Mukesh Kulriya was named one of the American Institute of Indian Studies Fellows for 2024-26. The American Institute of Indian Studies provides fellowships for advanced graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and faculty, and named 31 fellows, 16 of whom were graduate students. Kulriya is the recipient of the Thomas W. Simons Fellowship.
Kulriya will use the fellowship to support research for his dissertation, “Riding on Bhakti Beat: Annihilation, Assertion or Appropriation?” Bhakti refers to devotional Hinduism, emphasizing songs as a primary means of prayer and devotion as opposed to the more orthodox and exclusionary Brahmanical ritual-based practices.
Especially important to Kulriya are the subaltern voices in Bhakti. Kulriya’s study reimagines Bhakti’s inherently congregational spirit as a collective process of emancipation for women and marginalized castes, with a geographical focus on Bikaner, Rajasthan.
“There are today, attempts to appropriate Bhakti practices for political mobilization,” said Kulriya. “These often come in the form of narratives of a pan-Indian Brahmanical culture. My dissertation is a reminder that devotional practices are highly localized and also complex. They are often about everyday resistance. Ultimately, this is a project about how popular music and popular religion intersect and shape the present and future of one-sixth of the earth’s population.”
Kulriya was recently the recipient of a grant from the UCLA Initiative to Study of Hate.