When the tree-lined enclave of Dadar was threatened by the arrival of street hawkers, Mumbai’s proud Parsi community staged its first protest in living memory. Now the plan has been withdrawn, to the relief of many in the city.

The Parsi colony in Mumbai’s Dadar neighbourhood is unique. It is the world’s largest concentration of Parsis, now down to its last 80,000 despite the community’s wealth and education.

Locally, this central urban enclave is everything that this great Indian city is not: low-rise, languorous, its 25 acres embracing 14 gardens, its roads lined with pavements and 30 species of tree including the rare mahogany and ebony. Bird-call triumphs over traffic-honk. Most exceptionally, it is untouched by Mumbai’s signature slums.

The fire temple in Dadar’s Parsi colony.
The fire temple in Dadar’s Parsi colony. © Alamy

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But this year, the placid colony has been in a roil. On a blistering Sunday in April, for the first time in memory, the Parsis marched in protest. Too sophisticated to shout slogans, they walked to the statue of the colony’s founder, Mancherji Joshi. Leading them was his granddaughter, Zarine Engineer, veteran of many a battle to preserve the colony’s pristine heritage.

The object of their cool fury wasn’t the carts dispensing aloe vera juice to the walkers, yoga practitioners, the laughter-club members who descend on the colony’s huge greens, nor the dubious “beautification” by local councillors driven more by kickbacks than aesthetics. The real and present danger was the Street Vendors’ Act 2014, bringing in Mumbai’s No 1 enemy: hawkers.

As this island city’s real estate turned into a goldmine, by the 1980s several of the colony’s buildings began to be “redeveloped” with the addition of new floors. When these were sold to outsiders who were ready, willing and able to pay bigger bucks, the old Parsee Central Association fought and finally won a six-year legal battle to retain DPC’s monoculture in 2006. Such communal exclusion may be anachronistic, but it was a psychological boost for a once-lionised community now in its winter of discontent.

The next threat has retreated with the shelving of the hawker licences. But for how long can this urban idyll remain? Its ethnic and architectural signature, profligate open spaces and suspension in time are all unreal in a multicultural, overcrowded 21st-century city.

While a major celebration of Parsi culture in New Delhi has just been announced for next March, Mumbai’s desperate population is eyeing the Dadar colony greedily. The Parsis’ numbers are tumbling (the birth-death ratio has plummeted to 1:7). Their last bastion in Dadar is in double jeopardy: from external seizure and the siege within.

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