Parsi Times
Parsi Times is a Mumbai-based English-language community news portal and weekly newspaper covering the Parsi and Irani Zoroastrian community in India and abroad. It describes itself as a holistic weekly for the Parsi Irani Zoroastrian community, and it publishes on Saturdays. The weekly was launched in 2011, with free copies of its first issue reaching many homes on a Saturday in late May of that year, at a time when its founding editor argued that the established community press spoke mainly to older readers and that young Parsis needed a fresh set of views. Its website, parsi-times.com, was registered in April 2011, in keeping with that launch, and the title has continued to appear as a Saturday weekly, with a September 2026 issue among those circulated internationally to Zoroastrian association members.
Launch in 2011
The launch of Parsi Times was reported by Zoroastrians.net, a community website, under the heading of a new newspaper for the community. The report noted that the Parsi-Zoroastrians had a vibrant community press and had now received their latest newspaper, and that on a Saturday free copies of the first issue of the weekly Parsi Times reached many homes. It quoted Freyan Bhathena, the editor of Parsi Times at its launch, explaining the gap the paper intended to fill. In her account, the community was getting stuck with issues more relevant to the older generation, young people were tired of that conversation, and in the community press there was a void for young people; a fresh set of views was needed. That founding rationale, youth and renewal within a very old community press tradition, is the clearest documented statement of the paper's purpose. The domain record for parsi-times.com, showing the site created on 19 April 2011, places the weekly's online presence in the same weeks as its print launch.
A Saturday Weekly
Parsi Times is a weekly, and its day of publication is Saturday. Surviving early issues confirm the pattern: uploads of the paper's editions include issues dated Saturday, 17 March 2012 and Saturday, 30 June 2012. The Saturday rhythm continued over the long term. In September 2026, the Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe circulated to its members the Parsi Times issue of Saturday, 26 September 2026, alongside the Sunday issue of the community's older Gujarati-English weekly, inviting members to forward both publications to family and friends who did not receive them. That circulation illustrates two features of the paper's life: its readership is international as well as Mumbai-based, because the Parsi diaspora is widely dispersed, and its Saturday edition functions as a weekly appointment around which community organisations distribute news to their members. Business listings for the paper place its office in Fort, Mumbai, opposite the General Post Office, with weekday office hours; Fort is the historic commercial district in which much of Mumbai's Parsi institutional and publishing life has been concentrated.
The Community It Serves
To understand Parsi Times, it is necessary to understand the community it addresses. The Parsis are Zoroastrians who settled in India after migrating from Persia, and Mumbai, historically Bombay, became their principal centre, home to their fire temples, charities, housing colonies and newspapers. It is a small community, and its numbers in India have been declining for decades under the combined effect of low fertility, late marriage and emigration, a trend discussed across the community press. That smallness has two consequences for a publication like Parsi Times. First, a community weekly can plausibly cover a significant share of its readers' collective life: religious observances, institutional decisions, achievements, disputes, births of ideas and arguments about the community's future. Second, sustainability is a persistent concern for all Parsi publications, since the potential subscriber base shrinks even as the diaspora spreads. Parsi Times entered this environment in 2011 as a deliberately youthful entrant among much older titles.
Within a Very Old Community Press
The Parsi community press is one of the oldest in Asia. Mumbai Samachar, founded by a Parsi scholar, is Asia's oldest continuously published newspaper, and Jam-e-Jamshed, founded mainly for the Parsi community as a weekly on 12 March 1832 and later converted into a daily before returning to weekly publication, has been described as Asia's second oldest newspaper. The semi-monthly magazine Parsiana, founded in Bombay in November 1964 by Pestonji Warden and edited for decades by Jehangir Patel after 1973, chronicled the community in English until it announced that it would cease publication in October 2025 because of dwindling subscribers, lack of funds and the absence of a successor. Against that background, the launch of a new weekly in 2011 was a notable act of confidence. Parsi Times did not inherit a nineteenth-century title; it attempted to create a new one, in English, aimed at readers whom its founding editor believed the older conversation was failing to reach. The later closure of a much older English-language community magazine underlines both the difficulty of that undertaking and the reason a youth-oriented paper was thought necessary.
Content and Character
Parsi Times presents itself as a holistic weekly, a description that indicates breadth across community life rather than a single subject. Its content, as represented in circulated issues, combines community news with religious and cultural material, features and reader correspondence, including letters to the editor and contests in its early editions. An issue circulated in September 2026, for example, carried on page eight a report on a prominent Parsi peer championing stronger India-United Kingdom ties through a landmark education dialogue in New Delhi, an item that shows the paper covering community members' roles in national and international public life as well as internal community affairs. The weekly has also drawn on contributors from within the community across fields: the sports journalist and broadcaster Binaisha M. Surti, who comes from a cricketing family as the grand-niece of former India Test cricketer Rusi Surti, listed Parsi Times among the leading media outlets she had shared her expertise with, alongside national newspapers and television channels. Such contributions reflect the community's own professional range being turned back towards its own publication.
Print, PDF and Diaspora Distribution
Parsi Times has lived simultaneously as a printed weekly delivered to homes, as evidenced by the free copies of its first issue reaching readers, and as a digital file circulated far beyond Mumbai. Early editions were uploaded to document-sharing platforms under the paper's own account, and a 2013 article in the journal of the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America, discussing an initiative to connect Zoroastrians worldwide, noted that community publications freely available online could be placed on a common platform and that the FEZANA Bulletin and Parsi Times were already uploaded there. By 2026, a European Zoroastrian trust was emailing the Saturday issue to its members and asking them to pass it on. This layered distribution, print at home in Mumbai and electronic circulation through diaspora associations abroad, is how a small community weekly retains a global readership. It also matches the directory description of Parsi Times as both a community news portal and a weekly, based in Mumbai and read in India and abroad.
Language and Audience
This directory records Parsi Times as publishing in English. That choice is itself part of its founding proposition. The older community press in Mumbai was historically strong in Gujarati, the language many Indian Parsis spoke at home, with titles such as Jam-e-Jamshed long published mainly in Gujarati with a smaller English section before reversing that balance in more recent times. An English-first weekly launched in 2011 addressed younger Parsis in India, for whom English is the primary language of education and work, and the diaspora in Britain, North America and elsewhere, for whom Gujarati may not be a reading language at all. Community commentary in recent years has noted that not all Parsis are conversant with Gujarati, having grown up in environments where English, Hindi or Urdu predominate. Parsi Times' English format is therefore a practical response to a linguistic shift within its own readership.
Why a Youth-Oriented Paper Mattered
The founding editor's diagnosis, that community discussion was dominated by issues relevant to the older generation, points to a recurring theme in Parsi public life: an ageing, numerically declining community debates questions of religious orthodoxy, interfaith marriage, institutional governance and demographic survival, often in terms set by earlier generations. A weekly created to give younger readers a fresh set of views occupies a different place in that conversation, even when it covers the same institutions. Its survival as a Saturday title for more than a decade after 2011, in a field where an older and celebrated community magazine eventually closed for want of subscribers, funds and a successor, is the principal evidence that the gap it identified was real. Longevity in community publishing is rarely accidental; it requires readers, advertisers and contributors from within a very small population to keep choosing the publication.
Place in Mumbai's Media Landscape
In the wider Mumbai media landscape, Parsi Times is a specialist community title rather than a general city newspaper, and it should be assessed on those terms. Mumbai has large English and Marathi dailies, Gujarati newspapers with deep Parsi readership, and national media headquarters; none of those covers the internal life of the Parsi Irani Zoroastrian community with the concentration that a community weekly can. Parsi Times sits in a lineage with Mumbai Samachar, Jam-e-Jamshed and Parsiana, but it is the youngest of the group and the only one founded in the digital era, with a website registered before its first issue and PDF circulation built into its life from the start. Its Fort office location places it, geographically as well as institutionally, in the historic centre of that tradition.
Assessment
The documented contours of Parsi Times are a Mumbai-based, English-language, Saturday weekly and online portal for the Parsi Irani Zoroastrian community, launched in the spring of 2011 under founding editor Freyan Bhathena with an explicit aim of addressing younger readers underserved by the older community press. It reached homes in print from its first issue, established a website in April 2011, was being uploaded for diaspora readers through Zoroastrian association platforms by 2013, and was still being circulated internationally as a Saturday issue in September 2026. In a community whose press stretches back to the early nineteenth century and whose best-known English magazine closed in 2025, Parsi Times represents the attempt to renew that tradition for a dispersed, English-reading generation.
