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Updated: May 23, 2025
Zoroaster is to be classed with such great religious leaders as Buddha and Mohammed. He was the predecessor of Mohammed and the worship and belief which he instituted were trampled out in Persia by the forces of Islam in the seventh century of our era. The Persian Zoroastrians fled to India, where they are still found as Parsis on the west coast of Hindostan.
Zarathrustra rebuked the devil first with stones, then with pious words. From him, as from the Buddha and the Christ, abashed the tempter retreated. That victory over evil, the Parsis to-day regard as the capital event in the history of the world. It was the immediate prelude to the revelation of the Law which Ormuzd vouchsafed to his prophet.
And the local Parsis seem quite content eating the air in the dusk one or two of their menkind pay visits on foot from carriage to carriage they have at least a share in the pom pom of the brass band and welcome.
The Sikhs and the Jains are Indian sects which flourish in certain localities; as there are nearly two millions of the former in the Punjab, and over half a million of the latter in Bombay, and approaching that number in Rajputana, with comparatively few elsewhere. The Parsees, or Parsis, who were driven from Persia by the Mohammedans, number 76,774 in Bombay, not the city, but the presidency.
They were only obtained from the Parsis, who keep up their ancient religion on the soil of India, during last century, and the study of them has been very laborious and difficult, and has given rise to great controversies which are not yet settled. These ancient books are furnished with Eastern translations and commentaries.
I thought of and looked for tigers, and saw in a glade of palms and thorns where there should have been tigers, hoardings with "The Western Indian Army-Equipment Factory" and the like in big letters; so I had just to imagine the tigers, and make studies from life of the Parsis as they wandered up and down the corridor; I can see some point in their women wearing Saris, these graceful veils hanging from the back of their hair, but why do they and Mohammedan men wear their shirt tails outside their petticoats and trousers?
The very name of Bombay, which for most people recalls a spacious and dignified landfall, lateen sails, green islands and jutting precipices, a long city of trees and buildings like a bright and various breakwater between the great harbor and the sea, and then exquisite little temples, painted bullock carriages, Towers of Silence, Parsis, and an amazingly kaleidoscopic population, is for me a reminder of narrow, foetid, plague-stricken streets and tall insanitary tenement-houses packed and dripping with humanity, and of terrible throbbing factories working far into the night, blazing with electric light against the velvet-black night-sky of India, damp with the steam-clouds that are maintained to moisten the thread, and swarming with emaciated overworked brown children for even the adults, spare and small, in those mills seem children to a western eye.
Although sometimes the Parsis could push themselves forward to positions of officials and instructors and played an important part in the history of the Khalifate, generally speaking, this community was a close one leading a more or less exclusive life, a circumstance enabling the conservation of national peculiarities and attachment to antiquity.
The Islámite prayers were abolished as being too narrow and wanting in comprehension, and in their place were substituted prayers of a more general character, based on those of the Pársís, whilst the ceremonial was borrowed from the Hindus. The new era or date, which was introduced in all the government records, and also in the feasts observed by the Emperor, was exclusively Pársí.
Eighteen years later, a countryman of Hyde, George Boucher, received from the Parsis in Surat a copy of the Vendîdâd Sâda, which was brought to England in 1723 by Richard Cobbe. But the old manuscript was a sealed book, and the most that could then be made of it was to hang it by an iron chain to the wall of the Bodleian Library, as a curiosity to be shown to foreigners.
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