Avestan Ritual in India

Avestan Ritual in India (AVINDIA) is a 5-year project which will film the performance of a Visperad ceremony in India and seek to detect, describe, visualise and analyse how the ritual is structured as systematically organised activity, and to reconstruct its genesis and historical trajectory.

By analysing the ritual structure of the Visperad in the Indo-Iranian diachronic perspective, we are hoping to reveal change over long periods of time and across the boundaries of religious cultures. In addition, the team will examine how the ritual is practised and understood in India. Building on editing tools and work already undertaken in Professor Hintze's Multimedia Yasna (MUYA) ERC project, we will edit, translate, and analyse the Sanskrit version of the Avestan recitation text, the Gujarati preparatory ceremony (Paragna) and ritual directions, and Gujarati language treatises. 

This will create new insights into the historical trajectory of ritual change, as well as local variation of the performances in India.

The project will generate a large volume of research data in audio and visual digital formats, bringing with it responsibility for effective management both of data captured in field research and of subsequent processing. Technical infrastructure will be created to ensure that the data complies with recognised standards and can be made preservable in the long term. Early establishment of such infrastructure will significantly strengthen long-term preservation of raw data as well as discovery and accessibility of outcomes of AVINDIA, resulting in standards-based and sustainable research and public data resources. 

Deliverables of AVINDIA, including movies, annotation collections and publications including books will be formed into corpus repositories designed for sustained use and further enrichment by the team and by the wider research community, and also to deliver publicly-accessible presentations of key outputs. Data management will be undertaken by AVINDIA team member Data Futures GmbH, a non-profit company and member of the international InvenioRDM consortium, which is led by CERN and the European Commission’s OpenAIRE programme. 

While the infrastructure of the InvenioRDM platform is well established in the Sciences, AVINDIA will pioneer its use in the Humanities and Social Sciences, being the first large-scale Humanities project to adopt it from the outset.