Dr Leilah Vevaina

Leilah Vevaina received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the New School for Social Research in 2015.

She has an MA in Anthropology from The New School (2007) as well as an MA in Social Thought from New York University (2005). Her research lies in the intersection of urban property and religious life within the legal regimes of contemporary India. She has conducted fieldwork in Mumbai, India and Hong Kong, with specific focus on the Indian Zoroastrian, or Parsi, community, with generous support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation as well as the American Institute of Indian Studies. Her book entitled, Trust Matters: Parsi Endowments in Mumbai and the Horoscope of a City (Duke University Press) 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, death and diaspora. Her forthcoming project seeks to research the connection between gambling and charity in historical and contemporary of Hong Kong with particular attention to the Hong Kong Jockey Club.

Leilah Vevaina is also the founding Director of the South Asia from Asia Initiative at Chinese University which aims to bring together research and teaching on South Asia in Hong Kong in collaboration with other departments in the Faculty of Arts and university partners.

Research Project

Zoroastrianism, while still a lived religion today, sees its practitioners as small in number, and increasingly scattered around the globe. Indian Zoroastrians, Parsis, are known in India for their wide spread philanthropy as well as the endurance of the traditional Zoroastrian mortuary practice of dokhmenashini, wherein the corpse is placed in large towers to be eaten by vultures and other carrion birds. The towers and the mortuary infrastructure are supported through communal giving and the instrument of the charitable trust.

As merchant trade and the British Empire brought Parsis to settle in various entrepots, they brought with them these funerary rites, which actually established many early forms of communal associations in the diaspora. This project broadens the focus and wishes to ethnographically investigate the practices associated with cemetery burials and a very recent move to cremation, as well as the finance supporting these alternate mortuary infrastructures. Due to the unviability of excarnation in the present even the Parsis in Mumbai are now moving away from dokhmenashini and seeking alternatives.

This research will investigate how this transition away from millennia old ritual practice is not simply due to the reduced viability of excarnation outside of a few places, but also due to the newly acquired financial and political strength of diaspora groups particularly Hong Kong and the UK within the global Zoroastrian community.