Ph.D. Student Kush Depala

Kush is a PhD candidate at the department of Cultural and Religious of History of South Asia. He completed his BA in South Asian Studies and Study of Religion at SOAS, as well as studying Sanskrit in the AIIS program as well as in Gujarat. 

His PhD project, titled “Ritual Bodies, Ritual Identities: The Role of Ritual Texts in Forming Belief and Identity in North Indian Bhakti Sampradāyas” examines how Gujarati devotional movements, in the colonial and post-colonial era, author and adapt Sanskrit ritual texts to express their individual belief systems, and how this in turn helped to build a robust and strong public identity for the respective movements. He also examines the role of (digital) technology in the transmission and performance of rituals, as well as using and making AI tools for working on manuscripts. 

He started his doctoral studies in June 2022 and is supervised by Prof. Dr. Ute Hüsken. His other research interests lie in Gujarati and vernacular devotional literature, Indic thought systems, digital religion, Manuscriptology and Artificial Intelligence.