In her Brunei Gallery office in London University’s SOAS, the Deputy Director of the SOAS South Asia Institute Dr Navtej Purewal is influencing minds, young and old.
Such quiet leaders hold power but not in the flashy, in- your- face way that many Indians admire.
Dr Purewal works in the South Asia Institute at SOAS which oversees and coordinates the university's South Asia provision at SOAS; around 60 academics that research and/or teach on South Asia.
Dr Purewal liaises with and advises foreign and public policy bodies like the FCO dealing with the region.
Navtej also delivers professional and academic training for UK and international diplomatic staff, postgraduate teaching programmes, supervises PhD students, conducts research and coordinates partnerships with universities in South Asia.
Dr Navtej Purewal is an inter-disciplinary social scientist who, as a student, read politics, South Asia area studies, and international development. Her broad area of focus is on the political sociology of South Asia, with a particular interest in gender and the on-going bordering processes across the region.
Navtej is the lead (along with colleagues at TISS Mumbai) on a UKIERI network grant in collaboration between SOAS and four Indian universities.
Dr Purewal has also had a number of collaborative international links with universities in Ghana, Sudan and Bangladesh.
She was the principal investigator on a large project (2008-2010) which explored popular, shared religious practices in the region of Punjab across India and Pakistan.
Dr Navtej Purewal expands on this.
“My father’s family are from pre-partition west Punjab (Jarawala) and my mother’s family went from Punjab to Kenya in the early 20th century. I was born in the US and came to London to study in the early 1990s and stayed on. In that sense, we have been spanning borders for generations. I spent 2008-2010 living on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, first in Lahore and then Chandigarh. I was there doing research on a project exploring shared sites of culture and piety at shrines scattered around Punjab. A tragedy for the region is that local people cannot travel or engage with the other side of the border.”
Navtej has discovered much about the Punjabi language during her research.
“Punjabi has so many dialects that it is often difficult for a native speaker of one to understand everything that another Punjabi-speaker is saying. This richness must be celebrated and not curtailed. Punjabis are also very proud of their language, so differences of dialect don’t detract from this. The fact that Punjabi is written in two scripts (Shahmukhi and Gurmukhi) has meant that the literature is not so easily accessible, but it’s spoken and oral tradition is very rich.”
Dr Purewal has a special interest in the music of Punjab. Her mother taught her kirtan starting from when she was five years old. Navtej would perform in American gurudwaras with her mother.
“I learned the violin from the age of seven to sixteen through the Suzuki school, a Japanese method based on rote-learning. When I went to Lahore in 2008 I began to learn kirtan from the late Bhai Ghulam Muhammed Chand, whose family were the last rababis to have performed kirtan at the Golden Temple in Amritsar. I also learned from the late Ustad Hafiz Khan and later Pundit Yash Pal in Chandigarh which exposed me to classical music traditions in Punjab.”
Dr Navtej Purewal has an interest in feminist politics and has published and taught on topics relating to the violences and exclusions of gender injustice in South Asia including abortion, reproductive rights and female education in the context of neoliberal 'development' and governmentality.
The scholar’s most recent book is Son Preference: Sex Selection, Gender and Culture in South Asia (Oxford: Berg, 2010), and other publications include studies of diasporic Sikh shrines, Sikh-Muslim relations, access to housing for the rural poor, the impact of displacement and partition, and gender and development. She is also the co-author of Hodder’s Complete Course in Panjabi.
Biggest Challenge
Dr Purewal says, “the biggest challenge for my research has been to bring all of my interests together (which often cross borders and conventions) and to keep them all going at the same time. However, I feel that this biggest challenge also provides the greatest satisfaction. For example, I teach students from both sides of the India-Pakistan border, some from South Asia and others from the diaspora, who especially come to SOAS to study South Asia because they want to ask critical questions. I enjoy sharing my overlapping experiences of research, learning and exploration with students and to learn from them too. The impact that ideas and new research can have on students is what keeps me going.
