Dear Friends, Colleagues, and Fellow Scholars,

Greetings from the Sundar Singh Institute of South Asian Studies.

It is an honour and a weighty responsibility to be in the role of Head of Faculty at an institution that emphasises a critical and conscientious engagement with the many different realities of South Asia. Our work is motivated by our service mission; we believe that research should extend the boundaries of knowledge and while the work must aspire to ‘knowledge for the sake of knowledge,’ the critique should not end there. Knowledge must also serve the common good; locally, regionally and globally.

While our institution has no official motto, a unifying theme in our work is a deceptively simple but extremely demanding imperative: to engage with South Asia as a living, breathing web of socio-political processes, ecological systems, and cultural practices, rather than as shiny, colourful objects of study. We are committed to research that is methodologically sound but also, ethically grounded and contextually reflexive. Whether our focus is on speaking to transformations in relations of gender and national security, the impacts of climate change on the monsoon, the web of ethnic conflict, or the transformation of Bollywood narrative spaces, we aim to foreground and engage knowledge that seeks to understand and advance justice.

Our research will touch on a variety of disciplinary boundaries and national borders, as we connect the political economy of climate resilience, human rights, and cultural sustainability. We are aware that research is not isolated; different areas interrelate and spark interests in, and illuminate, other areas with respect to challenges being experienced. Our interdisciplinary mindset is the basis of our belief that scholarship is worthwhile—and necessarily so.

We have been fortunate to work with likeminded institutions and partners, from The United Nations Development Programme, to the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford, to respected India-based partners such as the Institute for Public Health. These collaborations remind us of the importance of placing scholarship within an inquiry-and-action frame of reference especially with respect to issues such as equity in sustainable development, gender justice, and democratic accountability.

Our recent work exemplifies this integrated sensibility. The South Asian Climate Resilience Blueprint, under the stewardship of Dr Anjali R. Kapoor, is calling together climate scientists and environmental activists into a reflection that articulates regionally attentive, and yet globally relevant, ways to account for climate adaptability and resilience. The interdisciplinary project Governance and Democratic Reform, led by Dr Isaac S. Sato, continues to extract empirically informed, and normatively informed, understandings and frameworks that seek to enable transparent and participatory governance in particular complex sociopolitical contexts.

As we move forward, we commit ourselves, again, to the proposition that knowledge is not an end in itself, but a form of service. To know South Asia is to participate in an ongoing conversation about its people, its histories and its futures—to purse this work, requires courage, humility and an abiding commitment to intellectual honesty. We strive to honour the communities whose lived realities shape our work through ethical imagination and rigorous analyses as we provide our support to an improvement of social equity and human dignity, however small our contributions may be.

We thank all of our partners—scholars, students, collaborators, and all friends, for your critical engagement and collaborative creativity that have made our work possible and important.

We warmly offer our continuing development of this knowledge journey with you—to make research space together, to participate in academic panels and workshops together, and to iteratively build the spaces for research together. The Sundar Singh Institute reaffirms its purpose to all knowledge—in its own, and as it leads to creating transformation in practice.