Overview
What are the sequential, hierarchical and dynamic properties of the hours-long and millennia-old ritual activities which Zoroastrian priests perform in India to this day? The aim of AVINDIA is 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 using film and computational technologies, AVINDIA will examine the ritual actions in the film it will create and in Gujarati texts, and track the historical changes in how the ritual is understood in India by unlocking the Sanskrit version of the Avestan recitation text. In addition to an analysis based on a closely detailed study, change over long periods of time and across the boundaries of religious cultures will be examined by 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 only there. The overall aim is to contribute to a deeper understanding and appreciation of this archaic intangible, but living, human heritage originating in the prehistoric oral culture of the Indo-Iranians. AVINDIA develops 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 scholars to pursue the analogy between linguistic grammars and non-linguistic grammar-like, structured systems such as music, dance, and ritual. This interdisciplinary project crosses the boundaries between ethnographic film studies, ritual studies, digital humanities and philology, and opens up research programmes for scholars working in ethnology, anthropology, linguistics, history, sociology, religious studies, and performance studies.