Mission Statement

The Sundar Singh Institute of South Asian Studies represents an emerging independent centre for critical inquiry and engaged scholarship. We strive to address the most pressing questions facing humanity regarding dignity, justice, and peace through sustained, interdisciplinary engagement with the critical realities of South Asia. We are anchored in a vision of research that has an intellectual and moral purpose. The Institute offers a unique form of regional study with Christian ethical imperatives in research informed by the vision and witness of Sadhu Sundar Singh.

In selecting of Sadhu Sundar Singh as the name of the Institute, especially to denote his boundless love, we acknowledge at the outset a foundational commitment to compassion as a scholarly virtue. The life and witness of Sadhu Sundar Singh challenges us to pursue truth not as an abstract idea, but as a engagement based in neighbourly concern and spiritual kinship. We are also supported by the St Bartholomew Missionary Society which embodies a similar ethos of integrity, humility, and service; and together we recognize that these shapes our mission: to foster an ethically vigilant, critically aware, and spiritually grounded scholarly community.

We do not view the pursuit of knowledge as an end in and of itself, we consider knowledge as vocation; the vocation to respond to the demand for morally serious scholarship in society. Our starting point is a simple but radical premise: scholarship must serve not only our minds, but our hearts into the service of the common good. And in that spirit, the study of South Asia is to be approached, not only as a intellectual pursuit, but also as a moral and historical obligation.

In this vein, we will comprehend and engage ethically with South Asia, with all its richness and complexity, its ancient civilisations and sacred histories, its contested realities and its lived realities of struggle. Engaging with South Asia involves more than intellectual acuity, it means humility and compassion. In our approach, we recognize the lived realities of the peoples of South Asia—marked by diversity, persistence, and contradictions—while also critically facing the legacies of the structures produced by colonial subjugation, structurally imposed injustice, systemic inequality, and geopolitically unable to consider full belonging.

The Institute’s research methodology is rooted in an interdisciplinary inquiry, employing the resources of the humanities and social sciences. These fields equip us, when at their best, to interrogate not only the origins of inequity and means of oppression, but to discern new ways for re-imaging futures that are more just and humane. Using disciplines such as: history, political theory, religious ethics, cultural studies, and development sociology, we strive towards articulating a clearer vocabulary for understanding and kinship practices, both de-romanticized and de-reductionized.

In addition, the Institute aspires to more than engage in critical analysis. We believe that knowledge should serve a generative purpose: our scholarship must lead to action, lead to change, and lead to hope. Scholarship must be reparative not just rigorous; it must be prophetic and not simply descriptive. Our commitment is to produce research that matters—research that makes a difference to communities, informs policy, and furthers peace.