The Boy Travellers in the Far East, Part Third / Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey to Ceylon and India; With Descriptions of Borneo, the Philippine Islands and Burmah

by Thomas Wallace Knox

"We will try to tell what we have seen since we came here, but there is so much of it that we shall be sure to forget something.

"To begin at the beginning, the first thing that attracted our attention was the great number of Parsees; we had seen them before in Calcutta, Hong-Kong, and other cities, but when we got to Bombay we found the streets full of them. Doctor Bronson says there are about 700,000 inhabitants in Bombay, and the Parsees are thought to be not far from 70,000; then there are 450,000 Hindoos, 120,000 Moslems, and 25,000 Europeans, while the balance is made up of various Eastern races and nationalities. So you see the Parsees are a tenth of the population, and we are told that at least half the wealth of Bombay is in their hands. Bombay is often called the City of the Parsees, and not by any means without good reason.

"The Parsees came originally from Persia, where they had been persecuted for their religious belief; they settled at Surat, and from there a good many of them came to Bombay and to other places along the coast, and it is thought that at least half of all the Parsees in India are in this city. They are sometimes called fire-worshippers, on account of their reverence for fire, and the worship they give to the sun, as the emblem of life. They regard fire as sacred, and will do nothing to degrade it; no good Parsee will venture to smoke, and it is an act of rudeness or ignorance to offer him a cigar or cigarette, or to light a cigar while talking with him. The Parsees are the shrewdest merchants of the East, and a large part of the business of Bombay is in their hands; the leading Parsee houses have branches in London and other European cities, as well as in China and the Far East generally. In every way they are the most influential of all the native inhabitants of Bombay, and are steadily gaining in intelligence and prominence. When they fled to India they brought the sacred fire with them, and it has been kept burning in their temples ever since.

PARSEE SCHOOL CHILDREN.

"Doctor Bronson found an old friend from New York,[9] who had been for ten years a resident of Bombay; through his assistance and in his company we were taken to the cemetery of the Parsees, on Malabar Hill, where we saw their strange way of disposing of the dead. He also took us to a Parsee school, where we saw lots of bright-eyed children, and heard them recite their lessons, which they did very prettily, although the language was one we did not understand. The little girls and boys 'spoke their pieces' just as girls and boys do at a school examination in Massachusetts or New York, and were quite as proud of the medals and prizes that were given to them. The afternoon we spent in visiting the Parsee school was one of the most interesting of our stay in Bombay.

"Very naturally, we were most interested in the girls; they were from eight to twelve years old, and had keen, intelligent faces. Nearly all were pretty as pinks—brown-hued pinks, we may say, as the most of the complexions had a brunette tinge. Each head was covered with a gold-embroidered cap, and the rest of the costume was quite Oriental, as it consisted of loose trousers, with a white or embroidered frock. The recitations and songs were given in a manner highly creditable to the tiny ladies, and with almost perfect coolness and self-possession. As each little miss—we don't know the Parsee word for miss—came forward to receive her prize she bowed gracefully, and marched off to her seat with all the dignity of a princess. And we call these people ignorant heathen!

"On leaving the school, we were invited to visit the 'Towers of Silence' on Malabar Hill, where the Parsees dispose of their dead: it was arranged that we should be at the gate of the cemetery at seven o'clock on the following morning, when one of the prominent Parsees to whom we had been introduced would meet us. We were there at the appointed time, and so was the gentleman who was to accompany us through the place.

"The Parsees do not bury their dead, but expose the bodies to be eaten by birds. The gentleman explained why they did this, and we cannot do better than use his own words, as nearly as we remember them.