History of the Parsis : including their manners, customs, religion and present position : with coloured and other illustrations : in two volumes

250 HIISTORV OF THE PARSTS. [CHAP. Y.

a regulation might be passed in terms of those answers which they presented “as embracing the tights of inheritance and succession that are acknowledged by the Parsi nation.” But owing to another petition having been transmitted to the Legislative Council by some of the Zoroastrians, embodying adverse opinions, and owing to several other causes, the matter remained unsettled,

In the answers to Mr. Borradaile two poimts were principally noticeable. In the ease of intestacy of a male Parsi they proposed to give a right of inheritance to the widow and daughters, fixie the amount at oneeighth for each. They proposed to give the Parsi wife a power of disposing by will, in her husband’s lifetime, with or without his consent, of all property she might have brought from her father’s house.

Four years after the passing of the Chattels Real Act of 1837, the Parsis of Bombay, in a letter dated Sth of March 1841, and addressed to Mr. Borradaile, who had meanwhile become a member of the Indian Law Commission, expressed their opinion on the evil arising from subjecting, as regards inheritance, all the property of intestate Parsis within the limits of the Supreme Court to English law, notwithstanding the partial relief afforded by the Act of 1837. In that letter they urged the necessity for something being done at once, on the ground that the English law in cases of intestacy was still wholly unsuited to their