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

CHAP, II.| BOTH SIDES WRONG. III

The Shehenshais explained that the Zoroastrian religion acknowledged one month’s intercalation at the end of every one hundred and twenty years, and that, after the fall of the Persian empire, there was one such intercalation while they lived as fugitives in Khorassan, but that when they arrived in India the practice had not been continued. Hence their date was one month behind that of the Kadmis. The Kadmis, on the other hand, maintained that intercalation was forbidden in the Zoroastrian calendar. They declared that it occurred in political calculations alone, and that, as a matter of fact, no such intercalation ever took place in Khorassan, as asserted by the Shehenshais.

With the light of recent knowledge thrown upon it, the question would seem to le in a nutshell, and if the actors in the drama of the Kabisa controversy were to rise from their graves they would probably wonder how they could have spent so much time and money over so small a matter. Mr. Kharshedji Rastamji Kama, who is a Kadmi, and of whose studies of the Zoroastrian religion we have spoken in another place, has, in a work on the computation of the Yazdezardi era published in 1870, essayed to show that both the Shehenshais and the Kadmis were wrong in their respective contentions. The Kadmis were wrong in denying that the Parsi new year properly commenced on the 21st of March, for, with