Leilah Vevaina, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Of Worldly Deeds and Sacred Souls: The Trust and Parsi Muktad Ceremonies

Friday 26 April 5:30pm
Refreshments from 5pm
All welcome

Atash Kadeh of Zoroastrian Association of California (ZAC) during Muktads, Photo by Leilah Vevaina

Charitable giving is one of the pillars of Zoroastrianism, where the acquisition of wealth is righteous if earned honestly and shared liberally. Conducting charity is practised at all class levels of the Parsi (Indian Zoroastrian) community in Mumbai, and is incorporated into several ritual practices such as the annual muktad remembrances for the dead. It is at these rituals wherein the souls of deceased kin (fravašis) are called down by name for feasting and convening with their living families on earth, that future charitable intentions are often announced. While the muktad rituals reconvene the living and the dead annually, the charitable trust is the formal legal mechanism, which mirrors this cosmological cycle of giving in the realm of the worldly, perpetually. Not simply analysing the trust as an econo-legal mechanism, this paper will investigate the trust as part of ritual practice.Leilah Vevaina is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. Her research lies in the intersection of urban property and religious life within the legal regimes of contemporary India. Her book entitled Trust Matters: Parsi Endowments in Mumbai and the Horoscope of a City (Duke University Press, 2023) focuses on religious endowments and the trust as a mechanism of property management in the city.In addition to her focus on Zoroastrian global philanthropic networks, Leilah is researching Zoroastrian death rituals and their legal and funerary infrastructures for a new book on necrofinance and death and diaspora. Her forthcoming project seeks to research the connection between gambling and charity in history and contemporary Hong Kong.Leilah  is also the founding Director of the South Asia from Asia Initiative at the Chinese University which aims to bring together research and teaching on South Asia in Hong Kong in collaboration with other departments and university partners.

Michael Shenkar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem/University of Oxford

A Scene of Fire Worship from the Late Umayyad Palace at Sanjar-Shah and the Sogdian Cult in the 8th Century

Friday 3 May, 5:30pm
Refreshments from 5pm
All welcome

A fragment of wall painting with heads of Sogdian priests, Sanjar-Shah. Drawing by Maria Gervais.Recent excavations at the Sogdian site of Sanjar-Shah near Panjikent (northern Tajikistan) have uncovered remains of a monumental palace built during the 740s under the last Umayyad governor of Khurāsān, Naṣr b. Sayyār (738–748). The palace was decorated with figurative wall paintings and architectural elements made of carved wood. It was destroyed in the third quarter of the 8th century, perhaps during the al-Muqanna‘ uprising.The Sanjar-Shah paintings are of the highest artistic quality and are new, outstanding monuments of Sogdian art. This talk will present fragments of figurative wall paintings from the Main Throne Hall of the Palace found during the last two seasons. They depict a procession of characters wearing Sogdian priestly garments, directed towards a large, stationary fire altar. This is the first time that representation of priests is found in Sogdian wall paintings. The talk will also discuss the implications of this find for our understanding of the Sogdian cult in the 8th century.Michael Shenkar is Associate Professor of Pre-Islamic Iranian studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His specialisation is the study of civilisations and cultures of the pre-Islamic Iranian world through their material remains and visual representations. His research interests encompass the archaeology, art and religions of pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia, including Zoroastrianism (with a particular focus on religious iconography), the culture of the Eurasian nomads, the Sogdian civilisation and the ‘Silk Roads’. He is a co-director of the excavations of the Sogdian site of Sanjar-Shah in northern Tajikistan.This year, Michael is a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford and a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre.

James White, University of Oxford

Editing Early Modern Persian Poetry from Iran and India: Global Perspectives and Local Identities

Friday 7 June, 5:30pm
Refreshments from 5pm
All welcome

Copyright © 2024 Ancient India & Iran Trust, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to our mailing list.Our mailing address is: Ancient India & Iran Trust 23 Brooklands Avenue Cambridge, CB2 8BG United Kingdom During the early modern era, Iran and India remained closely linked through politics, trade, and migration. These globalising tendencies also led to the formation of literary communities which spanned the two realms. With the rise of colonialism and modern nationalisms, the legacy of these transnational literary communities was largely forgotten, and much of the rich corpus of poetry that they produced remains unedited and in manuscript.  This talk will consider some of the practical problems involved in locating manuscripts of seventeenth-century poets’ collected works and in editing their contents, and discuss how we can ‘reconstitute’ the social world which produced them. James White is an Early Career Fellow at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. His research focuses on multilingualism and the social uses of poetry in the Middle East and South Asia during the medieval and early modern eras.