Prof. Swati Parashar: “Rethinking the coloniality & violence of famines in the Global South”
Public Lecture at the University of Freiburg, 20 November 2023
Postcolonial scholars contend that we are still doing body counts of colonialism’s violence, hence, epistemic and discursive categories may not account for the materiality of violence and the magnitude of physical and psychological injuries it causes. As Hannah Arendt would say, “what a risky business to tell the truth on a factual level without theoretical and scholarly embroidery.”
Can we consider erasures and silences as violence when we are still looking at injured, violated, exterminated, disappearing, mourning, lifeless, dead, rotting and suffering bodies? How can bodily injuries beyond sudden and spectacular deaths be accounted for on a temporal scale?
In this lecture, Prof. Swati Parashar (University of Gothenburg) sheds light on the slow and silent deaths, displacement and gendered suffering that occur in geographies of starvation produced through colonial encounters. The lecture engages with the existing dilemmas of studying the violence of famines and the coloniality of discourses around starving bodies in the Global South. This reflection considers the need to break away from the theoretical impulses of locating famines within the existing frameworks of disaster and crisis, and yet argues that justice and accountability for mass hunger crimes can only be enabled through particular discursive framings of injured bodies and the violence of colonial continuities.
Host & moderator: Dr. Amya Agarwal, ABI Freiburg
Co-host: Dr. Fabricio Rodríguez, ABI Freiburg / Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace & Conflict
~~~~~~
To learn more:
Camilla Orjuela & Swati Parashar (2023): Memory and justice after famines: an introduction, Third World Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2023.2236954
Swati Parashar & Michael Schulz (2021): Colonial legacies, postcolonial ‘selfhood’ and the (un)doing of Africa, Third World Quarterly, 42:5, 867-881, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2021.1903313
Swati Parashar (2013): What wars and ‘war bodies’ know about international relations, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 26:4, 615-630, https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2013.837429
E-INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: Swati Parashar – Interview – 14 July 2023. https://www.e-ir.info/2023/07/14/interview-swati-parashar-2/
~~~~~~
The ALMA Lecture Series 2023 is organised by the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) in cooperation with the BMBF network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace & Conflict, the Global Studies Programme (GSP) and the Colloquium Politicum of the University of Freiburg.
~~~~~~
The project Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace & Conflict (Hierarchies) is a collaborative network of the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) Freiburg, the Center for Conflict Studies at the Philipps University Marburg, the University of Bayreuth & the University of Erfurt.Hierarchies is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) over a period of four years (2022-2026).
Good evening everyone it’s nice to see some familiar faces some new faces here in this room and uh we’re very glad to see you all uh first of all I would like to welcome Professor Sati parasha very very very early who has so kindly agreed to travel from all the way from
B to share knowledge and perspective with us also like to thank my colleague uh Dr Amia hasely agreed to um accept our invitation to host today’s uh event um I’m also very thrilled to welcome our guest swatti parel who is a professor of heals and development research at the
University of gothenberg and has traveled all the way from Sweden to be with us today um it is my great pleasure also to say a few introductory words for S who is not only an inspiring scholar but also a wonderful human and a very kind academic
N over the years SW has extensively and passionately worked um and published on multiple themes around World politics such as critical security and War studies violence and development in South Asia field research ethics and women militant militants and combatants uh and I think a very important contribution of swati’s research has
Been towards pushing the boundaries of feminist scholarship in international relation discipline and highlighting the significance of encounters between feminism and postcolonialism and each head of swati’s work has also immensely helped me in my own work and shaping my thought process so personally very much thankful for
That also s um along with a number of commitments as an author and editor of books and journals she’s also currently working on a project on sexual violence along the War and Peace continum funded by the Swedish research Council and I think sti’s study of the nuances of violence is particularly very important
In these times when we are witnessing heighten forms of violence around around us um I would also encourage people to read her excellent non-academic writing that is also available online in form of blogs and newspaper articles um and you know I can go on admiring sti’s work but
Due to the limitation on time and also the interest uh in hearing out STI I clearly should wrap up now and once again many thanks for accepting our invitation STI and for joining us today the floor is all yours thank you thank you so much yeah I think the this works there’s
A lot of technology in the room I have to cope with all of that some video recordings Zoom uh and everything but thank you all for being here on a Monday evening my first question to fabrio was why would anybody choose to come at 7 on
A Monday uh for to to hear a talk but there you are and thank you for being here uh I am so honored and so privileged and thank you both of you fabrio and Amia for inviting me uh nothing pleases an academ mic in these
Times than to have a space where you can be talking about things that you like you know we like to talk about things right um absolutely an honor and I think it’s uh it’s also interesting to note that um I I find it interesting at least that
In in political science spaces not a lot of people want to talk about hunger and famine this is not a topic that attracts uh political scientists generally I mean I’ve tried to sell it in different departments and I’m very forceful but um journals don’t pick it up um IR journals
Are not interested and that’s the point of making this case that there are this is a very serious issue uh this requires a different kind of theorizing conceptualizing and uh policy intervention and so we need to really talk about it but then I but then none of us should be surprised that political
Science actually doesn’t want to talk about it because uh or IR because they are not where people are or orary people and ordinary lives is not usually where you find IR scholarship or political science scholarship going generally I’m not saying that doesn’t happen um War democracy State foreign policy we talk
About all of that but certainly not um as I say hungry uh emaciated malnourished slow dying bodies and what that means uh to us in in many different context uh and how we managed to bypass some of the uh some of uh these images some of what is actually happening right
In front of us uh and reduce it to a private household uh tragedy a crisis I mean these are the terms that you will find being used for uh for famine debts right and I’ll just come to the figures they are staggering but this is what we
Hear like uh you know it’s a household crisis of uh you know and generally the images of famine that uh that we’re going to look at in a bit but uh you know it’s a case of food insecurity it’s a disaster I think that’s normally the language that is
Deployed uh so here we are and and it’s it’s probably the outcome of War it’s it’s the outcome of a colonial encounter it’s not something on its own something on its own and that’s really the point that we’re making here uh it’s it’s as if it’s something completely normal for
People to starve and die in large numbers in different parts of the world um it’s not like War it’s not like other kinds of exceptional violence uh so uh you know death that doesn’t really count uh and uh there is and more importantly there is no human agency or accountability that is
Attached to famines people die but nobody’s responsible people can die in millions uh this this is what we find has happened in colonial times that many famines happened during colonial era in different parts of the world uh but of course people died and there’s no accountability so how then do we think
About it I want to start with uh a beautiful I like poetry and especially Udu poetry from uh the Indian subcontinent there is a poet called jiger madadi and I’m not sure there are any uh Udu um people here who can read but he writes uh Amia you would understand this insan
It’s part of a long poem on the Bal Famine of 4243 and Loosely translated uh it means it is unbearable to watch this condition of humans despite humans being there uh but we still watch and that’s what he’s saying it’s unbearable but the amidst humankind we are watching this and we are all
Bearing witness so as academics as research such as uh whatever else we do we are bearing witness to hunger deaths in the world okay so last few years um we have uh seen that there has been some attention to uh to famines and to starvation uh crimes uh early this year
In fact I don’t know if you all followed the news I think sometime around June there was news about a starvation cult in Kenya where 100 people had been starved mostly children um we were trying trying to write something about it but it was really hard and uh that
Was morly mostly for a religious purpose I mean starvation has been used has been weaponized in many different contexts but here we are talking about starvation Mass scale starvation as a crime that happens for many different reasons uh but in May 2018 something remarkable uh happened uh there was an addition to the
UN Security Council resolutions on civilian protection and armed conflicts and this is the language of ir that uh that really is something that uh that is interesting for us building on previous un resolutions on humanitarian laws human rights and protecting civilians and vulnerable populations resolution
2417 uh 2417 for the first time and this is important to note recognized the need to break the Vicious Cycle between armed conflict and food insecurity this was for the first time that it was taken up by the UN Security Council and it was a milestone it called for maintaining
International Peace and security by addressing food insecurity and famines uh in wars and armed conflicts this pathbreaking resolution also added Credence to obviously the sustainable development goals of eradicating hunger which we are all familiar with and work with then in 2020 something remarkable happened um that um Can does any body
Remember in 2020 the Nobel Peace Prize I’m from that Nobel country next door I didn’t travel very far though from Sweden uh but in 2020 who got the Nobel Peace Prize anyone no okay the world food program the world food program and I think it was really remarkable uh one of the
Largest humanitarian organizations addressing hunger and promoting food security recognizing uh that there was a serious Global crisis of food uh and how the world food program in its very quiet uh very sustained way has been fighting hunger uh and famine from the Grassroots to uh you know very high levels of
Global governance and if you uh look at its spread across different countries uh it has been doing a lot of work uh also hunger and food crisis emerged as serious threats during the corona pandemic and I’m sure you remember the images particularly of reverse migration uh people fleeing urban areas
Going back to their cities uh small towns Villages there was Massive Internal migration going on and the real threat of starvation existed uh and uh it was a very precarious situation to add to all of these precarities I don’t have to uh really uh talk too much about
It but we know that climate change of course impacts uh will impact continues to impact the future of agriculture food distribution and we don’t even have enough data on some of these things as they will unfold also since we’re talking about what makes this particular moment really interesting to be talking about hunger
And and famine uh it is also the 90th anniversary of the holod doore which was the famine in uh in Ukraine in the early 1930s from 32 to 33 uh which is also recognized in several places as the genocide side of the Ukrainian people under stalinist Russia and about uh uh 3
To four million people uh are supposed to have perished in that um so by the way just to emphasize that if you look at some of these figures they are staggering figures if I if I tell you uh for example the Great Leap Forward famine in China 30 million uh overall
Across the you know Colonial period in India 30 million uh across you know a century so these are really large numbers for those times right so but these numbers are not written in stone you can they are debatable theyve been debated by Scholars it’s just to give
You a sense that the more conservative estimates that point out also suggest that genocidal levels of violence has occurred because people have been starved to death um so why am I interested in this um I think some of this came from my own frustration of watching that we have
We’ve become very selective about what we outrage about right so um right now of course there’s a terrible terrible war going on in the Middle East and we are all outraged about that but um I come from India originally and uh right next door um 2 million almost the
Population of Gaza uh afghanis have been displaced from Pakistan where they were as refugees and they’ve had to go back to their country there are horrific stories coming around of how they are you know packing their bags and leaving and it’s it’s a it’s a nightmare it’s a
Humanitarian nightmare but of course we we have not paid that much attention there is a war uh Ukraine has also uh been important and last few years that I’ve been working on this project with different colleagues of mine we have noticed that uh there is very little
Attention to these kinds of uh crimes and I’ll come to uh famine crimes as we call them or violence that is uh caused by mass hunger um so these debts clearly matter and to me uh I started thinking about this in terms of violence itself so if it is a spectacular violence of
War where people are dying and we see these images which we confront every other day and now we have ai and we have all these kinds of fake images and it’s it’s a world of images I’ve never understood how we kind of empathize only through images right but we do and and
It really appalls me that we cannot seem to find that empathy without images but it is selective it is some images do the rounds and then they do the rounds and it’s what what really is this outrage manufacturing industry that outrage is about this but doesn’t feel that much
Outrage about that because certain parts of the world are not accessible they are not important uh there are all these questions that I’m sure that us all of us have been asking right so these debts matter clearly uh postcolonial Scholars content that we are still doing body counts of colonialism’s violence and
This is the big point that I want to make that we are still counting bodies we are still looking at dead bodies we’re looking at uh what has happened the extermination of people in different forms over a period of time and how that Legacy continues to impact uh you know
Different different parts of the world in so many ways um therefore therefore the question is uh the idea of epistemic and discursive right categories that we claim uh especially when we study violence it may not account for the materiality of violence and the magnitude of physical and psychological
Injuries it causes so yes we can go on and on talking about discourses of violence which is very important for this project as well because one of the arguments that we make is call famine Mass violence because if you call it Mass violence it changes the terms of
The discourse and it asks who is accountable for this who is respons responsible for this if you’re going to call it disaster well if you’re going to call it crisis they can be mitigated but if you call it VI violence it gives it a particular political purchase when you
Use certain terms right so on the one hand I’m saying that discourses and this has been the challenge discourses are problematic because discursive and epistemic categories take away from actual real violence the discussion that we should be having H having over bodies but at the same time this courses matter
And we’ll come to that uh some of these questions um I remember Hannah rent saying in in one of the in one of the pieces that what a risky business to tell the truth on a factual level without theoretical and scholarly embroider and this is what we keep doing
All the time whereas actually truth stares us there in the open I mean this is a question that has always nagged me as an academic and I don’t know if you also uh suffer from that some of it is the Imposter syndrome very familiar but also what do we do actually there’s a
Sense of Despair as a world at the end of the day I can come over here and talk and we can discuss certain issues and have a conversation but how do we really engage with real world and the issues out there how do we as Citizens as uh
People as individuals as you know located in the world in different context how do we make sense of uh so much that goes on and I guess some of this issue really came came up when I started studying famines um so can we consider erasures and silences as
Violence uh when we are still looking at injured violated exterminated disappearing mourning lifeless dead rotting and suffering bodies and me the different layers of bodies that we’re talking about different levels of injuries to the body our bodily injuries only about blood and war and me that’s
The question that I that has bothered me about violence um is it always about sudden and spectacular deaths on a temporal scale if it’s quick you know there’s a death in in this period of time it takes a while to die of hunger you don’t immediately die your body you
Know how you lose sustainance there there’s been so much written uh novels and poetry and artwork I mean that was our you know point of entry into the project as well it’s very hard to kind of just take hard facts so one of the things we did was studied artworks and
Studied uh those things that could actually tell us how people had uh imagined this tragedy looked like uh and how they had tried to capture it in different ways so uh what about the slow and Silent debts displacement and and suffering that occurs in geographies of starvation produced through different
Kinds of encounters and most mostly Colonial encounters so uh there is this dilemma of studying the violence of famines and the coloniality of discourses around starving bodies particularly in the global South it considers the need to break away from the theoretical impulses of locating famines within the existing Frameworks
Of disaster and crisis and I’m repeating the point but this was the kind of thing that we wanted to move away from and think about violence in terms of colonial continuity ities uh and also how do we kind of methodologically and conceptually um how do we undo violence
Whatever we know of it how do we understand it how do we kind of unpack it undo violence uh and how do we understand hunger within that uh what is this undoing of violence and I’ll talk about that a little bit so first of all this was this has
Been a collaborative project we have um you know our colleague who is um working on his Doctorate working on famines in Africa I work on uh uh on the Bengal famine and famines in Asia South Asia then I have colleagues who uh Camila who’s been working on transitional
Justice there are three aspects to this project or the way we imagine this one is of course hunger and famines as they occur but how do we remember them especially famines of the past right we remember Wars there are War memorials so we have been studying famine memorials
How do we memorialize for whom and and why and then the other question for us is Justice right if we are remembering things in a particular way or not remembering them because remembering is also about forgetting how does that lead to transitional Justice for for many people around the world right so there
There are these kinds of uh we tried to do this mapping around these two concepts that how do we remember and how do we seek Justice right so um and we came in also collaborations can be really rewarding and my friend camil Ella works on um my colleague as well at
The department works on transitional Justice and memory and I work on violence and we kind of came together with this puzzle um so what we’ve researched and for me on violence we have researched on all forms of violence right continuums Wars peace you know sexual violence which pretty much a lot
Of attention has been given to it from feminists um but we’ve not really I would argue still investigated the concept of violence itself in modern times which has of course changed also violence of the past which has morphed into all sorts of different things now what does this concept do right how is
It limited by the English language for example I’m only writing in English but there’s a particular understanding of violence in different languages as well right uh who is inside that violence who is outside that violence which bodies matter and what gets labeled as violence and most importantly who gets to label
An act or event as violence and this is really important who gets to decide what is a violent act or not is it Global institutions the state civil society us as academics uh and this is this is a big debate because it’s also about the genocide for example is something a
Genocide or not uh I recently got asked in the classroom by students like why did you use genocide for the ringas and I had to really articulate that there is the genocide convention this sort of fits into that narrative this so you know that that’s a good question to ask
How how are we using some of these terms right war or terrorism or genocide right so why have we not paid attention to hunger deaths although hunger is on the rise uh in the world famine victims and survivors don’t matter because the debts are less visible less bloody less gory
Uh or the fact that there is no resistance and these are questions to Think Through uh I have some facts here which are important in 2016 100 million people faced crisis level food insecurity and increase by 20 million from previous years and then in 2017 we
Had so many risk famine risk areas in uh mostly in Africa South Sudan Nigeria Somalia Yemen these are still affected areas by the way uh and and if you go back into history between 18 7 and 2010 uh at least 100 million people died in large scale famines and this is Alex
Tal’s uh data where he’s been writing about famines and making a case for uh for uh uh the fact that it should be recognized as mass violence and we kind of uh Alex has been involved in our project as well and he has been inspiring us and guiding us and so we we
Kind of continued with that inquiry uh Mass starvation should be seen as a tragedy at par with genocides and wars and uh we had for example in the last few years the risk in Yemen in Sudan at the moment um it’s it’s enormous even when we think about the war in the
Middle East in Gaza we have been talking about people being starved how are we going to deal with it right uh and and the latest data uh kind of suggests that 122 million more people are facing hunger in the world since 2019 alone which is just as the pandemic started
Until now it’s a large number of people uh and um you know a number of un organizations five un agencies have just come out with a report this year so if you just if you’re if you’re a data person if you like your numbers these numbers are staggering they are much
Bigger than War debts that are reported there are people who are starving and they are dying because there is lack of food but is there lack of food and that’s the question really um so when we think about famines and because there’s not so much time to
Really analyze why famines occur um we we think about of course most often crop failure entitlement failure s writes about that um Amar s food distribution issues market supply chains Etc weapon of War colonialism we read about these causes right we’ve been told all this but the complicity and this is the
Question that we have here but the complicity of societies and governments and states is what makes the violence of famine so pervasive so legitimate it’s considered okay for a few people to die like this uh that it’s perfectly fine it’s normalized it’s normalized uh there’s a silent extermination of undesirable bodies or Surplus
Populations causing no moral outrage and without any accountability right uh amidst all the media attention to the exceptional violence of Wars terrorism genocides we tend to forget all the millions of victims of hunger now in this context I want to move on to thinking about why for example uh famine
Is not referred to as violence right mostly we use all these different euphemisms for it it’s not violence it’s disaster it’s this it’s that but why not I mean initially when we started researching in different libraries we would look for the Bengal famine or we’d look for China famine and they would say
Oh disaster the key words would be disaster it would wouldn’t come if you put violence or if you put like justice or you know there certain key words that would work in disaster crisis food crisis food insecurity and we’re like yeah but there are famines that are
Caused by uh human Agency for example the Bengal famine that I study 1942 43 Churchill the war hero was not a war hero 3 million people uh were starved in Bengal alone because the it’s not because now it’s been established it’s not because Bengal did not have food
Production but because all the food was channeled towards British war efforts right but nobody told us that story and Churchill is the big war hero uh but of course these are he’s not the only one there are other kinds of people uh uh and governments and uh and basically the
Whole Colonial powers of of their eras who are era which are which have been responsible for many many famine crimes okay so just to quickly take us through the idea of violence that I’m interested in right violence in discourse and language and this is something to think through this
Demonstrates further how the ways in which we talk about violence pain mourning uh in some sense in in metan narratives or in philosophical terms how can it be devoid of any specific reference to the human subject and his or her experience or their experience right so we kind of have become a little
Philosophical about violence and discourse and language what is we also kind of uh use it quite um quite Loosely to argue that you know this is discoursive violence this is epistemic violence so are we really grasping the extent to which um you know the construction and representation that are
Seen as uh you know violence are act are also taking into account the actual acts of violence right so there is there is an extracted discourse of violence uh which doesn’t necessarily address address the fact that there is violence on the ground right so uh discourse often this focus on discourse has taken
Away from actually doing body counts in some ways and debatable but we can talk about this um exceptional violence has mediatized spectacle right the tendency to view violence as exceptional events this is also another thing that we all grapple with outside of everyday politics and this type of analysis
Highlights uh what what what you can call security moment right there’s a security crisis so there’s violence in the Middle East people are dying in Gaza in in Israel we have seen the hostage crisis you see it on your face so it’s it’s it’s actually violence in that
Sense also as I said it’s mediatized it’s totally controlled by the media what constitutes uh on your face every now and then those images that are shown to us which makes us think that okay this is uh something that is V so so there’s a certain exceptionality also
With which violence is presented famine is outside violence right it is not it it it merely implies that famine could be a byproduct very often you’re like I often get this question oh but it’s not violence it’s really a product of something uh well sexual violence is
Also a product of War but we have studied sexual violence for what it is so famine is mass scale starvation deaths of people so it is violence of that kind uh so it’s not merely an outcome of War it’s a deliberate deliberate war strategy that is used in
In different parts of the world uh so we need to think about it and this idea that it is outside the realm of violence is problematic also famine is when when you think about violence it’s also very masculinist representations and if you look at it from a feminist point of view
What is blood core bodies you know it’s it’s there’s something spectacular about that moment but here what do you see in famines sh drinking human forms emaciated bodies mostly if you if you close your eyes and think about images these images are mostly of um of children women and and men who have
Shrunk and you can’t tell a man for a woman right and how do you kind of those images are not attractive they’re not aesthetic even when you think about uh violence as the Aesthetics of violence and what gets represented so then that doesn’t attract uh enough attention as
Well it’s a it’s a very feminized gaze and it’s also represented as if it happens only in the household and I have some pictures uh to take us through that uh famine as violence in inaccessible invisible geographies of course there’s a big reason why we don’t want to talk about famines because it
Doesn’t happen in the global North generally what has happened in Ireland and Ukraine past famines but we don’t have such severe acute shortages of food and threat uh in in in the global North so of course it’s happening in Sudan darur Somalia Yemen uh we can talk about
Those places right and this is an interesting point to note because even postc colonial states and societies are very very anxious in labeling something as famine so even so famines of the past as well the anxiety comes from the fact that there’s a lot of Shame attached to
Uh and we and uh We’ve researched on this that there are there are different reasons why people societies don’t want to commemorate remember famines because it’s it’s death which is unesthetic it’s unappealing it’s not a masculinist martyrdom it’s not something uh that attracts people’s attention in that way
So even post Colonial societies are anxious about it they ask reparations but to investigate famine crimes that’s not something they in fact they would deny that there have there have been famine crimes they would say yeah okay yes Colonial Powers did it but it’s not happening anymore we are yes some people
Die of starvation but it’s not and this is really interesting how Colonial continuities work right so inaccessible geographies that are not strategic spaces for possible interventions right um and and so what is commemorated some of the most commemorated famines are in the Irish famine and and Hol the mo not
And some in Finland but we found like there is absolute uh lack of interest and and kind of at least commemoration or thinking about uh justice in famines in Africa and Asia right uh famine as silent violence and this is my fifth Point without resistance um right so
Very often violence is also the sight of resistance but do bodies that are slowly uh disappearing and depleted bodies do they resist of course they do there are food riots and there they been there is resist resistance of a different kind but uh but it is silent violence without
Resistance right uh famine also as cascading violence in many postcolonial societies uh and cascading violence has been a theoretical framework used by colleagues like din Costa and John Breet who talk about uh crimes cascading to war war cascading to more war to crimes within those cascading uh aspects of
Violence you find famine uh also occurs at various different points point of time um also uh the more important the final Point here famine as something which is occurring affecting the household so although it is public it is not public there is a private Dimension
To it it it who are the people affected households it’s not like the state or the society or you know it’s it’s not something that occurs in the marketplace uh there there are so many stories that you read about uh famines that actually are happening in within the household
The representations are remarkably uh uh telling because they are mostly of the household and I’ll come to that in a minute within all of this uh uh stories about violence uh we think we we’ve imagined for us what works is the idea of slow violence right it is slow
Violence and we use here some of the works that have been left for us by colleagues uh who write about how those at the margins of world politics understand violence they negotiate with the daily yet Elites exploit violence to a fix Collective identities Forge a common political project and subsumed
Dissent in this way they deny opportunities for transformation in exchange for more violence and this is a quote from uh my dear friend Lily Ling uh who left us in 2018 but a remarkable scholar who was thinking about theorizing always from the margins so how do we think about violence in the
Sense where where uh it is is uh it is considered it is consigned to normaly in a way that it is uh depersonalized and we we like these very normalized myths about violence because it is comforting this is violence so it doesn’t work with famines right and
Similarly uh we continue to erase in that same uh in that same line of thinking erase histories of people and societies uh which which have to do with colonialism and particularly families like in in many cases for example even in India we have had these debates on reparations for example right should the
British uh think about reparations yes so the cost calculation has occurred in many different uh contexts but uh very few actually say that 3 million people died in the Bengal famine I mean one of the things that you hear about British colonialism Visa other colonialism is
That it was a little bit more benign they didn’t have so much violence compared to the others but as if this violence of the famine didn’t matter right so anyways these are uh debates to Think Through let me take you some images that um that I have here for you
From the Bengal femine uh and uh these are very disturbing images but I want to take you through this so that uh you can understand how and I’ll come to this in a minute about how uh famines have been talked about and these images are powerful because they were used uh in in
Very very interesting ways they were used by the British Empire also to uh inculcate a sense of solidarity towards the Empire through relief works right relief is a very important part of uh community building so they were using these images for Relief work but in the Imperial project right on the other hand
Some of these images are also depicting of household uh what happens within the household the representations the famine memorials also in different places are to do with the household so i’ just take you through this so you can get a sense of it I am reminding you again this is a
Trigger warning the pictures are extremely disturbing so please if you don’t uh want to look at them uh please don’t all right okay so this is of course Deal’s quote uh starvation is a uniquely demoralizing crime for its victims this is because the ultimate perpetrators are remote um and sorry here oh
Yeah while the indignities and cruelties are intimate and immediate and I think this is as powerful as it can be um yes Churchill since I study uh the Bengal famine in some detail I don’t know why it’s moving so quickly uh sorry yeah so can you see that yes this
Is from 1943 the Bengal famine uh just pay attention to what what is what is this kind of uh what who produc Ed these images and how they were circulated in the Imperial um project this is of course an earlier famine that occurred this is again from The Madras
Famine so take note of the household right most of the pictures are taken outside the house outside in front of with children women there’s a there’s a particular narrative around that right it’s it’s it’s the home sleeping bodies eating not eating um yeah this is from the China fine um the
Great Leap Forward famine conservative estimates U 30,000 30 million uh people perished in that and these are of course artistic kind of representations apart from the pictures there’s also a lot of artwork that is available this is of course women and children also what is foregrounded as images mostly women and
Children this is in Dublin again women lots of women children and this is interesting this is from um uh the uh Irish famine and these uh women 4,000 women from warehouses were taken to Australia uh and this is something that I studied in great detail and how gender nationalism coloniality
Kind of maps itself onto uh you know in in a story of famine because the famine occurred and these 4,000 women were shipped Irish women were shipped starving women were shipped to Australia and the idea was that they would make amilies with the convicts who had been sent there political convicts and others
Who had been already sent before and the idea would be that that would be the birth of Australian nationhood so there is a memorial in Victoria uh for these women who went there and what happened to them and how they sort of uh lived their lives and you know how they made
You know some of them U you know married and they they they were the in some sense the founders of the Australian nationhood I found it so powerful and so interesting what goes on that’s basically there’s a rock and people walk past it I mean it’s very interesting to
Map and see what these memorials look like for famines war memorial has a different feel to it but famine uh it’s first of all it’s in very few places but it’s how people walk past and wonder what it is but you have to kind of um
Now this is very interesting this is in uh Sydney this is again the commemoration of the Irish famine uh the Potato Famine as it was called and uh I want you to pay attention to the artwork here this is an art installation right outside H Park in Sydney uh and you see
This is the household this is the table the ladle the soup bowl uh a plate you know everything is so intimately household this is one of the shelves there with uh representation of the potato and the Spade so um just absolutely uh and on the glass door here
Beyond this Beyond this table are the names of all the all the people who died and who um who didn’t survive the famine here and this is also interesting because these are representations on uh in in in media about how famine stories are told mostly with women and children
Right now I wanted to uh take you through these pictures because they tell us a story about um household and how there’s a certain way in which this violence becomes uh really something which can be erased which can be normalized which can be naturalized and uh which can which can be completely uh
Erased out of out of the whole thinking about violence in terms of its exceptionality right so we use the concept of slow violence which provokes us to think about violence is a long-term harm that mutates and looks beyond its original causes the immedi the visceral and the visible right uh it
Also enables us to locate famines as slow violent events that kill and injure a large number of people during a certain period of time and in specific geographies and as a kind of a spatial concept slow violence invites us to include uh in some sense the gradual deaths destruction and layered deposits
Of uneven social brutalities within the geographic Here and Now slow violence has been conceptually deployed in understanding environmental threats um climate change and injustices there’s a lot of uh uh you know talk of slow violence but uh and it’s a it’s a concept from Nixon but
Just to give us a idea that we we think that this for us works that this is slow violence and it needs to be recognized as such um I do have uh some um things to say about how we are thinking about uh the coloniality of it and all but let
Me talk about a couple of other important things that are important when you looked at these pictures uh there is a certain way in which populations during the colonial times were depicted for the cause of the Empire right the pictures played a role the relief measures played a role uh but also how
People were controlled and surveilled right and this is important because some of the arguments made were about culture that these people are culturally like this so they starve and you know uh their bodies are meant to starve they are not tough bodies I mean there are number of quotes for example from
Churchill himself that uh right that Indians are their bodies are not sturdy enough of course they’re going to die of this and they they breed like rabbits so a few will die the whole malthusian logic that Surplus population and some people can be exterminated through that
So there was a lot during colonial uh era and in colonial famines if you uh study them there’s the whole narrative of controlling surveilling bodies that were going through this first of all they did not starve on their own there they were deliberate attempts deliberate ways in which large scale Mass
Starvation occurred this wasn’t just an event because there wasn’t enough food and that’s something that’s across but more than that how that was linked to cultures that were uh you know uh that were more prone to being exterminated because uh you know they they they starved you know they look emaciated
They don’t look strong enough they are androgynous bodies I mean uh they they don’t look they’re not manly enough they’re not like Greek bodies Indian bodies are not like Greek bodies so of course they they should starve or they starve it’s not a big deal so this is
How it was normalized uh in that sense right uh the relationship between uh representations of custom and famine famine relief policies for example so there there are certain oh they have cast and they have class and you know the the cultural norms and their traditions and their religion they just
Enable this kind of starvation so it’s kind of really uh interesting to go through that let me conclude yeah I will conclude here uh the stories that uh exist when we think about famines more broadly and different and we have studied uh famines in many many different contexts there is a special
Issue that we we have just published uh a number of Articles from U the the issue hasn’t come out as an issue but it’s going to uh nevertheless all the articles are out in third world quarterly if you Google famines or if you get in touch with me later I can
Send you there are 10 or 12 articles from different parts of the world which talk about famines in Brazil in Iran in India uh in um in uh in in hore in Ukraine so we have in China so we have so many different stories of these famines that we’re trying to bring forth
And argue that they are being Remembered in many different ways is now now is the moment for example where Chinese uh people are talking about what happened during the Great Leap Forward and they’re using social media available in China very creatively to bring back the memories of the famine and how they can
Think about justice but our whole project is geared towards that to thinking about famine in such a way that we can make a case uh to uh larger structures of power and ask who to hold accountable and why not to hold people accountable right governments or institutions or uh whoever that be right
So the stories shatter our myths about the public private realm and how we understand violence at the intersections of these domains are inside and outside them the attention to violence in public discourse is enhanced by extensive 24 into 7 media coverage of War affected Landscapes injured and mutilated bodies
Blood gore and displacement of people all of which demonstrate the rupture of normaly and accept ality what does not get as much attention scholarly attention is in the public discourse are certain other kinds of violence and mass atrocities where the death and suffering are neither a rupture of everyday life
Nor a body count that can be routinely sensationalized and evoked in the nurturing of political constituencies and in demands of accountability these are slow unesthetic and ordinary Deb of ordinary lives consider for example that we pay attention to Wars and Refugee bodies as well uh but little to
Feminized dying emaciated bodies as I told you numerous cases that are still on ongoing uh we inhabit the era of certitudes and certitudes are violent uh as I’ve tried to show discussions on the nature of violence have produced discursive certitudes as well talk about discourse and and they’ve become
Obstacles in the pursuit of peace and justice um I often read Deborah Thomas’s work uh exceptional violence embodied citizenship in transnational Jamaica uh she writes about Jamaica about colonialism how uh modern uh stories of violence in Jamaica have nothing to do with you know these moments of violence
But how they’re rooted in coloniality but one of the other the powerful things that she writes about is uh real Justice is a sustained conversation about history and about the place of that past in the present in terms of other than those of righteous blame and liberal gift uh liberal guilt forgiveness is
Only sometimes restorative but never reparative right so how do we think about both restorative justice and reparative Justice and when you think about famine nothing less will will suffice because uh these are deliberate deliberate cases of people being starved right uh so how do we think about building trust acknowledging this kind
Of suffering uh and dealing with strategies or coming up with strategies as Scholars as as individuals as working in the media and the policy world how how do we think of it in terms of a future where we can seek Justice for crimes that have happened but also that
They don’t occur in the future I want to end with this uh poem uh again an U poet sah one of my favorite poets and basically what it means is that the Silent Lips and tired dying eyes they are gathering proof against Mankind and we are all complicit thank You