tribe over talent. And everyone suffered — not because talent disappeared, but because the system stopped rewarding it.

Indifference, Not Persecution:

If you interview a Parsi in Karachi today, you will not hear stories of mobs or forced conversions. You will hear something more chilling: “They forgot us.”
The state did not hate the Parsis. It simply stopped seeing them. Their schools were absorbed into the national system without acknowledgement. Their hospitals were renamed, their contributions untaught, their streets renamed after politicians who had built nothing. The community that had given the city its first mayor, its first technical high school, its first globally recognized novelist — became a footnote.Most Parsis who remain are wealthy enough to insulate emselves. Their silence is not cowardice; it is privilege. They do not need to protest because they can afford to leave. Those who cannot afford it stay, shrinking, aging, watching the vultures disappear from the Tower of Silence — a practical crisis that mirrors an existential one. Without vultures, the dead cannot be disposed of according to Zoroastrian rite. A community that cannot bury its dead properly is a community nearing its end.

The Uncomfortable Question:

There is a road in Karachi still called Parsi Colony. But how many who walk past it know who the Parsis were? How many schoolchildren learn that the man who made their city livable was a Parsi mayor? How many know that the founder of their nation loved a Parsi woman enough to defy his community — and that the nation he founded could not make room for her memory?Ruttie Jinnah did not build Pakistan. But Pakistan’s inability to remember her — to honor the love that crossed its most rigid boundary — is a measure of what it has become. The same nation that needed Parsi hands to build its banks, its schools, its hospitals, its very streets,could not find space for a Parsi woman in its founding myth.And now, as the last vultures leave the Tower of Silence, as the last Parsi families close their doors and book their flights, a question hangs in the air:If a nation’s founding required a Parsi woman’s sacrifice, what does her erasure from that
nation’s memory say about its soul?