The Qissa-i Sanjan tells how a group of Zoroastrians, fleeing religious persecution after the Arab conquest of Iran, sailed from Hormuz and eventually reached the coast of Gujarat in western India, seeking a place to settle and practice their faith undisturbed. Its best known scene has the local ruler, given as Jadi Rana, respond to the refugees' request for asylum by sending out a vessel filled to the brim with milk, a wordless message that his land was already full and could not receive more people. The Zoroastrian elders are said to have stirred sugar into the milk without spilling a drop, returning it with the message that they would dissolve into the local population, sweetening it, without displacing anyone already there, and the ruler granted them land at Sanjan on that understanding.
The text lays out a set of conditions the refugees reportedly accepted in exchange for asylum, adopting the local language, having their women wear local dress, and surrendering their weapons, before describing the establishment of a sacred fire, still maintained by the tradition as the lineage source of the fires burning in Parsi fire temples today, and the community's subsequent growth and eventual movement to other parts of Gujarat and beyond as it prospered. As the origin story a living community tells about itself, the narrative functions for the Parsis much as a founding migration account functions for many diaspora communities: less a neutral historical record than the story a people uses to explain who they are and how they came to be where they are.