This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Bombay became the centre of Parsi life only after the East India Company itself relocated there, moving its headquarters from Surat to Bombay in 1687. Parsis followed the Company's commercial activity into the growing port city and began rising within its colonial trading economy almost from the start.
Rustom Maneck was appointed the Company's first official broker in Bombay in 1702, giving a Parsi a formal position at the heart of the city's commercial administration. His son, Naoroz Maneck, built on that foothold through the 1720s, establishing Bombay as the primary centre of Parsi habitation and work rather than merely one Parsi settlement among several on the Gujarat coast. In 1728 the community formalised its own self-governance there, founding the Bombay Parsi Panchayet to govern Parsi affairs directly rather than leaving them to Company or local rulers.
What this changed for Zoroastrianism's spread was the concentration of a diaspora community, until then spread across Gujarati coastal towns since the Sanjan landing centuries earlier, into a single dominant urban centre. By the middle of the eighteenth century Parsis were one of Bombay's most prominent commercial groups, a status built inside two generations of the Maneck family's own rise and formalised through the Panchayet's self-government, and one the community went on holding into the modern era.