United States or Kenya ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The late Jamsetjee Nusserwanji Tata of Bombay, a typical Parsee, amassed an enormous fortune as a merchant and manufacturer, won an enviable reputation for integrity, enterprise and public spirit, and for several years before his lamented death in 1904, was permitted to enjoy the gratification that men of his kind deserve after a long career of activity and usefulness.
He had hardly got past the fountain presented by Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy in wasted benevolence, than he heard the deafening report of the bomb which had wrecked his studio, reduced it to a tangle of iron girders and stanchions, strewn its floor with brick rubble and thick dust, and left his wife a human wreck, lying unconscious with a broken spine, surrounded by splinters of glass, broken jars, porcelain trays, and nasty-looking fragments of sponge and vertebrate anatomy.
To the English argument that the duty is "only a small one" the Indian reply is that, according to the results of an elaborate statistical inquiry conducted at the instance of the late Mr. Jamsetjee N. Tata, a 3-1/2 per cent Excise duty on cotton cloth is equivalent to a 7 per cent duty on capital invested in weaving under Indian conditions.
I was anxious to visit one of their temples, but this, Sir Jamsetjee assured me, was impossible, as none but the initiated are allowed even to approach the entrance, still less to get a glimpse of what is passing within.
Sir Jamsetjee himself, though probably faithful in the observance of the actual requirements of his creed, was assuredly less strict than the majority, and being a man of large intellect, cultivated mind and great independence of character, he did not hesitate to borrow from other nations any customs, institutions or inventions that might tend to the improvement of his own people.
Sir Jamsetjee assured me that the intelligent Parsees regard the sun and fire as only the symbols that are to remind them of the God they worship.
These names are strikingly peculiar, are usually of from four to six syllables, the last being usually "jee" or "bhoy." The Jeejeebhoy family is intensely Parsee, of course, and important enough to possess an English baronetcy. The city's principal hospital was the gift of Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy. Other families of renown in the financial world are the Readymoneys, Jehangirs and Sassoons.
A merchant-prince of this sect was noted as a philanthropist; and for the vast sums of money he gave for benevolent institutions, the Queen knighted him, as she did Sir Modava for his public service. This gentleman is Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy He died in 1859." "Parsees do not eat anything cooked by a person of another religion, and reject beef and pork, especially hams.
From Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy's hospital for sick animals to the Olympian conceit of the English residents, there are infinite variations of people and things that I am persuaded can be matched nowhere else. I felt myself living in a series of pictures, a sort of supernumerary in a theatre, where they changed the play every night. One of the first who boarded our ship was Mr.
The name of the late Sir Jamsetjee stood for more than a score of years at the very head of the list of merchant-princes and ship-owners in Bombay, where he was born, and where his ancestors for many generations resided.