The lack of citizenship or statelessness may be brought about by action, misaction and inaction of not only the state but the society in the country as well. The state and society often join hands in depriving a community of citizenship and, in so doing, both parties may act legally and extra-legally against recognizing and giving identity documentation to the community in question, again according to the text of the law, its implementation, or both. The society in question may opt to return citizenship to the same community and encourage the state or state-like entities to implement it. This chapter discusses the situation of the Rohingyas during the political transition in Myanmar (from 2011 to 2020) when the state and society joined hands in legally, extralegally, and/or socially depriving the Rohingyas of citizenship and identity documentation and arbitrarily implementing and mis-implementing the Myanmar Citizenship Law. The main part of the chapter traces the Rohingya moment during the Myanmar Spring (February 2021) and discusses four positive developments in the situation of the Rohingyas after the February 1, 2021 coup, concluding with a caution and some suggestions for the way ahead.

Setting Up Shop

I was with Momtaz Khatun inside her small shop one afternoon in June 2018, during the heart of the monsoon season. The summer humidity coupled with the thunderous bellowing of windy rain shook the open thatched dwelling as Momtaz sat at the back, crouched on a small table, intricately embroidering the sides of the dress for her friend's daughter under a lightly dimmed hariken, as her husband manned the front table. Eid was only a few days away and Momtaz had two more orders to get through before the holiday arrived. They had set up this small makeshift shop at the end of their lane under a bamboo roof without walls to take orders and sew on demand if anybody required the services. ‘There is a lot of demand around Eid time. I know many women are sewing but, in this zone, I am the only one with a shop and so many people know I am here, so they come to me if they need quick service.’ Prior to arriving in Bangladesh, Momtaz tells me that she did not ‘imagine’ ever working for an income, much less having a shop set up for her. In her hometown of Buthidaung, Myanmar, her husband Ahmed was the sole provider, working as a labourer in the village, and her responsibilities revolved primarily around childcare and taking care of the home.

‘We Are Rohingyas, We Are the Oppressed’

On a cool, windy evening in March 2018, as the light of dusk spread throughout the vast dusty camps and people began retreating to their shelters, I stood on the edge of a hill with Khatun Khalamma as she tended to a small potted plant of chilli leaves, the chillies beginning to bloom with the arrival of spring. We had been talking for hours – her stories, like that of many refugees like her, vividly encompassed a life of oppression, erasure, and ‘running’ that were etched into her memory. Tears rolled down her eyes as she fiddled with the chilli plant. She was from Buthidaung township in Rakhine State, Myanmar, and had fled with her son, daughter-in-law, and nine-year-old grandson in the 2017 mass exodus. Her three daughters were raped and killed in Myanmar, and her daughter-in-law died during childbirth once they reached the camps in Bangladesh. The pain of her immense loss and of leaving her homeland was still fresh in her mind. At one point, she began singing a tarana (Rohingya song) entitled ‘We Are Rohingyas, We Are the Oppressed’, which she had heard shared throughout the camp, composed by a fellow Rohingya refugee.

The tarana was haunting, evoking the trauma of displacement and the suppression of their voices when they screamed out to be heard. The life stories of Rohingyas spanned generations, ultimately leading to a migration that was tremendous in its scale and level of desperation. This chapter provides the context to understanding the gendered nature of violence against the Rohingyas and the chaotic nature of their displacement to Bangladesh. By situating the recent migration of Rohingyas from Myanmar to Southeast Asia within the greater context of conflict and systemic violence and oppression in Myanmar's recent history, the chapter is an introduction to the Rohingyas as a borderland people in Myanmar, their life under siege, and provides a glimpse into Rohingya gender relations and roles prior to displacement.

After Rai returned to India in December 1919, he sought to apply what he had learned in America to his own activism in India. Inspired by the Rand School of Social Science, Rai formed the Tilak School of Politics in 1921 to educate underprivileged Indians. He also started his own newspaper, The People, to circulate his ideas on caste and racial science, and his opinions on Gandhian non-violence tactics. Rai's views regarding the effectiveness of Gandhian techniques evolved throughout the 1920s. At the start of the decade, he supported Gandhi's non-violence strategy. However, Rai questioned passive resistance as a viable method for overthrowing White supremacy and the British Raj following the failure of the non-cooperation movement in 1922 and his exposure to Du Bois's articles in The Crisis describing the mass lynchings of Black Americans in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. Rai came to see violent encounters as an inevitability during social clashes predicated upon race and class. Sadly, this violence came to claim Rai's life. On October 30, 1928, Rai himself led a protest against the British to challenge their lack of inclusion of Indians on the Indian Statutory Commission, which was a group of seven White British members of parliament chosen by the British government to study constitutional reform in India. During the protest, British police superintendent James A. Scott ordered the police to attack the protesters and Scott personally assaulted Rai. Rai died a month later, never recovering from the injuries inflicted upon him.

Up until his death, Rai's outlook continued to evolve. Alongside his thoughts on violent protest, his perception of caste changed throughout the 1920s. While Rai saw India's caste problem as a secondary issue early in the decade, by the tail end of his life, Rai had brought the matter to the forefront of the Indian independence movement. He actively sought the abolition of caste discrimination and sub-castes even to the point that he considered postponing Swaraj to solve the issue of caste. This showed that Rai actively sought caste reform and advocated for the abolition of sub-castes. In the many articles that Rai wrote in The People, he condemned caste discrimination explicitly and stressed that India could never achieve unity and become a functional democracy so long as caste discrimination remained.

Kalimpong as a ‘Nest of Spies’

Situated just a kilometre away from Kalimpong Police Station, the Kalimpong Chung Hwa School (see Figure 4.1 for a map of the town) opened its doors for the first time in June 1941. Established by three wealthy entrepreneurs, Ma Zhucai, Liang Zizhi and Zhang Xiangcheng, the school developed as a branch of the Calcutta Mui Kwong School. The primary purpose of the school was to provide education for the children of Chinese refugees from China and Southeast Asia who had fled to the hill station during the Second World War. The curriculum initially consisted of Chinese-language studies, complemented with Tibetan and English; class lectures on the Chinese anti-Japanese war effort were also held. Apart from transmitting and preserving ‘what was and continues to be regarded as Chinese identity … and links with the ancestral homeland’, the Kalimpong Chung Hwa School performed, unwittingly or otherwise, a dual function: like its counterparts in Calcutta, it served as a political playhouse where the factional struggles between the GMD and the CCP were staged after the 1950s.

Jibanananda Das, a leading Bengali poet of the twentieth century, never travelled to the Malay Peninsula. However, in an allegorical verse in his famous poem ‘Banalata Sen’, an ode to the eponymous eternal woman, Das expressed that he had travelled for thousands of years from Sri Lanka to the Malay world to attain a moment of peace. His literary mind knew no bounds. Though his journey was a fantasy of love, it gives us a sense of the constant flow of Bengali mobility and culture between the two coasts of the Bay of Bengal and the Malay Sea. Factually, the Bengalis did voyage to the Malay Archipelago over the course of a thousand years. This truth fuelled the imagination of the Bengali poets, as reflected in Das's verse. With the advent of British colonialism, Bengali mobility took a new turn, and Das's verse reflects its nodal points in the eastern Indian Ocean domains during the late colonial period.

The trans-regional mobility of peoples, goods and cultures and its attendant space-making is the central theme of this book. Although studies of connected histories have flourished in the past few decades in the Global South, Bengali historical diasporic experiences have remained largely unexplored. With a focus on the historical mobility of the Bengalis from both Bangladesh and West Bengal of India, the book argues that there was robust Bengali trans-regional mobility in the Malay world, a story that has been largely lost in the narrative of ‘Indian’ migration.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, the total number of Bangla-speaking migrants from Bangladesh in the Malay world was approximately 900,000, the vast majority being in Malaysia, followed by Singapore and Brunei Darussalam (hereinafter Brunei).

This chapter investigates first encounters with e-books and the processes by which readers evaluate a given work. Drawing on Genette’s theories of paratext and Drucker’s of performative materiality, it examines how trust is established and legitimacy constituted in practice, considering realness and bookness in terms of a given e-book’s status as cultural product and cultural object, and the ways in which e-book legitimacy can hinge on relationship to a print edition or to traditional mainstream publishing. It analyses readers’ rationale of realness on the theme of equivalence, contrasting conceptions of an e-book as real because ‘bits and ink – there’s no difference’ and unreal because they are ‘not the same product’. Finally, it considers the digital proxy and the ersatz book as two discrete types of e-book unrealness.

Between the 1910s and the 1930s, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted to build several alliances with Indians in his quest for transnational racial solidarity. While his “To the Nations of the World” address at the 1900 Pan African Congress was his first major example of internationalizing the Black struggle, his initial impact on Indians came at the First Universal Races in 1911. At the Congress Du Bois's speech entitled “The Negro Race in the United States of America” made a lasting impression on some Indians associated with the Gandhian movement. In his speech he sought to inform the international community about the problems of Black Americans in the hope that he could build international allies to sympathize with the Black American struggle. Du Bois argued that although the Civil War had formally ended slavery, White Americans in the US South were still “determined to deprive the Negroes of political power and force them to occupy the position of a labouring caste.” Du Bois came to the meeting armed with a plethora of statistics to prove that Black Americans were relegated to menial labor and were not equally represented in the higher divisions of labor. He gave additional examples of Black Americans being forced to attend underfunded schools and concluded that in addition to racism, a lack of educational funding was the greatest factor for Black Americans being denied the same career paths as their White counterparts.

Du Bois hoped to prove to the Congress that there was no real biological difference between races. White Americans simply chose to subjugate Black Americans to lower socioeconomic positions based on phenotypical features and skin color. He stressed that if Black Americans were offered a more democratic form of government and better educational facilities, they could eventually prove that there were no intellectual deficiencies amongst Black Americans in the US.

Although Gandhi did not attend the Congress, he sent his associate H. S. L. Polak, an English ally from South Africa, in his stead. The event was also attended by Indian National Congress leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale.

I have chosen to connect the unique histories of both India and the United States (US) for a multitude of reasons. My grandfather, Lakhan H. Massand, was an activist and a freedom fighter during British rule in India. He had an idealistic vision of a free and secular India where there was no oppression, and everyone was equal. To achieve this lofty goal, he was willing to make supreme sacrifices and even withstand the tortures of imprisonment. In fact, when India finally achieved independence in 1947, my grandfather was in jail and was released only in 1948. Unfortunately, my research and visits to India have impressed upon me that my grandfather's vision for an egalitarian Indian society never truly came to fruition. I noticed that many low-caste Indians in Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, and New Delhi lived in dilapidated homes in a hyper-segregated region with a history of especially pernicious race and caste prejudice. Likewise, while I studied at Tulane University, I came to understand that a similar form of class and social stratification existed in New Orleans, which consistently disadvantaged local Black Americans. This situation became clearest to me when a fellow academic and friend was racially profiled by the New Orleans Police Department. When he was eighteen, he was picked up at random, physically assaulted by the police, and driven to meet a White woman who had been mugged near Tulane and Loyola University. The police tried to get her to name my friend as the perpetrator. The woman refused and insisted that the man who mugged her was someone else. Yet the police persevered with the false charges until he revealed that one of his relatives was the Deputy Superintendent of Police in New Orleans.

Inspired by my friend's story, and countless others who have experienced discrimination based on their racial background, I have chosen to write a book which further disseminates the realities of the lived experiences of low-caste Indians and Black Americans. Defenders of the American Dream preach that one of the core American values is equality for all, regardless of age, color, disability, gender, national origin, race, religion, creed, sexual orientation, or social status.

India finally achieved independence in 1947. Afterwards, W. E.B. Du Bois sought to utilize the newly free country to put pressure on the US to address its racism. His strategy was to build publicity and awareness of White supremacy in the US amongst the international community. His primary means for doing so was by drafting a petition for the United Nations (UN) in collaboration with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP), hoping that the UN could mandate a resolution for Black civil rights. Du Bois's efforts caught the attention of B. R. Ambedkar who saw parallels between the Black American struggle and Indian untouchability. Using Du Bois as a source of inspiration, Ambedkar sought to create his own UN petition to solve India's caste problem. Du Bois's petition did not reach the floor of the UN, however. Prominent NAACP members such as Eleanor Roosevelt refused to present it, fearing that it could tarnish the international reputation of the US. Ambedkar also did not follow through on his UN petition and instead tried to address caste by working with the Nehru government.

One of the most significant aspects of Du Bois's work during the 1950s was his generation and harnessing of negative Indian sentiment toward the US to apply pressure upon the US government to address Black civil rights. In 1951, Du Bois collaborated with fellow Black Americans Paul Robeson and William Patterson to draft a second UN petition. While the petition again stopped short of the floor of the UN, it tarnished America's image amongst some Indians and the Indian media and increased Indian awareness of American racism. As a result, it prompted Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to urgently repair the image of the US abroad. Indian public opinion played a part in pressuring the US Supreme Court to desegregate public schools through the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Douglas along with fellow justice Earl Warren acknowledged it as an influential factor, although international concerns were not cited explicitly in the ruling's text.

Introduction

Mariyamma sighed, looking briefly around the large room in the NGO office where she works before glancing back at me. She paused and looked away for another moment before responding, “See, everything has changed.” A transgender woman in her sixties, Mariyamma is also involved in hijra relationships and previously lived in hijra communal homes. Initially, she struggled to respond to my question about the changes in hijra groups she has witnessed throughout her life. But once she began to think out loud about what her life was like as a young GNC person, she talked excitedly, emphasizing the transformations in hijra family relationships.

Mariyamma left her birth family as a teenager, approximately 50 years before I spoke with her. As a young, feminine-presenting GNC person, Mariyamma was in a vulnerable position, and joining the hijras was essential for survival. Hijra communities are organized around family relationships between gurus (teachers or mothers) and chelas (disciples or daughters). In traditional guru–chela relationships, gurus and chelas live in the same household. Looking back, Mariyamma remarked, “You had to have a guru and your guru used to guide you every single day…. See, you had to be under the wing of your guru.” She needed daily mentoring and the protection that living in a hijra community and being “under the wing” of her guru offered.

Throughout our conversation, Mariyamma consistently emphasized the reciprocal nature of the guru–chela relationship when she was a young chela. “You had to give them [your guru] all your earnings. Then, they used to take you for [surgery] and they used to look after you.” Gurus at that time had access to important resources that younger GNC people needed, like surgery, housing, and a means to earn an income. In exchange for the financial support chelas offered to their gurus, gurus provided these resources for their chelas.

Until about the mid to late 2000s, the majority of young GNC people who joined the hijras lived in hijra residences in Bangalore. Most often, chelas lived with their gurus, and these communal living arrangements enabled the daily mentoring that gurus provided.

A new kind of book emerged in Sindh at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Written by Islamic scholars, it contained Sindhi verse in the Arabic or modified Arabic script. The latter script, which first appeared in these books, would later become the standard for writing modern Sindhi. These early authors translated Islamic law of the Sunni Hanafi variety from Arabic into simple rhyming Sindhi verse. In particular, they described the law on obligatory ritual performance such as ablutions and prayers, fasting, and animal sacrifice and slaughter. This genre had already existed as oral performance in the form of preaching and sermonizing in seventeenth-century Sindh. Its appearance as a book broke a century-long, sustained focus on Persian-language book writing. It marked an important watershed in the history of Sindhi literature, inaugurating a textual tradition in Sindhi that, over the course of the eighteenth century, grew to include Sufi and court poetry, along with prose as well.

This book signaled a transformation in the early modern self and the practice of leaving legacies. Before, Sindhi verse was performed for elite literary gatherings and other audiences, recited in Sufi khanaqahs as part of ecstatic practice, and sometimes abstracted in Persian prose. It was not written as book manuscripts to represent the work and legacy of an individual. The previous chapters have shown that Persian was the language of individual self-representation in the form of books and epigraphy for men associated with Mughal officialdom. Even written memorialization of Sufi saints at this time occurred in Persian and emphasized the saint's facility in elite languages. Qazi Qadan (1463–1551), the earliest Sufi known to have composed Sindhi verse, was remembered in Masum's The History of Sindh (1600–01) for his command over Arabic-language knowledge of Quranic commentaries and Prophetic hadith and Persian-language knowledge of letter-writing and accounting. Masum made no mention of Qazi Qadan's Sindhi verse. In fact, the most extensive collection of his Sindhi poetry is preserved in a Dadupanthi anthology of bhakti saints. Similarly, Shah Karim of Bulri (1538–1622/23), another Sufi saint known today as an early Sindhi poet, has no contemporary manuscript of Sindhi verse.

Until Partition, the provincial capital of Karachi was a relatively small port city (pop. 200,000) whose growth during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was accelerated by wartime trading booms (Khuhro 1999). Sindh's attainment of provincial “independence” from Bombay Presidency in 1923 transformed Karachi into an important arena for the province's politically dominant rural Muslim elite, as well as for the All-India Muslim League (AIML), which received early but conditional support from Sindh (in notable contrast to the League's difficulties in enlisting the Punjab at this time). And yet, like many cities in what came to be known as “west Pakistan,” most of Karachi's pre-independence population was a composite of non-Muslim communities. By 1948, it had become apparent that the majority of the city's inhabitants – made up of Hindus, Sikhs, and Parsis – would be supplanted by incoming Muslim refugees and migrants. According to the first national census of 1951, the city's population had doubled since the last accounting in 1946 to approximately 450,000 and had been “more than replaced by the vast stream of incoming Muslims who … classed themselves as Muhajir” in accordance with the official definition at the time of any individual who came to Pakistan as a result of the communal “disturbances” of Partition (Census of Pakistan 1951: 131). However, as I noted in the previous chapter's discussion of the transfer of population in west Pakistan, the influx of Muslims into urban Sindh continued until well after the official transfer of population had concluded in 1949. Most of the arrivals in this case were from the erstwhile “minority Muslim provinces” of India.

Taking Karachi's post-Partition context as my focus, this chapter shifts from the narrative of mass evacuation to consider the political making of voluntary migrants. The “internal” differentiation of Pakistan's mass-migratory population into evacuees and voluntary migrants was part of the broader, situated attempt on the part of the Pakistani state to fashion itself as a sovereign power in the context of responding to “critical events” (V. Das 1995; see also Chapter 2). My aim here is to highlight how late colonial expectations of Muslim sedentarism after independence were not simply dashed by the eventualities of Partition, but to pay closer attention to specific projects of recognition, regulation, and belonging that unfolded in the decolonizing wake of mass-migration.