The Herbad as Ervad, Still Ordained Today

Among the Parsi Zoroastrian community of India, chiefly concentrated in and around Mumbai, and among Zoroastrians elsewhere in the diaspora, the herbad survives today under the Gujarati-influenced form ervad, the title by which a priest who has completed navar ordination but not the further martab ordination is generally addressed. An ervad performs the outer ceremonies open to the wider community and can be found engaged in the range of everyday priestly work, funerary rites, the Navjote initiation ceremony, and periodic liturgical service, that constitutes the great majority of Zoroastrian priestly activity, since the higher inner-sanctum ceremonies a full mobed performs are comparatively rare in most communities' regular religious calendar.

Like much of the Zoroastrian priesthood, the rank has faced real pressure from the community's shrinking numbers and from many priestly-family sons choosing secular careers instead, a demographic concern openly discussed within Parsi religious institutions and by scholars of contemporary Zoroastrianism, though the graded herbad-to-mobed ordination structure itself has continued largely unchanged, distinguishing the tradition from religions that have restructured or simplified their clergy in response to similar pressures. The herbad rank is recorded here as a living tradition rather than a purely historical one for exactly this reason: ervads continue to be ordained and to serve active congregations today, not merely to be studied as a closed historical institution.