The Bulsaras

Freddie Mercury was born of Persian parents, in fact they were from Gujarat in western India, which is not one of India's most visited regions, but Gujarat was good enough for Krishna and Gandhi to hang out there, and has long been an important centre for Jains. Today, Gujarat is one of India's wealthiest states, supporting modern industrial complexes as well as thriving village handicrafts.Gujarat is the province that has supplied more Indian immigrants to the world than any other. The name Bulsara, Freddie's real surname, was taken from the small Gujarati town in which Bomi Bulsara, Freddie's father, was brought up. And there it is, North of Bombay, South of Ahmedabad: Bulsar, a tiny dot on a huge coast.

Freddie's parents are Parsees, Indian followers of Zarathustra, the man-God who is best known to most European non-Parsees for speaking in riddles to Nietzsche.
"Body am I entirely and nothing else, and soul is only a word for something about the body" spake Nietzsche's unbelieving Zarathustra. Parsees can indeed trace their origins back to Persia, but only if they turn the clock back an entire millennium, to the 9th century in most cases, when the first boatloads of persecuted religious refugees from the northern deserts landed on the Gujarati coast. Since then, the Parsees have had a thousand years to become indelibly Indian. Which is what Freddie Mercury was as well. He did not arrive in Britain until he was 17. And most of his formative years were spent a short bus journey away from Bombay.