Maneckji Limji Hataria

Who was Maneckji Limji Hataria?

Maneckji Limji Hataria, was a Parsi-Zoroastrian scholar and civil rights activist.

Manekji was born at the village of Mora Sumali near Surat, in Gujarat, India in A.D. 1813; and as he himself tells, earned his own bread from the age of fifteen, traveling widely as a commercial agent in India. By the time of his appointment, he was already experienced, self-reliant and resourceful, and his choice by the Society proved a wholly admirable one. His memory remains green among the Zoroastrians of Iran, for whom he was to labor, with only one brief intermission from then until his death in 1890.

In 1854 Hataria was appointed emissary by the "Persian Zoroastrian Amelioration Fund", an organization founded in Bombay by Dinshaw Maneckji Petit with the aim of improving the conditions for the less fortunate co-religionists in Iran, who were being persecuted by the Qajar rulers.

In Yazd, Hataria established a Council of Zoroastrians, which succeeded in convincing a number of Iranian Zoroastrians to emigrate to India. Hataria may also have been instrumental in obtaining a remission of the jizya poll tax for his co-religionists in 1882.