Seas of Charity: Zoroastrian Community Ties through Necrofinance

Leilah Vevaina, Department of Anthropology, CUHK 

Date: 26 February 2026 (Thurs)

Time: 5 PM (HKT)

Venue: Room 4.36, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower,

Centennial Campus, HKU

All are welcome!

No registration required.

Zoroastrianism, while still a lived religion today, sees its practitioners as not only small in number, but increasingly scattered around the globe. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, due to merchant trade, Indian Zoroastrians (Parsis) settled in various entrepots of the British Empire creating a second diaspora, with India as the new homeland. Wherever Parsis moved and settled they built sacred spaces such as temples and funerary grounds to maintain Zoroastrian laws of purity and pollution in their new environment and used endowments to financially support them. Funerary grounds within the second diaspora were the critical nodal points of Zoroastrian settlements all over the globe, be it in Zanzibar (dokhmas), Hong Kong (cemetery), or North America (cremation). This paper will investigate the role of funerary infrastructure in establishing community connections through charitable giving in the emerging Parsi settlements in the diaspora. It will show how necrofinance comes to make new homes for the living and the dead.

Leilah Vevaina is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2023, she published her book entitled, Trust Matters: Parsi Endowments in Mumbai and the Horoscope of a City (Duke University Press), which focuses on religious endowments and the trust as a mechanism of property, time, and obligation in the city. Leilah is currently researching Zoroastrian death rituals and their legal and funerary infrastructures for a new book on necrofinance and death and diaspora. She is 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 and university partners. 

Seas of Charity: Zoroastrian Community Ties through Necrofinance

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