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Armenians in Mumbai: A 200-year history

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  • Armenians in Mumbai: A 200-year history

    Hindustan Times, India
    July 3 2011


    Armenians in Mumbai: A 200-year history

    Aarefa Johari, Hindustan Times
    Mumbai, July 03, 2011

    Zabel Joshi (nee Hayakian), now Mumbai's last surviving Armenian, was
    raised as a Lebanese Armenian in Beirut. She met her husband, a
    Mumbai-based cloth merchant, on one of his numerous business trips to
    that city. She married at 23 and moved to Mumbai in 1972 and now
    speaks fluent Armenian, Arabic, Turkish, English, Gujarati, Hindi and
    Marathi.

    The Armenians have a large diaspora spread around the world. The
    Indian Armenians, though a small community, have been influential
    merchants and jewellery traders who have set up churches, clubs and
    educational institutions in port cities such as Kolkata, Chennai and
    Mumbai. In Mumbai, however, Joshi is now the sole trustee of the
    215-year-old St Peter's Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church in Fort,
    where her three daughters were baptised.

    `The Archbishop of Australia came to baptise me, and my pictures had
    come in the papers,' said Joshi's youngest daughter, actor Tulip
    Joshi, who is not a practicing Armenian Christian but has fond
    memories of get-togethers with Mumbai's close-knit Armenian community
    at the church.

    Today, though the church is being renovated with funds from the
    Armenian community in Kolkata, it has no priest and no Armenian prayer
    services. A few years ago, Joshi opened up the premises to the city's
    Syrian Orthodox Christians.

    `Their beliefs are similar to ours, and it is important that the
    church not go empty,' said Joshi. Besides Joshi's daughters, Mumbai
    still houses a few people of Indo-Armenian ancestry, descendents of
    Armenians who fled to India at the time of World War I. `Like the
    Jews, Armenians were also persecuted by the Turkish and were thus
    always on the run,' said Marion Arathoon, a journalist whose paternal
    grandfather was an Armenian who settled in Lahore.

    While retaining their ethnic language and culture, most Armenian
    migrants have adopted India as warmly as India has adopted them. `I
    have been to Armenia several times and travel to Beirut every year,
    but today I consider myself truly Indian,' said Joshi.

    http://www.hindustantimes.com/Armenians-in-Mumbai-A-200-year-history/Article1-716653.aspx




    From: A. Papazian
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