No House, No Spouse: The Bombay Parsi Punchayet
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Published:October 2023
Chapter 3 examines how contemporary Parsi family and marriage practices intersect with trust bureaucracy and organizational practice. With current demographics deemed to be in “crisis,” this chapter explores what this designation entails and calls forth. The BPP's obligations to distribute its assets to its beneficiaries can only be maintained in perpetuity if beneficiaries exist; therefore, reproducing its beneficiaries through methods like enclave housing, marriage bureaus, and IVF becomes the object itself. Maintaining the trust structure has become the purpose. While housing, for decades, has been offered to encourage endogamous marriage, a new and controversial fertility scheme entangles the knot of ethnic and religious subjecthood in particularly gendered ways.
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