A Critical Study, Edition and Translation of The Qesse-ye Sanjan: The Account of the First Exile and Diaspora of the Zoroastrians of Iran

印度的琐罗亚斯德教徒，因为他们的波斯血统而被称为帕西人，只有一份文件，16世纪的Qesse-ye Sanjan‘the Ballad of Sanjan’，它用波斯诗联讲述了他们的祖先从伊朗到印度西海岸的旅程。根据这篇文章，一小群虔诚的琐罗亚斯德教徒的移民发生在伊斯兰时期的前几个世纪的某个时候，因为他们受到穆斯林多数派的压迫和强行皈依伊斯兰教。这首诗有大约430对押韵对联，从来没有得到令人满意的编辑、翻译和全面研究。在过去的一个半世纪里，许多学者，无论是学者还是业余人士，都仔细研究了这本书，希望它能揭示琐罗亚斯德教到底是什么时候到达印度的这个棘手的问题。学者们对正确的年代仍然没有达成一致，有些人的分歧长达两个世纪。考虑到全文只包含一个日期，即1599年的创作日期，这并不令人惊讶。在我的研究将导致的研究中，我接近文本，它似乎是最清楚的，即一首具有神话、助记和意识形态特征的宗教诗歌。这是一种叙事，只要它可以在原始的波斯语中享受，就在琐罗亚斯德教徒中流行起来，回忆他们是谁，他们最初来自哪里，以及他们是如何在古吉拉特邦成为他们的。随着英语的主导地位超过了波斯，后来甚至超过了古吉拉特语作为他们的第一语言，这首诗几乎已经变得默默无闻，除了它以某种方式继续提供给帕西族民间知识，并因此他们的自我理解。我编辑了现存最早的手稿的文本，并将其从波斯重新翻译成英语无韵诗抑扬格五步对联(为了尽可能保留其作为诗句叙事的形式)。此外，我还从微观和宏观两个层面对文本进行了分析，从线条和整体叙事结构两个层面对文本进行了全面的评析。文本必须位于拜火教的长期文本和神学传统，也考虑到16世纪的牧师学者作家，巴赫曼凯科巴德关注的问题。我通过讨论学者以前对文本的处理来结束这项研究，并反思文本对帕西人本身的意义，以及对学者在琐罗亚斯德教特别是对宗教的研究中的意义。

The Zoroastrians of India, known as the Parsis because of their Persian origins, have one single document, the 16th century Qesse-ye Sanjan 'The Ballad of Sanjan', which tells the story, in Persian verse couplets, of their ancestors' journey from Iran to the west coast of India. According to this text this emigration of a small band of faithful Zoroastrians took place some time in the first centuries of the Islamic period and was undertaken because they were being oppressed and forcibly converted to Islam by the Muslim majority. The poem, of some 430 rhymed couplets, has never been satisfactoriy edited, translated and discussed in a full study. In the past century and a half many scholars, academic and amateur, have scrutinised it for light it might shed on the vexed question of when exactly the Zoroastrians arrived in India. Scholars still do not agree on the correct dating, some differing by as much as two centuries. This is hardly surprising considering that the text in its entirety contains only one date, namely that of its composition in 1599.In the study which will result from my research I approach the text for what it seems most clearly to be, i.e. a religious poem of a mythological, mnemonic and ideological character. It is a narrative which, so long as it could be enjoyed in the original Persian, was popular amongst Zoroastrians in recalling who they were, where they had come from originally, and how they had come to be who they were in Gujarat. With the ascendancy of English eclipsing Persian and latterly even Gujarati as their first language, the poem has all but passed into obscurity, except that it somehow continues to inform Parsi folk-lore and consequently their self-understanding. I have edited the text from the earliest extant manuscript and translated it afresh from the Persian into English blank verse iambic pentameter couplets (in order to preserve as far as possible, its form as a verse narrative). In addition I analyse the text, both at the micro and macro-levels of line and overall narrative structure and provide a full commentary on the text. The text must be situated within the long textual and theological tradition of Zoroastrianism, and also considered in the light of the 16th century concerns of the priest scholar author, Bahman Kaykobad. I conclude the study by discussing previous treatments of the text by scholars and reflecting on the significance of the text for Parsis themselves and for scholars in the study of Zoroastrianism in particular and the study of religion in general.