Two disputes have defined Parsi communal life, and both are about boundaries.
The first is the calendar. In the 1720s an Iranian priest visiting India found that the Iranian and Indian reckonings had diverged by a month, and in 1745 a faction at Surat adopted the Iranian one. The community has had competing calendars ever since: Shahanshahi, the inherited Indian reckoning that most Parsis follow; Kadmi, the Iranian-aligned reckoning adopted in 1745; and Fasli, a seasonally corrected calendar created in 1906. Festivals therefore fall on different days for different Zoroastrians, which for a religion built around a ritual calendar is not a small matter.
The second is conversion and intermarriage, and it is existential. The dominant Parsi position has been that one is born a Zoroastrian and cannot become one, and that a Parsi woman who marries outside the community loses her religious standing and her children are not Parsi, while the same is not said of a man. A ruling in 1909 restricted the term Parsi to those with Zoroastrian parents and formal initiation, excluding converts. Indian constitutional law has since moved against strict patrilineal tests, and litigation over a woman's access to fire temples and to the funerary grounds has reached the Supreme Court, which pressed the trustees concerned toward accommodation.
The Bombay Parsi Punchayet, founded in the 1670s, is the apex lay body: a charitable trust, one of Mumbai's largest private landlords with thousands of housing units, custodian of the Doongerwadi funerary grounds, and elected by the Parsi residents of the city. The arguments are conducted through it.