AS Katoch
Biography
AS Katoch is a British-Indian researcher of dreams, divination, and Indian visual culture, working at the intersection of art history, the history of science with focus on cultural astronomy and oneiromancy, and depth psychology. His current research reconstructs and re-reads illustrated astrological and dream-omen manuscripts of the Pahari and Rajput courts, with a particular focus on the ancestral visual culture of Himachal Pradesh. He holds an MA in Literary Linguistics from the University of Nottingham (2011), with research on the cognitive poetics of oneiric texts, and is an independent researcher at the Warburg Institute Library, London (2024 to present). He is a member of the Research Network for the Study of Esoteric Practices (RENSEP) and the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD).
His approach is combines the textual and art-historical scholarship with first-hand practice. He reads Sanskrit dhyāna and Jyotiṣa material, works within Hellenistic, Persian-Arabic, Italianate, and early modern British astrological traditions, and has a sustained practice in painting (with training from the King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, London) and in dream interpretation. This dual literacy, as both scholar and practitioner, informs his study of astrological and oneiric painting: he approaches these folios not only as objects but as instruments their makers intended to be used.
Current Research
Katoch is reconstructing a dispersed series of fifteen Pahari astrological folios (zodiac signs and planetary deities) sold at Sotheby's, New York, in September 2005, now distributed across the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Ashmolean Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Working from the verso inscriptions, he has identified the compiler's textual scheme, in which the zodiac signs carry verses from Sphujidhvaja's Yavanajātaka and the planetary deities carry Purāṇic dhyāna-ślokas and kavacas. The reconstruction refines several catalogue identifications and addresses a divergence in workshop attribution across the holding collections. A Shorter Notice on the series is in preparation for publication.
His wider research concerns dream imagery and oneiromancy in the Indian miniature tradition, including the eighteenth-century Śākunāvalī and related dream-omen manuscripts, and the place of astrological and devotional painting in contemplative practice.
Selected Talks
October 2026 (forthcoming) — The Department of Art + Art History and The Center for the Study of Ideas and Practices at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, in co-sponsorship with The Center for Advanced Studies – Erlangen, The University of Exeter’s Centre for Magic and Esotericism, and Societas Magica, “Creative Practices and Bridging the Invisible” (online): the dispersed Pahari astrological series for the Art Institute of Chicago panel “Beyond the Western Occult: Decolonizing Global Esoterica”
July 2026 (forthcoming) — LABRC conference, “Ecopoetics” held at Pembroke Lodge, Richmond Park, London: the tiger as lion in Pahari painting
June 2026 (forthcoming) — LABRC conference, “Embodied Aesthetics” held Association of Jungian Analysts, London: the Svapnadarshana folio at the Museum Rietberg, Zürich.
May 2026 — LABRC conference, “Sacred Arts” held at St Anne's College, Oxford: the dispersed Pahari astrological series
January 2026 — LABRC conference, “Astrology in Focus” (online): ancestral Pahari astrological painting in the Kangra idiom
November 2025 — LABRC “Alchemy” conference, held at St Anne's College, Oxford: painting dream omens from Śākunāvalī tradition with active imagination technique as a form of yogic Indian alchemy
June 2025 — International Association for the Study of Dreams, annual online conference: the eighteenth-century Śākunāvalī and dream-omen painting
March 2025 — IASD, "Dreams and Spirituality," Bangalore: invited speaker on dreams and divination across the Indian miniature tradition
September 2024 — Astrological Association conference: Albrecht Dürer’s 1525 dream vision as prophecy and material culture as history of art and cultural astronomy
June 2024 — IASD, annual conference, Netherlands: the astrological Lot of Dreams and oneiromancy in Hellenistic culture
Research for these has drawn on the Warburg Institute’s Photographic Collection in London, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
Funding
April 2026 — Washington State Astrological Association scholarship to present findings for the London Arts-Based Research Centre at the University of Oxford, the Association for Jungian Analysts, London, and Pembroke Lodge, Richmond Park, London.
June 2024 - June 2025 — International Association for the Study of Dreams’ Diversity Taskforce awarded BIPOC scholarships and invited speakership for their international conferences in the Netherlands, India, and online.