The Department was sad to learn that Dr Roger Ballard died on 30 September 2020. Roger was a lively and very visible member of this Department from 1989-2003 as Senior Lecturer in Comparative Religion. Born in York on 20 April 1943, Roger was by training a social scientist (BA in Social Anthropology Cambridge 1966, PhD in Sociology University of Delhi 1970). As two of the (then) few specialists in non-biblical religions at the University of Manchester, he and I found a camaraderie and became firm friends. He enthusiastically set up the joint degree in Comparative Religion and Social Anthropology, the teaching of Urdu, and the Centre for Applied South Asian Studies, of which he was Director. After his retirement, he did valuable work for the civil, criminal and family courts as an expert witness, preparing over 400 reports, and was recognised as one of Britain’s leading experts in the field. Very much of the generation of Prof. Sir Edmund Leach’s teaching at Cambridge, Roger had conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in both India and Pakistan, and also with members of the South Asian diaspora in the UK. In 2012 Roger was awarded the Lucy Mair Medal for Applied Anthropology.
Here at the University of Manchester, as before at the University of Leeds in Race Relations, Roger inspired many students, who got a real kick out of being taught by someone who had actually worked in the field. We knew he was never quite at home in a textual theological setting, and he was certainly a positive influence on the transformation from the former Faculty of Theology into the new Department of Religions and Theology. He was indeed jolly Roger, always good-humoured, laughing, larger-than-life, blunt and ebullient, never shy of a heated debate, with a passionate commitment to issues of ethnicity and gender long before they became fashionable.
He is survived by his wife Tahirah and their two sons Zafar and Akbar, and Mark and Joe by a previous marriage. He is missed by many and, with colleagues in the field who worked with him, I am currently putting together a collection about his life and work for publication in the journal South Asia Research, and will post a link here when this happens.
Here at the University of Manchester, as before at the University of Leeds in Race Relations, Roger inspired many students, who got a real kick out of being taught by someone who had actually worked in the field. We knew he was never quite at home in a textual theological setting, and he was certainly a positive influence on the transformation from the former Faculty of Theology into the new Department of Religions and Theology. He was indeed jolly Roger, always good-humoured, laughing, larger-than-life, blunt and ebullient, never shy of a heated debate, with a passionate commitment to issues of ethnicity and gender long before they became fashionable.
He is survived by his wife Tahirah and their two sons Zafar and Akbar, and Mark and Joe by a previous marriage. He is missed by many and, with colleagues in the field who worked with him, I am currently putting together a collection about his life and work for publication in the journal South Asia Research, and will post a link here when this happens.
Alan Williams, Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion
