Swati Parashar opes for more solidarity between women

Listening to the wordless

– Instead of creating a world where only people who think alike can enjoy life together, we should learn from nature: without diversity, life cannot be sustained.

Words spoken by Swati Parashar, Associate Professor at the School of Global Studies. Her field of research is gender, war and security in South Asia and East Africa.

Text: Eva Lundgren Photo: Johan Wingborg In 2014, two Indian teenage girls were raped and murdered in a field where they had gone to relieve themselves. The case garnered a lot of international attention, Swati Parashar reminds us. – The indignation should have been about violence and the vulnerability of Indian women. But the media chose to focus on the lack of toilets, as if rape is about inadequate sanitation. This is how the Global South is often described in the West, as if every terrible event can be explained by some form of deficiency in development.

Swati Parashar argues that this is an example of the three principal barriers to global solidarity between women. – We talk about the Global South in a terribly prejudiced way. And there is also a perception of “non-negotiable differences”, i.e. that certain differences between the West and the Global South are so fundamental that it is simply pointless to discuss them. Furthermore, there is also a notion that women in India, Latin America and Africa lack the ability to express what they want, which is an absurd notion. What we need to do instead, is to learn to understand the ways in which they express themselves; not everything is about words, you can express a view through silence as well.

Swati Parashar is originally from a small town in the state of Bihar in eastern India. It was what she experienced in childhood that made her a feminist.

– In the town where I grew up, there were constant electricity and water shortages , the general level of education was low, and girls were married off as young as 10–13 years of age. That was true for my mother as well, who never received any formal education and was married off in her early teens. When my three siblings and I complained about all the homework, she would point out that we must never become like her, we must study to get a better life.

Patriarchal authority over women and children is common in India. – The laws are frequently outdated, and violence against women rarely leads to proper police investigations or legal proceedings. When I was growing up, I reacted to all of that and was almost always angry.

Even though Swati Parashar’s family was also patriarchal, both herself and her sisters, as the first women of the family, were allowed to enter higher education. – I started at Delhi University, and later took my MA in Politics and International Relations at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. For me, it was a tremendous experience to come

to this enormous, bustling city. But you had to constantly be on your guard. For example, my friends and I always carried safety pins on the bus in order to have something to stick into all the men who constantly groped us.

Swati Parashar completed her Ph.D. at Lancaster University in the UK. Since then, she has lectured and conducted research into war and terrorism in South Asia at universities in India, Singapore, Ireland, and Australia. Recently, she has developed an interest in East Africa, not least the reconciliation efforts following the genocide in Rwanda.

The India in which Swati Parashar grew up in the 1990s was a turbulent place. The economy was liberalised, the country was modernised, but also suffered terrorist attacks and violence; for example, in 1991 the Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was murdered. – The younger generation is less forgiving than the older generation, who lived through a terrible amount of violence, such as during the Partition of India that divided British India into two independent states India and Pakistan in 1947. The fact that young people are more restless now than before is not exclusive to India, it is true for many countries. It is partly linked to a masculinity that feels lost and in crisis, which is expressed through increased violence.

But India is not solely a country of conflict. It is also a nation full of poetry, art, literature and music. – The exquisite ghazal and padyam forms of poetry can express a vast amount of meaning in a handful of words. And music from my part of the world is nearly infinite in its abundance. But I have to admit that I also like old-fashioned Bollywood music, and spend some of my time commenting on artists in various media.

India is also the birthplace of several religions, such as Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism.

– Hinduism is the oldest religion, and has many gods and goddesses, whose representations are not constrained to binary forms of gender. Hinduism enables many different philosophical paths.

Cricket, the most colonial of all sports, is also very popular in India, Swati Parashar explains. – It surprises many people, but I truly love cricket, particularly the old format of five-day test matches. But cricket is actually more than just a sport. There is a wealth of stories about famous cricketers

○ Swati Parashar

Current position: Associate Professor at the School of Global Studies. Family: Partner, as well as family in India. Lives in: Gothenburg Publications. She is the author of Women and Militant Wars: The Politics of Injury (Routledge, 2014). She is the coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research. London and New York (with Tarja Väyrynen, Élise Féro and Catia C. Confortini, 2021), Rethinking Silence, Voice and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains (with Jane Parpart, Routledge, 2019), Revisiting Gendered States: Feminist Imaginings of the State in International Relations (with Ann Tickner and Jacqui True, OUP, 2018). She conducts research into and lectures on the point of intersection between feminism and postcolonial thoughts and approaches. She is a regular contributor to The Indian Express and other media. She also started the blog blogalstudies.com. Interests: Classic Indian music, cricket (the most colonial of all sports). Latest read: Aghora: At the Left Hand of God by Robert E. Svoboda. Favourite dish: Masala Dosa and South Indian thali. and how they transform the life of entire communities in the countries where they come from, and there is something magnificent in all this. Even though a growing number of women play cricket it is a very masculine sport, and I have even been chased out of cricket discussions when I wanted to venture an opinion. But that is also interesting for a social scientist like myself.

Swati Parashar came to Sweden four years ago, from sunny Sydney to the city of Gothenburg, which had a temperature of -11 °C at the time. – Here, me and my colleagues have started conducting research into starvation as a means of inflicting violence in conflicts. When it comes to war and terrorism, there are international agreements governing how to handle the perpetrators. Starvation, however, is often seen as an unfortunate circumstance, even though famine is almost always caused by intentional policies.

Those of us who live in the wealthy parts of the world should pause occasionally, and remind ourselves of how privileged we are, Swati Parashar states. – Doing that may come more easily for someone with my background, where every success always required hard work. I am incredibly grateful of the opportunity to study, and of being able to continue to learn new things every day. I have also always had amazing mentors and wonderful colleagues. Academic success is not an individual achievement, but is dependent on all the people who support you in various ways, and with whom you collaborate over the years.

Swati Parashar also believes that we should occasionally reflect on nature, and its enormous riches and diversity. – Nature teaches us that differences are not dangerous, on the contrary, they are essential to our continued existence. Creating a world where everybody thinks the same way, and perceives the world in the same fashion just seems silly. The tolerance of the intolerant concerns me, that they are so certain about the truth, when we in fact do not know very much about life at all. Instead, we need to be as kind and empathetic as possible, even to those who we feel may not be entitled to our care. We need to realise that the problem does not lie with them, but with us and our, at times prejudiced, way of thinking about other people.