AS Katoch

Biography

AS Katoch is a British-Indian researcher of dreams, divination and Indian visual culture. His work brings together art history, the history of science (especially 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, where he divides his time between Kangra district and Staffordshire, England. He holds an MA in Literary Linguistics with Distinction from the University of Nottingham (2011), with research on the cognitive poetics of oneiric texts, and has been an independent researcher at the Warburg Institute Library, London, since 2024. 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). In 2026 he held a Washington State Astrological Association scholarship to deliver three talks on astrological oneiromancy in Pahari art for the London Arts-Based Research Centre (LABRC).

His approach combines textual and art-historical scholarship with first-hand practice. He reads Sanskrit dhyāna and Jyotiṣa material; works within the Hellenistic, Persian-Arabic, Italianate and early modern British astrological traditions; and has a sustained practice in painting (trained at the King's Foundation School of Traditional Arts, London) and in dream interpretation. Working as both scholar and practitioner shapes how he studies astrological and oneiric painting: he treats 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 and now held by 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: 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.

His wider research concerns dream imagery and oneiromancy in the Indian miniature tradition, including the late eighteenth-century Svapnadarśana in the Museum Rietberg, Zurich, now attributed to Nikka of Guler and his Chamba workshop, related dream-omen manuscripts in Chamba and the Śakunāvalī tradition, and the place of astrological and devotional painting in contemplative practice.

Selected Talks

  • November 2026 (forthcoming) — Oxford Symposium of Occult Studies, "Grimoires as Scholarship, Scholarship as Grimoires", St John's College, Oxford, 19–20 November: Reassembling Dispersed North Indian Pahari Astrological Folios across British and American Museum Collections, c. 1810

  • November 2026 (forthcoming) — LABRC conference, "Alchemy: Exploring Metaphorical Transformations and Arts-Based Research", University of Oxford, 14–15 November: "Dreaming the Divinanimal: Wonder, Omen and the Gaja-Siṃha in a Practice-Led Mythography" (published in Journal of Mythology, vol. 1, no. 3)

  • October 2026 (forthcoming) — IX International Conference on Myth Criticism, "Myth and Woman", Universidad Complutense de Madrid: "Saraswati in Chamba Dream-Omen Folios: Wisdom Goddess and Royal Authority"

  • October 2026 — "Creative Practices and Bridging the Invisible" (online), University of North Carolina at Charlotte, with the Center for Advanced Studies Erlangen, the University of Exeter's Centre for Magic and Esotericism, and Societas Magica: the dispersed Pahari astrological series, on the Art Institute of Chicago panel "Beyond the Western Occult: Decolonizing Global Esoterica"

  • July 2026 — LABRC conference, "Ecopoetics", Pembroke Lodge, Richmond Park, London: the tiger as lion in Pahari painting

  • June 2026 — LABRC conference, "Embodied Aesthetics", Association of Jungian Analysts, London: the Svapnadarśana at the Museum Rietberg, Zurich

  • May 2026 — LABRC conference, "Sacred Arts", 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 conference, "Alchemy", St Anne's College, Oxford: painting dream omens from the Śakunāvalī tradition, with active imagination as a form of Indian yogic alchemy

  • June 2025 — International Association for the Study of Dreams, annual online conference: the eighteenth-century Śakunāvalī 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, read through material culture, art history and cultural astronomy

  • June 2024 — IASD annual conference, Netherlands: the astrological Lot of Dreams and oneiromancy in Hellenistic culture

Research for these talks has drawn on the Warburg Institute's Photographic Collection, London; the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence; the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Ashmolean Museum, 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.