Early modern South Asian history

Purnima Dhavan is a historian whose research includes the social and cultural history of early modern South Asia. Her University of Washington profile records a doctorate from the University of Virginia in 2003 and describes teaching interests that include South Asian, Mughal and environmental history. She works with literary and visual sources and studies relationships among religious, linguistic and status identities and political institutions. This range places her work on Punjab within a wider South Asian context. An institutional biography records a scholar’s stated interests at a particular time; individual publications show how those questions are pursued in detail. Her teaching also includes courses on the Mughal Empire, while her research brings literary and visual material into conversation with social history. Her stated interests include literature, gender and environmental history.[1]

When Sparrows Became Hawks

Dhavan’s When Sparrows Became Hawks: The Making of the Sikh Warrior Tradition, 1699–1799 studies the emergence of Khalsa martial traditions in the eighteenth century. Oxford University Press describes the book as centring the experiences of peasant communities and examining the varied perspectives and debates through which a composite Khalsa culture took shape. Dhavan’s university profile explains that she uses Persian and Punjabi sources to explore social mobility and the aspirations of individual Sikhs. The account is an interpretation grounded in selected sources, not a claim that every person’s experience followed the same path.[2]

Reading sources and interpretations

Dhavan has also written about Persian histories of Sikhs commissioned by the East India Company; the abstract asks about those texts’ narrative frameworks and the information networks of their authors. Reading such works together shows how historians investigate both events and the making of historical records. Readers can compare translations, evidence and alternative interpretations when following this field further.[3]

Sources & notes

Source records include access dates and, where known, limits on what was examined. Checks used AI assistance; independent human or specialist review has not been completed.

  1. University of Washington. Purnima Dhavan ↗Written source · Source date: publication date not established · Locator: Biography and research interests. Accessed 2026-11-03.Institutional biography, publisher description, or scholarly abstract inspected.Return to Early modern South Asian history, paragraph 1 ↑
  2. Oxford University Press. When Sparrows Became Hawks ↗Written source · Source date: 2011 · Locator: Book and publisher description. Accessed 2026-11-03.Institutional biography, publisher description, or scholarly abstract inspected.Return to When Sparrows Became Hawks, paragraph 1 ↑
  3. Purnima Dhavan; Sikh Formations 3(2), pp. 111–124. Redemptive Pasts and Imperiled Futures: The Writing of a Sikh History ↗scholarly journal article · Source date: 2007 · Locator: Publisher abstract on Persian histories, narrative frameworks and their authors’ networks. Accessed 2026-11-04.Publisher-indexed abstract and the author’s university bibliography inspected; the complete article and original manuscripts were not independently inspected in this pass.Return to Reading sources and interpretations, paragraph 1 ↑
Help improve this entry. Suggest a correction with a source. · Read recorded changes
Record PH-PEO-0265 · English edition · human review not performed