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Updated: May 13, 2025
The Parsees, who reverence fire, will not suffer menstruous women to see it or even to look on a lighted taper; during their infirmity the women retire from their houses to little lodges in the country, whither victuals are brought to them daily; at the end of their seclusion they bathe and send a kid, a fowl, or a pigeon to the priest as an offering.
The officiating priests were brahmins, the custom and the festival of which Lacshmee, the goddess of wealth, is the patroness being purely Hindu. The Parsees of India, sole remnant of the ancient fire-worshippers, have sadly degenerated from that pure faith held by their forefathers, and for which they became fugitives and exiles.
The Singhalese have ever been essentially an agricultural race, a small portion devoting themselves to such simple handicraft as life on the island demanded. They are not traders, even in our day. Moormen, Syrian Jews, and Parsees monopolize that occupation, and the few 'longshore sailors are all of the Tamil race.
Most Parsees are superbly educated, variously accomplished, and speak English fluently. Their equipages are the smartest in Bombay, and every walk of life is led by them. The great fortunes of this part of India are theirs, and Parsee names are identified with everything contributing to Bombay's importance.
Though, generally speaking, well-behaved and attentive, the domestics of a Bombay establishment are very inferior in style and appearance to those of Bengal, the admixture of Portuguese and Parsees, with Mohammedans and Hindus, forming a motley crew, for all dress in their national costume, it being impossible to prevail upon people having so many and such different religious prejudices to assume the same livery.
Behind us sat the Parsees and their women-folk, soberly clad in European dress; they are intelligent looking people with pleasant cheery manners, I would like to see more of them.
This declaration, however, was somewhat in contradiction to one circumstance, which I omitted to mention, namely, that before the assembled Parsees rose from the floor, they permitted the officiating brahmins to mark their foreheads with the symbol of the goddess, thus virtually admitting her supremacy.
Among the Parsees the priest eats the bread and drinks the haoma, or juice of a plant, considered to be both a plant and a god. Among the Episcopalians, a contemporary Christian sect, the sacred juice is that of the grape, and the priest is not allowed to throw away what is left of it, but is ordered "reverently to consume it."
Armenians from Persia, like their fellow-countrymen the Parsees, have a racial gift for commerce; and Armenian merchants had been in India long before the English arrived.
The race, the caste and often the province of a resident of India may be determined by his headgear. The Parsees wear tall fly-trap hats made of horse hair, with a top like a cow's foot; the Mohammedans wear the fez, and the Hindus the turban, and there are infinite varieties of turbans, both in the material used and in the manner in which they are put up.
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