The Elaborate Parsi Sky Burials and Towers of Silence

The Parsi Zoroastrian tradition of sky burial involves laying the bodies of the dead on circular stone towers called Dakhmas or Towers of Silence, where they are exposed to the sun and to scavenging birds. Rooted in a Zoroastrian theology that regards earth, fire and water as sacred elements that must not be polluted by the dead, the practice is one of the most theologically coherent and ecologically integrated burial traditions in human history. The collapse of the vulture population across India in the late twentieth century has placed this tradition under severe pressure, forcing the Parsi community into a painful internal debate about identity, adaptation and the future of a practice that has defined their relationship with death for over a millennium.

The Secret Forest of Malabar Hill

On Malabar Hill in Mumbai, behind a screen of dense trees that the Parsi community planted specifically to shield the site from outside view, stand three circular stone structures that most Mumbai residents have never seen from the inside and never will. The Towers of Silence, as they have been called since the nineteenth century, are among the oldest continuously used sacred structures in the city. They are also among the most misunderstood, carrying associations of gothic darkness that have nothing to do with what they actually are or what the tradition they serve actually means.

To understand the Towers of Silence, you need to begin not with death but with purity. Because in Zoroastrian theology, the sky burial tradition is not primarily about death at all. It is about the sacred status of the natural world and the obligation of the living to protect it even in the moment of their dying.

The Zoroastrian Theology Behind the Practice

Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest monotheistic religions in the world, founded by the prophet Zarathustra in ancient Iran at a date that scholars continue to debate but that most place somewhere between 1500 and 600 BCE. The religion teaches that the world is the creation of Ahura Mazda, the supreme being of wisdom and light, and that creation is fundamentally good. The sacred elements of creation, fire, water, earth and air, are understood as manifestations of divine goodness that must be protected from pollution.

Death, in Zoroastrian understanding, is the one moment when the human body becomes a source of potential pollution. The corpse is understood as nasu, ritually impure, and the primary obligation of the community in handling the dead is to prevent this impurity from contaminating the sacred elements. You cannot bury a body in earth without polluting the earth. You cannot consign it to water without polluting water. You cannot burn it without polluting fire, which is the most sacred element of all in Zoroastrian practice.

The solution, developed over millennia of theological and practical reflection, is to give the body to the sky. To lay it on a stone surface open to the sun and to scavenging birds, allowing it to be consumed and returned to the cycle of life without contaminating any of the elements that Zoroastrian theology holds sacred. The sun, understood as the eye of Ahura Mazda, purifies what remains. The birds complete the work of return. The stone tower, which cannot be polluted by the dead in the way that earth or water can, provides the surface on which this happens.

The Architecture of the Dakhma

The dakhma, the Tower of Silence, is a precisely engineered structure whose design encodes the theological logic of the tradition it serves. The Mumbai towers, managed by the Bombay Parsi Punchayet, are circular stone structures approximately thirty meters in diameter and several meters high, with walls tall enough to prevent visibility from outside. The interior surface of the tower is divided into three concentric rings.

The outermost ring is for the bodies of men. The middle ring is for women. The innermost ring, closest to the central well, is for children. This arrangement is not hierarchical in the way it might appear to an outsider. It reflects a specific understanding of the relationships between different members of the community in death, with children closest to the central point of return.

At the center of the tower is a deep circular well called the bhandar. Once the sun and the birds have done their work and the bones are dry, they are gathered and deposited in the bhandar, where they slowly disintegrate and are washed by rainwater through charcoal and sand filters into the earth. The filtering system is itself a theological device, ensuring that even this final contact between the remains and the natural world is mediated through a purifying process.

The nassesalars, the men whose hereditary responsibility it is to carry the bodies into the dakhma and arrange them on the stone surface, are among the most ritually specialized members of the Parsi community. Their work is considered simultaneously essential and isolating. Because of their constant contact with nasu, they are required to maintain specific ritual protocols in their daily lives that limit their contact with other community members in certain contexts. This hereditary specialization is one of the most ancient institutional features of the tradition.

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The Ritual Preparation of the Body

Before a body reaches the Tower of Silence, it passes through a sequence of ritual preparation that begins in the home of the deceased. The body is washed and dressed in a white sudreh, the sacred inner garment that every Zoroastrian wears from the time of their initiation, and a kusti, the sacred thread woven from wool that is tied around the waist. These garments are worn in death as they were worn in life, the continuity of the sacred dress marking the continuity of the person’s relationship with their faith across the boundary of death.

A dog is brought to view the body, a ritual called sagdid, meaning the gaze of the dog. The dog’s gaze is understood in Zoroastrian tradition to drive away the demon of decay and to confirm that life has departed from the body. This practice, ancient in its origins and documented in the Avesta, the Zoroastrian sacred scripture, is one of the most distinctive features of the tradition and one that has attracted considerable anthropological attention.

Prayers are recited by priests throughout the preparation period. The body is then carried to the dakhma on a metal bier by the nassesalars, who work in pairs and are accompanied by mourners who follow at a prescribed distance, holding a white cloth between them in pairs to maintain a ritual connection to the procession without coming into direct contact with the nasu.

The Vulture Crisis and Its Consequences

The practice that has sustained the Parsi sky burial tradition for over a millennium depends on a specific ecological relationship: the presence of vultures in sufficient numbers to consume the bodies laid on the dakhma within hours of their placement. In the Mumbai of the early twentieth century, the towers on Malabar Hill were surrounded by the white-backed vultures that were once common across the Indian subcontinent, and the process the tradition required proceeded efficiently.

In the 1990s, the vulture population of the Indian subcontinent collapsed with terrifying speed. The cause was eventually identified as diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug used in veterinary medicine that proved fatally toxic to vultures who consumed the carcasses of treated animals. Within a decade, a population that had numbered in the tens of millions was reduced by more than ninety-five percent. The ecological collapse was one of the fastest and most comprehensive in recorded history.

For the Parsi community, the consequences were immediate and deeply distressing. Without vultures, the bodies placed on the dakhma were not being consumed. The process that was central to the tradition’s theological integrity was failing. The Bombay Parsi Punchayet began exploring alternative methods, including solar concentrators that could accelerate the decomposition process through focused sunlight, to replace the function the vultures had performed.

The debate within the Parsi community about how to respond to the vulture crisis is documented through research supported by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, which has studied the community’s response to this ecological disruption as part of broader research on minority religious communities navigating environmental change.

A Community in Internal Debate

The response to the vulture crisis has not been uniform within the Parsi community. A significant portion of the community, particularly those with more orthodox religious views, insists that the dakhma tradition must be maintained in its original form and that any significant alteration represents an unacceptable departure from a practice of fundamental religious and theological importance. They have resisted the adoption of alternative burial methods, including the option of burial in Zoroastrian cemeteries that some community members have advocated.

Others within the community argue that the theological principle underlying the sky burial, the protection of sacred elements from pollution, is more important than the specific architectural form of the dakhma, and that if the dakhma cannot function as intended, alternative methods that honor the same principle are theologically legitimate.

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This internal debate has unfolded against the backdrop of the Parsi community’s broader demographic crisis. The Parsi population in India has been declining for decades due to low birth rates and emigration, and the community that once numbered over one hundred thousand in India now numbers somewhere between fifty and sixty thousand. The question of how to maintain the integrity of a tradition in a community under demographic and ecological pressure simultaneously is one of the most painful that any religious minority can face.

The Parsi community’s engagement with these questions has been supported by institutions including the Parzor Foundation, a UNESCO partnered project dedicated to preserving and promoting Zoroastrian culture and heritage in India, which has been involved in documenting the dakhma tradition and supporting the community’s efforts to navigate its current challenges.

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Curious Indian: Fast Facts

• The word dakhma refers to the Tower of Silence in Avestan, the ancient language of Zoroastrian scripture.
• The interior of a dakhma is divided into three concentric rings for men, women and children respectively.
• The ritual of sagdid, in which a dog is brought to gaze at the body of the deceased, is one of the most distinctive features of Zoroastrian funeral practice.
• The nassesalars, hereditary specialists who carry bodies into the dakhma, maintain specific ritual protocols in their daily lives because of their constant contact with nasu.
• The vulture population of the Indian subcontinent declined by over ninety-five percent in the 1990s due to diclofenac poisoning, devastating the ecological foundation of the sky burial tradition.
• The Bombay Parsi Punchayet manages the Mumbai Towers of Silence on Malabar Hill and has been at the center of the community’s debate about how to respond to the vulture crisis.
• The Parsi population in India has declined to somewhere between fifty and sixty thousand, making them one of the smallest religious minorities in the country.
• Every Parsi body is dressed in the sudreh and kusti, the sacred garments worn throughout life, before being carried to the dakhma.

Conclusion

The Towers of Silence ask something of those who try to understand them from outside the tradition. They ask for the suspension of the assumptions about death and disposal that most people carry without examining. Within those assumptions, exposure of the dead to birds seems disturbing. Within the Zoroastrian framework that produced the dakhma, it is the most reverential and the most ecologically coherent response to death that a community has devised.

The vulture crisis has placed that framework under a pressure it was not designed to withstand. The birds that were the essential biological component of the tradition are gone, and no amount of theological ingenuity can fully replace what their absence means for the practice as it was intended to function. The solar concentrators are a sincere attempt to honor the tradition’s principles in changed circumstances. Whether they succeed in preserving what matters most about the tradition is a question the community is still working through.

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What is not in question is the seriousness of the tradition itself. A community that has maintained a specific relationship with death across fifteen centuries, across the displacement from Iran to India, across colonialism and modernization and now ecological collapse, is not maintaining it out of habit. It is maintaining it because the theology behind it remains coherent and the identity it expresses remains real. The Towers of Silence are still standing on Malabar Hill. The community they serve is still here. The conversation about what comes next is one of the most honest conversations a religious community can have.

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