This panel features talks on various aspects of Avestan and Vedic ritual. It includes panel members of the project “Avestan Ritual in India” (AVINDIA), hosted at SOAS University of London and funded by the ERC with an Advanced Investigator Grant. The project focuses both on the ritual and on the linguistic aspects of the Avesta in India. It creates a film of the performance of one of the Zoroastrian core rituals, the Visperad, editions of the Sanskrit versions of the recitation text and of the ritual traditions in Gujarati treatises.
The aim of AVINDIA is to detect, describe, visualise and analyse how the ritual is structured as systematically organised activity, and to reconstruct its 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 will record in 2024, 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.
The project design has taken inspiration from the work of Frits Stall on ritual structure. Staal’s theory of ritual formalism remains compelling as an account of orthopraxy, as does his view that rituals are in large part structured, or better constructed, according to rules that are self-referential. Without committing to Staal’s view on ‘meaninglessness’ and specifically his reliance on the language analogy, AVINDIA is based on the premise that Avestan solemn rituals are composites of simpler forms, and that there are rules which govern their composition. Contributions to the panel are invited especially by scholars of Vedic ritual to allow for a comparative perspective.