Navjit Kaur is a linguistic and socio-cultural anthropologist with research based in South Asia, primarily India. Her research addresses the role of work and labor in techno-financial capitalism, and in particular, how this labor is narrated. To this end, her research foregrounds the vexed relationship between narratability and work as it comes to bear on worker biographies, with a focus on women laborers, migration, caste, housework, and language itself. Navjit works with materials in English, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Persian and Mughal Persian.
Her first book project, Narrating Labor’s Remainders: Sorority, Techne and Woman in Indian Punjab examines the double effacement of labor in techno-financial capitalism. Based on ethnographic and archival fieldwork among lower-caste Muslim families in Malerkotla, Indian Punjab, Narrating Labor’s Remainders returns to the theatre of financial and A.I. literacy programs in Indian Punjab which propose gestures of financial inclusion couched in terms of feminist empowerment. The lower-caste Muslim women participants not only refused these gestures, but also repeatedly made a demand for waged work. On the one hand, Narrating Labor’s Remainders foregrounds the impossibility of listening to the women’s demand by the feminist and state organizations promoting finance capital but more importantly, on the other hand, the failure of the muslim women themselves to narrate themselves as workers. Expunging the fantasy of romanticized resistance and yet lingering in the widened aperture opened by the refusals of these women against any form of financial gesture, the book examines these affirmative sabotages of capital. It also demonstrates how the question of work refuses to be banished, returning in spectral forms which themselves resist capture in language. Navjit’s research has been supported by Wenner Gren Foundation, American Institute of India Studies, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and other intra-mural grants at Princeton University.
Apart from her book project, for the past 5 years, Navjit has been collaborating with Dr. Fauzia Farooqui at Princeton University on a documentary project called Taoos Chaman (Peacock Garden). The project is an oral history archive of various dialects, folk songs and genres of storytelling in the Awadh region of India. The project aims to show how different genres of storytelling—songs, dance, and other cultural forms—trouble efforts to codify either a ‘Hindu’ or a ‘Muslim’ festival genre. The film also examines other often hidden questions in these everyday forms of myth and storytelling. Apart from her academic and visual media works, Navjit has also collaborated on translating poets and short story writers from regional languages of India, a part of her writing is under publication with Bloomsbury Press.
Degree and University:
PhD, Princeton University, 2025
M.A., Anthropology, Princeton University, 2021
M.Phil, Social Anthropology, Delhi School of Economics, 2018
M.A., Social Anthropology, Delhi School of Economics, 2016
B.A. (hons), University of Delhi, 2014