SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

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Reception at the Swedish Embassy in New Delhi,
Friday November 2, 2007

Web page: http://www.swedenabroad.se/Page____21587.aspx

Sweden has had diplomatic relations with India since Her independence in 1947. The Embassy of Sweden in New Delhi is located in Chanakyapuri. The present Chancery, Ambassador's residence and staff accomodation were designed by the prominent Swedish architects Sune Lindström and Jöran Curman.The 40,000 metres greenspace was landscaped by Walter Bauer. The buildings were inaugurated in November 1959 in the presence of the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

On November 2, Anna and Lars, along with the members of SASNET’s South Asian reference group (Dr. Rita Afsar, Dr. Tek Nath Dhakal, Dr. J. Devika, Dr. Dipak Malik, and Prof. Kumudu Wijewardena), were invited to the residence of Mr. Anders Sjöberg, Deputy Head of Missions at the Swedish Embassy. Several people from the Embassy were there to meet us, including. Stefan Jonsson, Counsellor of Science and Technology, and Carl-Gustaf Svensson, Counsellor of Development Cooperation.

The Swedish Embassy was generous enough to organise a reception in honour of SASNET to which more than eighty academics had been invited. It began with drinks and informal mingling in the garden, following which Anna introduced SASNET and talked briefly about its aims. Lars filled out the picture with details of SASNET’s history. The members of the reference group then introduced themselves and spoke of their aspirations for SASNET.
Dinner was then served courtesy of the Embassy and we all had a lovely time. Many of the guests expressed their gratitude for being invited and for the opportunity of getting together with colleagues in the area of New Delhi whom they seldom have the opportunity to meet. We were also amazed about the esteem in which SASNET is held.

Among the guests were not only people from the institutions and universities that we had time to visit in India this time. Other researchers involved in different kinds of Indo-Swedish collaboration also turned up, and we had discussions with them on the lawns. Some of them:

• Prof. Virendra Seth, Deputy Director, Shriram Institute for Industrial Research, Delhi.
• Prof. R.V. Upadhyay, Dept. of Physics, Bhavnagar University. Involved in research collaboration with the Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm.
• Prof. S. Jodhka, the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.
• Prof. Ummu Salma Bava, the Centre for European Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Also Coordinator, The Netherlands PM’s Grant; and Associate Fellow, Asia Society, New York.
• Dr. Veena Ravi Kumar, Reader, Dept. of Political Science, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, New Delhi.
• Dr. K.R.G. Nair, Honorary Research Professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

We also met a couple of Swedish academic visitors. One of them was Dr. Bent Jørgensen from the Division of Peace and Development Research (PADRIGU), School of Global Studies, Göteborg University. Bent has previously worked on ethnic conflicts in India, and in 1997 he defended his Licentiate thesis titled ”From Frontiers of Empires to Borders of States – and Beyond. Images from India”. Later on, his major research field is however Vietnam, where he has studied the linkage between globalisation and marginalisation, and how globalisation changes the living conditions of poor people and subnational identity groups.
Bent had just come from Rajasthan, where he had spent some time with students from his department. PADRIGU regularly sends students to India for fieldwork.

Another guest we had asked the Swedish Embassy to invite for the reception was the Swedish student Pär Fredborn Larsson (photo to the right) from Lund University. He has come to India on his own initiative and spends two semesters as a Masters student in the Persian language at the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Pär has written an article about life as a student at JNU, in the Swedish magazine SYDASIEN, No. 4/2007. Read the article (as a pdf-file, in Swedish).