What gender is the language of conflict?

It was 1998 and the governments of India and Pakistan were locked in a series of nuclear tests. Around the same time, researcher and author Aneela Zeb Babar was pursuing her second Masters in Gender and Development. The hyper psycho-sexual nature of the jibes both countries threw at each other — Humne bhi chudiyan nahin pehni hain — jolted her to attention.

Babar’s thesis focused on this gendered language. “In South Asia, we consider deterrence in militarism a very masculine idea of peace,” the 43-year-old explains. She found that this jingoism influenced the lives of women and moulded language on the streets of Delhi, Karachi and Rawalpindi. “You have a state deriding conflict resolution as a means to peace, seeing it as a feminine aspect. When it tells you that one kind of violence is justified, you are deriding not just the female as a person but femininity as a concept,” Babar explains.

As we enter another season of discontent in India and Pakistan, Babar thinks it would help to revisit these conversations. “Thoughts on how militaristic values phrase everyday conversations in popular culture and on social media might interest readers,” she says. She has compiled her theses in a book — We Are All Revolutionaries Here: Militarism, Political Islam and Gender in Pakistan. As a Pashtun who grew up in Rawalpindi, Babar was drawn to the subject. “The ‘80s was a time of martial law when Pakistan had started experimenting with religion as political control,” says Babar, who now lives in New Delhi with her husband.

The book covers issues like veiling and female preachers, and observations on the new, gender and class of social revolutionaries in Pakistan. “We try to explain women taking up weapons in South Asia as religious feminism,” she says, pointing out parallels in the Rashtra Sevika Samiti from the 1990s. “There was a massive effort to rope women into the social revolution without questioning patriarchal family ideology. The RSS was perceived to be an extension of the family and thus, women’s involvement in the movement considered acceptable.”

(We Are All Revolutionaries Here, published by Sage and Yoda Press, is available on Amazon for Rs 695 (Hardback) and Rs 485 (Kindle))