The Project Gutenberg EBook of Les Parsis, by D. Menant

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Title: Les Parsis

Author: D. Menant

Translator: Ratanbai Ardeshir Vakil

Release Date: June 13, 2009 [EBook #29109]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Les Parsis

By

D. Menant

Translated in part

By the late

Miss Ratanbai Ardeshir Vakil

London

Printed for private circulation

1902

CONTENTS

Page

Introduction ix
Chapter
I. The Exodus of the Parsis 1
II. The Zoroastrians in Persia 38
III. Population--Costumes--Usages--Festivals 77

INTRODUCTION

A special interest attaches to this translation into English of
D. Menant's monograph entitled "Les Parsis," arising from the
circumstance that it is, in great part, the work of a Parsi lady,
the late Miss Ratanbai Ardeshir Vakil.

I have still a vivid recollection of the morning in the beginning of
the year 1886 on which Mr. Ardeshir F. Vakil, senior partner in one of
the leading firms of solicitors in Bombay, brought his two daughters
Meherbai and Ratanbai to the Wilson College to begin their career
as students of the Bombay University. Although for many years that
University had prefaced its Regulations with the sentence--"In the
following regulations the pronoun 'he' and its derivatives are used
to denote either sex," and had thus opened its doors wide to the women
of India, only one lady student had been enrolled as undergraduate in
Arts before these two sisters entered upon their College career.