The Bombay Parsi is a born venerator of water. He may be seen any day on the beach, dipping his fingers in the water and applying it to his eyes and forehead, lifting his hands in prayers and wafting his soul to the realms of the Great Unknown. To all that is pure, sublime and beautiful in the universe the Zoroastrian paid willing homage. Accordingly, water-worship was a general cult amongst the Parsis in their ancestral home. It was, however, a means of looking up through nature to nature’s God. It merely postulated the presence of a beneficent spirit permeating water. There was no suggestion, whatsoever, of water-goblins haunting wells and springs. How, then, did the present-day Parsi come to imbibe the belief in such minor deities and how did he come to give them a local habitation and a name? This is a question of absorbing interest from the point of view of the folklorist. India is par excellence the land of goblindom and it is but natural that the spirit-world of the Parsis should expand in the land of their adoption. With their mind attuned to the worship of water they came readily under the influence of the genii locorum. The most curious feature, however, of this Parsi belief in Moslem water-spirits is that amongst the Mahomedans themselves no such belief prevails or ever did prevail. They believe, no doubt, in saints who have endowed springs and wells, but no Mahomedan sayyid or pir has or ever had his home or haunt in water. Neither does a Mahomedan believe in any other benevolent or malevolent indwelling spirit of the well. The installation of Mahomedan saints in the wells of Parsi households is therefore an anthropological puzzle for the solution of which we must make a joint appeal to history and folklore. It is evidently a case of substitution and amalgamation of beliefs and it is cases such as these that call for research in the localisation of popular beliefs and their ethnic genealogy. People inhabiting modern culture areas have an anthropological as well as a national or political history and without the anthropological history it is impossible to explain the meaning and existence of a number of beliefs and customs prevailing in a particular community. It is, therefore, necessary to classify all the Indian cults of water according to their ethnological and geographical distribution and to carry on research in the genealogy of the different conceptions and customs prevailing in different parts. In this way we may arrive at different historical landmarks, working backwards from which we may get some glimpses of the political, social, psychological and religious history of the older races that lived in this country. Water-worship, like stone-worship, is a non-Aryan custom and without some research in the history of the non-Aryan races that dwelt in the land before the advent of the Aryans it will not be possible to account for the savagery of many of the forms and rituals of this worship as it now prevails amongst the Aryan races.
Parsis on the sea-beach in Bombay.
Offerings to the Gunbow Well.
In the following pages I have sought to indicate what scope there is for such research work and I have devoted a special chapter to Sir Laurence Gomme’s luminous analysis of the water cults prevailing in Britain and its isles with a view to indicating the methods of research adopted by him. If we follow the same lines in tracing the ancestry of the Indian customs and beliefs, we may hope to throw some fresh light on the cultural history of the ancestors, or at all events the immediate predecessors, of the people among whom we now find them prevailing. I do not profess to have accomplished anything of the kind in this book. It is really not want of time so much as the consciousness of sheer inability to do justice to the theme that has deterred me from launching upon a scientific survey of the varying forms of water-worship. Circumstances permitting, after further study and research, I may venture to essay it and place before the public a more studied and comprehensive volume on the subject, meanwhile this little book will not have been published in vain if it leads some student of anthropology to embark on such a survey and I shall be better pleased indeed to see this fascinating subject comprehensively dealt with by one of the masters of the science of folklore.
I trust I have duly acknowledged, at the proper places, all the authorities I have consulted. I cannot conclude, however, without expressing my special indebtedness to the works of that distinguished Town Clerk and student of local lore, the late Sir Laurence Gomme. My thanks are also due to my esteemed teacher and friend, Mr. J. D. Bharda, for the interest he has taken in this work and for his helpful suggestions when the sheets were passing through the press.
R. P. M.
Bombay, March 21st, 1918.