Avestan Ritual in India

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What are the sequential, hierarchical and dynamic properties of ritual activities which Zoroastrian priestsperform in India to this day in their millennia-old solemn rituals lasting for many hours? The aim of AVINDIAis to detect, describe, visualise and analyse how these rituals are structured as systematically organised activity,and to reconstruct their genesis and historical trajectory. Taking the Visperad ritual as a case study, and usingfilm and computational technologies, AVINDIA examines the ritual activities in the film it creates, in Gujaratilanguage sources, and in the Sanskrit version of the Avestan recitation text in order to track the historicalchanges in how the ritual is practised and understood in India. In addition to an analysis based on a closelydetailed study, change over long periods of time and across the boundaries of religious cultures is examinedby analysing the ritual structure of the Visperad in the Indo-Iranian diachronic perspective.The Visperad provides the ideal case study because live performances can still be witnessed in India, and onlythere. Our overall aim is to contribute to a deeper understanding and appreciation of this archaic, living, butcritically endangered human heritage, originating in the prehistoric oral culture of the Indo-Iranians. AVINDIAdevelops a descriptive and analytical technique for Zoroastrian ritual action that is both systematic and detailed,and is useful to researchers in ritual studies and beyond. It is a contribution to the ongoing attempt by scholarsto pursue the analogy between linguistic grammars and non-linguistic grammar-like, structured systems suchas music, dance, and ritual. This interdisciplinary project crosses the boundaries between ethnographic filmstudies, ritual studies, digital humanities and philology, and opens up research programmes for scholarsworking in ethnology, anthropology, linguistics, history, sociology, religious studies, and performance studies.