Introduction

One bright, warm afternoon, I sat across the desk from Akrithi, a trans woman in her thirties who has a guru1 and is also an NGO staff member. As sunlight streamed in through her office window behind her, she excitedly related her experience of a recent advocacy project for transgender people. What struck me was how her perception of her abilities and potential shifted as a result of her participation in this kind of activist work:

From Akrithi's perspective, the skills she developed through her employment at an NGO caused a dramatic shift in how she perceived and understood herself and her place in the world.

Akrithi's employment history also includes sex work. With a note of pride in her voice, she relays how she “got out” of sex work and into office employment at an NGO:

Akrithi frames her employment history as a linear progression, moving “up” from engaging in sex work at a public park to a career as an office worker in an NGO. Her pride is evident in how, upon becoming an office worker, she steadily climbed the NGO employment ladder to her current position. Tellingly, Akrithi does not simply think of her career trajectory as an alternate source of employment and income compared to sex work; rather, it symbolizes the transformation her life has undergone. According to Akrithi, the changes in her employment have “proved” that she has accomplished something truly remarkable.

This chapter introduces the elements of Flavius Agricola’s funerary ensemble (sculpture, epitaph, tomb), positions them within the Vatican necropolis, and contends that they combined to form a cohesive, carefully conceived whole.

In 1626, workers took aim at four spots marked on the floor of the largest church in Christendom, Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The structure’s immense dome hovered more than four hundred feet above them, for they stood at the intersection of the church’s nave and transept. They began to dig. These shafts, when eventually filled with masonry, would support a towering bronze tent (called a baldacchino) over the high altar. As shovels and picks hacked deep, the excavation took laborers back through layers of history. After breaking through the floor of the Renaissance church, they burrowed through the fill separating it from its fourth-century predecessor. They then cracked through that building’s pavement and struck an ancient cemetery (Fig. I.1). If authorities expected to find anyone’s remains, they were those of Peter himself or one of his papal successors, for they believed the key apostle and later popes were buried here.

Appendix

It is somewhat implicit that the readers are familiar with the first course on solid state physics, which mainly deals with electronic systems and teaches us how to distinguish between different forms of matter, such as metals, semiconductors and insulators. An elementary treatise on band structure is introduced in this regard, and in most cases, interacting phenomena, such as magnetism and superconductivity, are taught. The readers are encouraged to look at the classic texts on solid state physics, such as the ones by Kittel, Ashcroft and Mermin.

As a second course, or an advanced course on the subject, more in-depth study of condensed matter physics and its applications to the physical properties of various materials have found a place in the undergraduate curricula for a century or even more. The perspective on teaching the subject has remained unchanged during this period of time. However, the recent developments over the last few decades require a new perspective on teaching and learning about the subject. Quantum Hall effect is one such discovery that has influenced the way condensed matter physics is taught to undergraduate students. The role of topology in condensed matter systems and the fashion in which it is interwoven with the physical observables need to be understood for deeper appreciation of the subject. Thus, to have a quintessential presentation for the undergraduate students, in this book, we have addressed selected topics on the quantum Hall effect, and its close cousin, namely topology, that should comprehensively contribute to the learning of the topics and concepts that have emerged in the not-so-distant past. In this book, we focus on the transport properties of two-dimensional (2D) electronic systems and solely on the role of a constant magnetic field perpendicular to the plane of a electron gas. This brings us to the topic of quantum Hall effect, which is one of the main verticals of the book. The origin of the Landau levels and the passage of the Hall current through edge modes are also discussed. The latter establishes a quantum Hall sample to be the first example of a topological insulator. Hence, our subsequent focus is on the subject topology and its application to quantum Hall systems and in general to condensed matter physics. Introducing the subject from a formal standpoint, we discuss the band structure and topological invariants in 1D.

Introduction: Ma Zhucai's Transculturalism and Interpellation

This chapter analyses narratives and recent representations of the Ancient Tea Horse Road (ATHR) trader Ma Zhucai (1891–1963), who developed Kalimpong as the headquarters of his business empire as he charted and moved in and within the trade connections between the 1910s and the 1960s from southwest China. The narratives here bifurcate in two separate Mas: the official Chinese patriot Ma Zhucai (the Memorial-Ma) and the Kalimpong-based trader-smuggler Ma Chu Chai to his English-speaking contemporaries (or the IB-Ma). The former representation emanates from an edited volume whose title is best translated as Diqing Literary and Historical Materials, vol. 10: Memorial of the Patriotic Overseas Chinese Leader Ma Zhucai (hereafter Memorial). The latter representation is from the archives of the British Indian colonial state (mainly of the IB) and the postcolonial Indian state along with ethnography done in 2016–2017 in Shangri- La, Yunnan and Kalimpong. The argument that develops in these Memorial representations is a robust picture of an idealised Ma embodied in the Chinese nation, zhonghua minzu, protecting its borderlands. What emerges unfailingly is the icon of an ideologically interpellated Chinese trader who crossed bounteous borders, from Gyalthang, or Shangri-La, in Kham-Yunnan through Lhasa in Tibet to Kalimpong in India, yet remaining loyal to his motherland. Here we critically contextualise Chinese patriotism and nationalism and its concomitant politico-cultural technologies of memorialising by unpacking Ma's 41 years in Kalimpong and the geographic and economic entanglements with a GMD and CCP China.

Gyalthang (Shangri-La), Ma's native place, is located in the easternmost foothills of the Himalaya mountains at around 3,300 meters above sea level, seen from a Chinese perspective as in the ‘northwest corner of present-day Yunnan province in southern Kham. From 1725 until 2001, this area was referred to as Zhongdian in Chinese.’

Until 2017, Rohingyas – often dubbed the ‘most persecuted minority in the world’ – making the perilous trek across the border into Bangladesh were predominantly male, as they were not only denied citizenship and legal rights in Myanmar, but they also lacked economic opportunities within the country to support their families and communities (Kojima 2015; Albert 2017). On 25 August 2017, an escalation of violence in Rakhine State in Myanmar – where the Rohingyas largely resided – reached a tipping point, with horrific reports of murder and kidnapping of Rohingya men by Burmese soldiers, forced public nudity and humiliation, and sexual slavery and gang rape by military captivity directed against Rohingya women and girls. These attacks resulted in a humanitarian disaster that forced over 700,000 Rohingyas to flee their native land and seek refuge in the makeshift and overpopulated refugee camps outside of Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh – specifically the Kutupalong– Balukhali mega-camp (used interchangeably with ‘camp’ or ‘camps’ throughout this book) – making it the largest refugee crisis in the world. Compared with past waves of refugees, there was a drastic increase in the number of women and girls crossing the border into Bangladesh. The concentration of refugees in Bangladesh's refugee camps is amongst the densest in the world, with tarpaulin and bamboo shelters precariously built on sharply sloped hillsides. There are now an estimated over 1 million Rohingya refugees living in the overcrowded and squalid camps, as the influx continued steadily over the subsequent months, with the majority of the camp's residents being women and girls (Ellis-Petersen 2019).

Unlike most debates on forced migration which focus on the larger structural needs of refugees, this book focuses on the lived experiences of Rohingya refugee women. Discussions of power relations and the reproduction of power asymmetries are often neglected in the dominant literature on refugee women's everyday subjectivities. The narratives of Rohingya women's perception of their own lives and the ways in which they negotiate, navigate, contest, and adjust to their surroundings are vital for understanding how these women forge kinship networks and learn to make a life in their new surroundings.

A Town Transformed

When I began fieldwork in August 2017 in Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh, it was not my first trip to the seaside town. I had visited Cox's Bazaar several times over the years, particularly during my childhood on trips to Bangladesh to visit relatives, and I remembered it always having the same rush of tourists flocking the city centre bazaars, with bicycle rickshaws and CNGs (auto-rickshaws) caught in stifling traffic jams and the sounds of holidaymakers partying through the night. In late 2016 and early 2017, I visited the Rohingya refugee camps (located 20 miles outside of Cox's Bazaar town) for the first time as part of a humanitarian project I was helping to organize. At that time, the camps consisted of a small number of refugees – a few thousand – who had fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar at varying periods over the past three decades. Only a handful of humanitarian organizations had set up shop in the centre of town. Nobody had anticipated a sudden influx of over a million people in the months to come.

When I returned to Bangladesh eight months later, in August of that year, the ambience felt starkly different. On the flight from Dhaka to Cox's Bazaar, it was unsettling to find myself as one of the only people of Bangladeshi heritage on a flight that was usually always filled with locals heading to a weekend getaway. This time, the flight was filled with international UN aid workers, NGO staff, and government officials. Driving into Cox's Bazaar from the airport was an even greater shock. Bangladeshi tourists were few and far between, and the streets were now filled with foreigners and humanitarian aid staff eager to ‘see’ firsthand the effects of the recent influx of Rohingyas from Myanmar. I was now one of them. The realization that I too had become a part of this sudden ‘fascination’ with the plight of the Rohingyas, and what that means for the ways we use the marginalized to obtain ‘breaking news’, would trouble me throughout my fieldwork and to this day.

China as an idea and entity is everywhere today, both materially and symbolically. One way of looking at it is to address the present and future in a world that is profoundly interconnected, although with a resurgence in the idea of borders and barriers. We have a changed mediascape, our planet's sense of brokenness, isolation and fragmentation still infusing the post-Brexit and post-Trump world of nationalism and populist politics with troubling irresolution, but we must also recognise events along the Silk Roads since 2015, where there has been a narrative of strengthening ties, cooperation and a network of relationships with immense global reverberations and continual shifts. This book is not so much clearly concerning these complex geopolitics, notably vis-à-vis India and China, but about looking back and looking forward, in intersecting timeframes, at how these relationships are effected and affected, constrained and cracked. The book could have taken a different form but is confined to relating the representations and shenanigans around a border town during an exacting period.

The burden of the book has been to trace how China figured in the sociopolitical imaginary of the British and thereafter in the postcolonial Indian state, as well as in communist literature in China itself. More specifically, the book considers the Kalimpong border regions between the 1940s and the 1960s (also a consequence of its earlier history of settlement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) as its main case study to explore these issues. The book's primary subject remains—even more so in the twenty-first century—relevant in terms of the border claims in the region and the anxieties that those provoke. The existential angst is very much present, one could say, in relation to the people of Chinese origin but Indianised in varying degrees, still living in the area or in the diaspora of Kalimpong/Indian Chinese that proliferated around the world.

The predicament of Muhajir national recognition was brought into sharp relief for me one winter evening in Karachi, circa 2009, when I stumbled upon a talk show dedicated to the theme of “language and power” (zubaan aur hukmaraan) on a local private satellite television channel. It featured poets representing each of Pakistan's major regional languages, including Sindhi, Balochi, Punjabi, Pashtu, and Urdu, deliberately and favorably highlighting the country's ethnolinguistic diversity. Despite this, Urdu's status as a universalizing “bridge language” was on full display in this setting, as each poet recited a work in their respective regional mother tongue, followed by a lively discussion in Urdu on the commonalities and differences of imagery, form, and political subject matter.

What caught my attention, however, was the presence of a self-identified “Muhajir poet” in a show dedicated to Pakistan's marginalized native poetic cultures. His delivery was in the kind of chaste “Urdu-e-Mualla” that Pakistan's largely non-Urdu-speaking population has grown accustomed to hearing since the advent of state-run radio and television. Although the gentleman's recitation was delivered in Urdu, his comments stood apart from the other panelists in that he did not emphasize the linguistic particularity of Urdu or Muhajirs. The verse's subject matter was more political and existential in character, casting Muhajirs as beings who had crossed a “river of fire” (aag ka darya) to live in Pakistan. Addressing an immediate and impersonal audience made up of the country's native ethnolinguistic communities, the Muhajir poet expressed grievance – “but you still see us as foreign” (tum abhi bhi ghair samajhte ho) – tinged with defiance: “this land is our final place of refuge (thikaana).” The potency of the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) poet's recitation elicited audible calls of appreciation from the non-Muhajir panelists (“wah! wah!”), suggesting a flow of aesthetic and moral acknowledgment of the collective history being portrayed. This scene of aesthetic recognition was short-lived, however. Later in the program, the Muhajir poet suggested that Muhajirs were “that nation (wo qaum) that brought people from the lower middle classes into power.” To this, two of the panelists politely replied in unison, as if to clarify a factual error: “Muhajirs are not a nation (muhajir aik qaum nahi hain).”

This chapter explores how readers who have chosen an e-book decide on their next step, contrasting the motivations for purchase (or conditional use license purchase), loan, and piracy. It draws on legal scholarship, book history, and fan studies to investigate how bookness and realness in the form of meaningful ownership can be constituted if desired, acknowledging that bookness and realness may be unwanted when readers prefer temporary, unauthorised, or unambiguously illegal uses. This recasts e-books as an integral part of building a personal library: sometimes as components, but sometimes just as tools. It concludes with evolving understanding of the rights of the reader and the fraught question of e-book control, and readers’ experiences of conflict with corporate entities over ownership of their collections. This further demonstrates how readers are able to move flexibly between conceptions of e-books as real books, ersatz books, and digital proxies.