The 79th of Parse is an excerpt of a talk given by Dr. Daniel Sheffield titled “Pragmatic Zoroastrian Theology: Mulla Firuz against the Anti-Vaxxers, Bombay, 1806”. The talk deals with how in the early 19th century when the smallpox vaccine first arrived in India, many Parsis were strongly against getting vaccinated because Zoroastrian priest Dastur Barjorji Khurshedji Darab Pahlanna issued a decree declaring vaccination to be impermissible for Zoroastrians, on account of what he viewed as a violation of Zoroastrian ritual purity laws concerning dead matter. Concerned with the potential failure of the Bombay government’s campaign to promote vaccination in the hinterland of Gujarat, the British governor of Bombay, Jonathan Duncan, commissioned a leading Zoroastrian scholar-priest named Mulla Firuz to compose a treatise in Persian arguing for the permissibility of the vaccine in Zoroastrian ritual law. In this talk, Sheffield presents the first English translation of Mulla Firuz’s treatise and argues how it is part of a broader study of developments in Zoroastrian thought during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. 

Daniel Sheffield is an Associate Professor of Iranian Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, at Princeton University. He is a scholar of the intellectual and social history of the Persian-speaking world and a specialist in the early modern history of the Zoroastrians of Iran and Western India.   

To watch the full talk, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjYp32sgqMQ&t=592s