Parsis (Indian Zoroastrians), like many religious groups, manage their ritual spaces and funds with charitable trusts. High numbers of intermarriage have caused much debate over who counts as a Parsi within the community, and more attention is being paid to women and their rights of access. After a local trust in Valsad, Gujarat, barred intermarried women from entering Zoroastrian sacred spaces, Goolrukh Gupta, an intermarried Parsi woman, sued her trust in the high court. It ruled that Gupta was no longer a Parsi but a Hindu, like her husband, even though she had married under the Special Marriage Act of 1954, which enables civil marriage. Offering fresh insight into debates on the politics of recognition and the potentialities and pitfalls for women who appeal to the law to secure their communal rights, I argue that the mechanism of the trust allows the analysis of the two distinct but not separable notions of property and propriety. I analyze how the communal trust in India propertizes married women's legal and religious personhood. This article reveals how Indian women's composition as communal subjects as well as some aspirations of Indian secularism come undone.

Parsis (Indian Zoroastrians), a small traditionally endogamous group, are well known in India for their philanthropic giving. The Parsis of Mumbai are beneficiaries of hundreds of Parsi public charitable trusts today, and this article will show how trusts, as particular forms of giving, establish perpetual communal obligation connecting the past and present. It will show how the circulation of personal assets through customary inheritance within a family is replaced by the trust with the circulation of communal obligations in perpetuity. While this mechanism of giving has a marked endurance, what has changed is what constitutes ‘the good’ within these deeds. Moving away from traditional philanthropic practices of subsidizing education, medical care, and welfare to the poor, the focus of giving has shifted to the pursuit of communal reproduction, both biological and social.

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