Zoroastrian priests in India still perform the Visperad, a solemn ritual lasting many hours that originated in prehistoric Indo-Iranian oral culture, and this project will film and analyse its precise structure to understand how it has changed over millennia. This matters because the Visperad is a critically endangered living heritage—it is performed only in India, and the knowledge of its internal logic is fading. Scholars have long studied ritual as a structured system, like language or music, but no one has systematically mapped the sequential, hierarchical, and dynamic properties of a Zoroastrian ritual using film and computational tools. AVINDIA fills that gap by combining ethnographic film, digital humanities, and philology to track how the ritual’s practice and interpretation have shifted across time and religious boundaries. If successful, the project will produce a descriptive and analytical technique for ritual action that researchers in ritual studies, anthropology, linguistics, and performance studies can apply to other traditions. This is fundamentally curiosity-driven research—it will not change infrastructure or supply chains. But similar fundamental work on the grammar-like structures of music and dance has reshaped how scholars understand human cultural systems. A deeper grasp of ritual’s hidden logic could, in the long term, inform fields from cognitive science to heritage preservation.
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What are the sequential, hierarchical and dynamic properties of ritual activities which Zoroastrian priests perform in India to this day in their millennia-old solemn rituals lasting for many hours? 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 examines the ritual activities in the film it creates, in Gujarati language sources, and in the Sanskrit version of the Avestan recitation text in order to track the historical changes 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 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. Our overall aim is to contribute to a deeper understanding and appreciation of this archaic, living, but critically endangered 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.
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