Perhaps it was that sense of ethical and ethnic distinction that first drew the Parsees closer than any other Indian community to the British colonial rulers. Despite their tiny numbers — 100,000 in a subcontinent of 600 million — the Parsees dominated the upper echelons of the Raj, excelling at everything from science, medicine and banking to education and the arts. The examples best known in the West, like the conductor Zubin Mehta and the Tata industrial empire, represent a community that still gives India some of its finest and least corrupt professionals.

There are obvious parallels with the success of the Jews in old Mitteleuropa. But the Parsees have managed to avoid the kind of backlash that fuelled Western anti-Semitism. The credit must go partly to Indian traditions of tolerance and pluralism and partly to a peculiarly Parsee sense of bonhomie, which made even their racial exclusivity seem more idiosyncratic than offensive. It was typical of the pragmatism of Bombay's Parsee merchant princes that they made their fortunes selling opium to the Chinese, but spent much of those profits endowing the philanthropic and educational trusts for which they are so renowned, and from which many non-Parsee Indians still benefit.