The world’s largest living Parsi enclave is also Mumbai’s greenest oasis. Welcome to the Dadar Parsi Colony — a 100-year-old vision of urban utopia.
In the late 1800s, the bubonic plague tore through Mumbai. It thrived in cramped chawls and crowded lanes where stagnant water, no sewage, and little sunlight turned neighbourhoods into disease traps.
The city needed wide roads, leafy streets, and open homes became matters of survival, not luxury. This was when visionary civil engineer Mancherji Edulji Joshi fought and won the right to reserve over a hundred plots for middle-class Parsis.
Joshi’s rules were simple but transformative: No building taller than two storeys. One type of tree per street — Ashoka on Jame Jamshed Road, mahogany on Firdausi Road. The seasons here still arrive in harmony, turning entire streets golden or blooming overnight in one unified colour.
Today, 10,000 Parsis call this 100-acre haven home. It’s the largest such community in the world, but a place where every face is familiar.
Buildings with saucer-shaped balconies — some art deco, some neoclassical — wear quirky signs like No Parking or No Courier. Children run through 14 gardens, and a neighbour’s home is just another extension of your own.
Even Freddie Mercury, the rock icon and lead singer of Queen, once strolled these streets as a schoolboy.
It’s not just heritage — it’s discipline. Residents call the BMC if a single leaf is out of place, and the streets remain spotless. Here, the city noise fades, time slows, and trees filter the sunlight into soft gold, and the air feels cooler.
Cafés like 792 still serve sali chicken, dhansak, and chocolate éclairs — all homemade by local hands. You might come for the food, but you stay for the conversations and the warmth of being known.
If Mancherji could build Mumbai’s first and only master-planned colony back in the 1920s, what’s stopping us now? Dadar Parsi Colony still follows the timeless rules of sustainable living — no overflowing water tanks, and you’d better not cut a tree.