International migrants in Malaya frequently engaged in social and associational activities, often leading to the growth of what may be termed a diasporic civil society. Civil society organisations created a public space in urban areas to secure their interests and represent themselves through various activities, including social services, acts of community solidarity, policy advocacy and cultural activities. Each generation of migrants made its imprint by creating new organisations or promoting existing ones. The Bangla-speaking diaspora shared a similar historical process for space-making in Malaysia and Singapore. The previous chapter focused on Bengali place-making from the lens of political organisations and activism. This chapter explores further Bengali contributions to place-making from the vantage point of civil society, including associational and other activities. The binary processes of globalisation, that is, ‘globalization of the local’ and ‘localization of the global’, could help to articulate the role and engagement of Bengali migrants in the local and international sphere, especially since the end of WWI.

Bengali Civic Spaces within the South Asian Diaspora

During the early twentieth century, South Asian transnational communities formed different organisations under the umbrella term ‘Indian’ mainly for three reasons. First, despite different ethnic backgrounds, the Indian diasporic communities were open to forging cooperation. The Bengalis, among other diverse South Asian migrants, played a vital role in forming organisations and associations of a social and religious nature. For example, Hindu migrants disseminated the idea of reforming Hinduism in Malaya. S. N. Bardhan, a Bengali, was a founding member of the Arya Samaj Sangam, established in 1910. Later, he served as its president from 1911 to 1919. Adi Dravida Sangam, another Hindu reformist organisation, was founded in the 1920s in Singapore. S. C. Goho frequently arranged dialogues there on the Hindu religion. Apart from the religious debates, members of Hindu religious associations occasionally placed their demands before the government. For instance, delegates from the Arya Samaj, Dravida Sangam and Vivekananda Sanmarga Sangam appealed to Singapore's government to introduce an ordinance for the registration of Hindu marriage in the Straits Settlements.

In this chapter, we shall discuss the interplay of symmetry and topology that are essential in understanding the topological protection rendered by the inherent symmetries and how the topological invariants are related to physical quantities.

Introduction

Poincaré conjecture was the first conjecture made on topology which asserts that a three-dimensional (3D) manifold is equivalent to a sphere in 3D subject to the fulfilment of a certain algebraic condition of the form f (x, y, z) = 0, where x, y and z are complex numbers. G. Perelman has (arguably) solved the conjecture in 2006 [4]. However, on practical aspects, just the reverse of what Poincaré had predicted happened. Topology and its relevance to condensed matter physics have emerged in a big way in recent times. The 2016 Nobel Prize awarded to D. J. Thouless, J. M. Kosterlitz, F. D. M. Haldane and C. L. Kane and E. Mele getting the Breakthrough Prize for contribution to fundamental physics in 2019 bear testimony to that.

Topology and geometry are related, but they have a profound difference. Geometry can differentiate between a square from a circle, or between a triangle and a rhombus; however, topology cannot distinguish between them. All it can say is that individually all these shapes are connected by continuous lines and hence are identical. However, topology indeed refers to the study of geometric shapes where the focus is on how properties of objects change under continuous deformation, such as stretching and bending; however, tearing or puncturing is not allowed. The objective is to determine whether such a continuous deformation can lead to a change from one geometric shape to another. The connection to a problem of deformation of geometrical shapes in condensed matter physics may be established if the Hamiltonian for a particular system can be continuously transformed via tuning of one (or more) of the parameter(s) that the Hamiltonian depends on. Should there be no change in the number of energy modes below the Fermi energy during the process of transformation, then the two systems (that is, before and after the transformation) belong to the same topology class. In the process, something remains invariant. If that something does not remain invariant, then there occurs a topological phase transition.

Statelessness in Central Asian republics historically stems from the dissolution of the former Soviet Union in 1991, of which they all were a constituent part. Even though these republics had adopted inclusive and gender-neutral citizenship laws in the post-Soviet period, such laws failed to stipulate legal safeguards against hidden statelessness dimensions in the specific regional context of state succession. These laws, coupled with a conflict between formal law and indigenous practices, restoration of traditionalist societal tendencies, and bureaucratic administrative and technical procedures, created numerous stateless persons of undetermined citizenship, including across the border areas. As in many other parts of the world where statelessness exists, in Central Asia, it mostly affected the rights of women and children. Whereas recent policies of each republic positively address the statelessness problem within their own jurisdiction, such individual initiatives do not offer a long-term solution in a wider regional perspective. For state and non-state actors to be more successful in eliminating future incidences of statelessness, they must consider multiple challenges, including the relationship between gender and statelessness, not just within each separate jurisdiction but from a wider Central Asian regional perspective.

Like the military coups that give them life, projects of extra-constitutional political reform are “reflective and transformative occasions, moments between and betwixt ordinary times, when axiomatic values are invoked even as they are questioned and reformulated” (Coronil 1997: 124). Pakistan's head of state Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan ruled under martial law from 1958 to 1961 and then as president under a constitution of his regime's own design until a mass-resistance campaign led to his regime's demise in 1969. His administration relied upon emergency powers to contain regional and leftist political forces that had become increasingly aligned in the years preceding the coup against the centralizing tendencies of the postcolonial state. Paying attention to the discursive, spatial, and institutional connections between the powers of exception and the regulation and agency of everyday citizens, this chapter examines cultural and spatial pedagogies of nation-state building and citizenship that were launched in the context of Pakistan's first military dictatorship.

Much of this work in nation-state building took place under the Bureau of National Reconstruction, a “revolutionary” state institution created shortly after the 1958 coup. The bureau spearheaded two significant projects of authoritarian political reform. The first sought to impose a unitary Muslim national subject to the exclusion of native ethnic and regional identities, an initiative that centered Urdu, north Indian Islamicate history, and, to a related and lesser degree, Urdu-speaking Muhajirs as pedagogical models of Muslim nationality. This project was launched in conjunction with another initiative also housed within the bureau known as the “Basic Democracies” (BD) scheme. It sought to remake Pakistan's electoral-political landscape by limiting electoral franchise to locally bounded constituencies, leaving Pakistani citizens with few mechanisms at their disposal to represent problems – such as the inequities arising from industrial and agrarian capitalist control, and the growing economic and political dominance of Punjab – that confronted the nation at large. Both projects were part of a larger and coherent extra-constitutional strategy to enhance centralized state control over the country's provincial units (F. Ahmad 1998; Ayres 2009; F. H. Siddiqui 2012; Caron 2016).

Bengalis migrated to British Malaya through an evolving system regulated from both the sending and receiving ends. The system underwent sporadic changes, revisions and additions, often in response to public criticism or the need for efficiency. However, the flow of emigration and demand for labourers remained largely unaltered. In the early 1920s, a fundamental alteration occurred in migration history with the introduction of passports. This system led to stricter control of mobility, and with the fashioning of a new administration in Malaya and India in the 1940s, migration became even more controlled. The Straits Settlements were dissolved in 1946; Singapore became a separate crown colony, and the Malayan Union was formed with the Unfederated and Federated Malay States. In India, British decolonisation left the subcontinent divided into India and Pakistan, which each devised specific sets of migration rules and regulations. These changes in the sending and receiving regions left marks on migration governance.

Types of Bengali Migrants

Before dealing with the theme in detail, it may be pertinent to note that, based on its characteristics and governing systems, Bengali migration can be divided broadly into bondage or systematic migration and ‘free’ migration. Convicts, indentured and kangany labourers can be placed under the first category. Non-government as well as government agencies transported such labourers through stringent systems. Those being transported like this had no choice or very little legal freedom of movement. The Bengalis who migrated willingly from the early colonial period for better opportunities in commercial ventures and the government sector can be termed ‘free’ migrants. Though they are termed ‘free’, the choices of these labourers were still quite limited at home and overseas. These migrants also had only a little freedom of movement. There was another kind of migrant—those who had to leave India or Bengal due to political persecution. Many Bengali revolutionaries moved to Malaya during the anti-British and nationalist movements in Bengal.

Convicts

From the late eighteenth century, the EIC transported convicts from British India to the Malay Archipelago. Regulation XVII of 1817 categorised the convicts as those accused of robbery, burglary, theft or any other form of open violence, who were liable to be whipped, imprisoned and transported for life.

Black Americans and Indians built many connections to combat White supremacy and they positioned the Black American and Indian struggle as part of a global movement for equality, as W. E. B. Du Bois and Lala Lajpat Rai commonly emphasized. They utilized each other to modify their aspirations for their respective societies and achieve a meaningful social impact, particularly in the US. However, this impact largely occurred after Indian independence through the efforts of Black radicals such as Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and William Patterson who identified India as a source of sympathy for the Black American cause because Indians were similarly victimized by White supremacy under the British Raj.

Caste was not a colonial invention and, therefore, the end of British colonialism did not result in its annihilation and some caste elements of British colonialism have remained in India. One of the most striking parallels regarding how African Americans and Dalits remain marginalized is the persistence of “criminal castes.” Although some low-caste Indians could access education, land, and better jobs during the British Raj, occupational specialization was generally accepted as a defining characteristic of castes and tribes, even to the extent of defining certain tribal communities as “habitually” criminal under the Criminal Tribes Act. Originally passed by the British government in 1871, the British used the act to categorize some communities across the country as “born criminals,” irrespective of their criminal precedents. The act required adult male members of such groups to have weekly meetings with the local police and they were not allowed to leave their villages without permission. The categorizations had no basis in criminal evidence and were merely based upon racial and caste stereotypes. The British government initially proposed the act to reform “born criminals” through labor. However, when these “born criminals” attempted to make a living like members from other castes, they struggled to find work outside the settlement because of public prejudice and marginalization.